Once-remote Box Canyon Being Pried Open

Some communities boast that “George Washington slept here.” Box Canyon, a rocky hideaway west of Chatsworth, is doing its best to forget that mass murderer Charles Manson spent time there.

Actually, Manson was just passing through in the late 1960s, freeloading for three days off a religious cult that fed and sheltered transients. The community’s notorious reputation as a haven for criminals and iconoclasts was really created by other miscreants, such as the two cult members who blew up themselves and seven others in 1958.

Today, Box Canyon is struggling to put its checkered past aside. But the community and its new breed of residents--affluent professionals attracted by its proximity to the San Fernando Valley--are finding that the path to becoming the next Laurel Canyon can be as rocky as its hillsides.

“What’s happening is that Box Canyon is getting propelled--kicking and screaming--into the 20th Century,” said Ian Brodie, one of Ventura County’s two code enforcement officers. “It’s the last frontier.”

What is causing all the fuss is a crackdown by county officials on substandard housing and junk that have turned Box Canyon into a hodgepodge of homes, ranging from a castle to a converted water tower.

In a clash reminiscent of a range war, code enforcement officers responding to complaints about violations say they’ve been shot at and had their tires slashed. Those who have filed the complaints, many of whom are newcomers trying to protect property values, say they have received threatening phone calls.

The county’s cleanup effort has sparked so much resentment from some longtime residents that they have added signs--an example says, “This property is protected by shotgun law”--to the plethora of “no trespassing” warnings on dirt roads leading to their homes.

Exactly what Box Canyon will look like when the dust settles is unclear because officials say they are too short-handed to consistently enforce laws regarding proper housing construction and land-use.

But what is clear is that longtime residents do not plan to give in easily.

Vows one 26-year-old waitress who grew up in the area and lives in a 12-foot-wide, two-story metal water tower that resembles a tin can with windows and doors: “We were here first. They’re trying to turn it into a place for rich people, but this is our canyon.”

Other residents of the growing community of about 700 say they welcome the cleanup effort and are confident that this will be the last conflict in the area’s history, which includes the Manson visit, the bombing and another murder on land owned by the religious cult. As indications of change, they point to homes under construction and the transformation of a tavern once called “Hillbilly Haven” into an upscale steakhouse.

“It’s just a matter of time before things get better and people stop thinking that Manson lived here in the late ‘60s when he really lived over the hill at Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth,” said Beverly Patterson, 39, who bought Box Canyon’s castle for $440,000 about a year ago. “Those stories and all the junk really detract from property values.”

The gray castle, which was built in the mid-1940s by a postal worker, has two turrets and a dungeon and sits atop a cypress-lined driveway on six acres overlooking the canyon. It offers a perfect view of the spacious homes and shacks below--and of the abandoned cars and other trash in some residents’ yards.

Just about the time the castle was being built, Box Canyon was going through its first major transition--from a weekend resort founded in 1923 to a residential enclave, said C. D. (Speed) Glanton, one of the area’s longtime residents. Glanton, 84, purchased several lots in the canyon shortly before the Depression for $25 apiece and ran its first water company until 1964.

He still lives in the four-room, aluminum-sided home he built in 1933 overlooking the Valley, but his six acres are now worth at least $20,000 an acre, said Bob Wood, a real estate agent in the area.

Property values throughout the three-mile-long canyon have skyrocketed in recent years, even though the county limits development to a range of one house per half-acre to one per 40 acres, depending on the property’s location, said Todd Collart, zoning administration supervisor. The restrictions were imposed primarily because the canyon’s steep topography and deep sandstone floor make it hard to install adequate septic systems, Collart said.

But some residents have flouted the law and built whatever they pleased-- largely because of the area’s relative remoteness from the rest of Ventura County, Collart said.

Box Canyon got its name because it literally formed a box and could be reached only from Chatsworth until 1942, when the road running through it was extended northward. It remained a world of its own until the Simi Valley Freeway was built and Chatsworth began developing into a bedroom community.

The canyon’s charms, including rosy sandstone rock formations honeycombed with caves, attracted a religious sect known as WKFL Fountain of the World, which founded a commune there in 1948.

Led by Krishna Venta, a one-time boilermaker once jailed for issuing fictitious checks, the cultists wore white robes and quietly pursued their beliefs for about 10 years. Then, in 1958, two jealous husbands who believed that the leader was sleeping with their wives set off a bomb, killing Venta, themselves and six others, and thrusting the canyon into the limelight.

“You could hear the explosion clear over in Camarillo,” said Lt. Hank Carillo of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. “People 20 miles away thought it was a sonic boom.”

The canyon’s notoriety increased in 1974 when American Indian Movement activists living on the cult’s land were charged and later acquitted of murdering a cabdriver and stuffing his body down a drainpipe.

“I’ll always remember Box Canyon as the place where I was lowered down headfirst into the well to retrieve the body,” said Braden McKinley, a former sheriff’s deputy who is chief investigator for the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

In recent months, code enforcement officers have been fighting a tamer sort of criminal activity. In response to complaints from homeowners, they have cited several property owners for a variety of violations, ranging from unsafe electrical wiring to converting an outhouse into living quarters. Some residents have been forced to tear down their homes.

“I’m heartbroken that I had to move out of my house and into my station wagon,” said Tracy Bassett, a 24-year-old construction worker who was ordered recently by a Ventura Municipal Court judge to demolish a two-story plywood home he built on top of a 12-by-12-foot outhouse. The home was “a beautiful pad,” Bassett said, but was too small to ever conform to building code regulations.

“It was kind of small,” Bassett said. “But it was like a fort, like a little playhouse.”

Other residents have been prosecuted after failing to respond to warning notices.

Phil Shiver, a longtime resident who owns about 100 acres in the canyon, was convicted in December in Ventura Municipal Court of two misdemeanor counts of violating the county’s open-storage laws on a hilltop parcel strewn with farm machinery and other items. Offered the choice of going to County Jail or accepting the conditions of probation, which included unannounced inspections of his property, Shiver, a 52-year-old Korean War veteran, chose jail.

After spending two days behind bars, Shiver appealed the case to Ventura County Superior Court and was released pending a hearing this spring.

“There are people up in this canyon who can’t be at peace until they rob everyone of their constitutional rights to use their land the way they want,” said Shiver, a retired handyman and construction worker. “Your land is your life. I would teach someone how to make a pipe bomb to protect their rights.”

Although Brodie and his partner Sheldon Klain say Shiver has been courteous to them, skirmishes with other residents have made them wary of citing alleged violators without bringing along sheriff’s deputies or carrying weapons, which they are prohibited from doing.

Hand-held radios used to contact law enforcement agencies in case of emergencies do not always work well in the canyon, adding to their concerns about their safety, they said.

“I’m no 98-pound weakling, but I get a little nervous up here,” Brodie said. “What people don’t understand is that we come up here on a complaint-only basis because my partner and I are responsible for 42,000 parcels of unincorporated county land. We don’t look for problems.”

Sheriff’s deputies said that except for occasional reports of gunfire or loud parties, crime is low these days in Box Canyon. And although residents say they have received threatening phone calls, they have not formally notified the Sheriff’s Department, said Deputy James Lee Morris, who patrols the area.

Several people who spoke on condition that they not be identified said callers threatened to firebomb their homes or take other retaliatory measures should the complaints continue.

“It’s intimidating,” said one woman, who has lived in the canyon since the late 1970s and refused to give her name for fear of retaliation. “But we’re not giving up. A long time ago, everyone up here did whatever they wanted, but the area has changed. We pay taxes and have to conform to the codes, so why shouldn’t everyone else?”

Other longtime residents fear that they might become targets of the code enforcement crackdown and are “scared to death . . . that they are going to end up homeless,” said John Hand, 48, who manages some rental properties in the canyon.

He said many residents cannot afford to bring their homes up to code and added that some dwellings may be exempt from regulations because they were built before the county’s codes were written in the late 1940s. Brodie said that may be true in some instances, but if structures have been modified since then--as most have--they must conform with the regulations.

Glanton considers the county’s demands excessive.

He wants to pave a dirt road leading to his property because he said he is too old to refill potholes by hand as he has done in previous springs. But the county told him that the road had to be widened for fire trucks, “which is impossible” and would cost a fortune, he said. “I didn’t build that road in the ‘30s for fire engines, I built it for my Model A Ford.”

While Hand and others decry what they see as county interference, even they tend to be pessimistic about being able to withstand the pressure to change. The “flatlanders” will eventually take over Box Canyon as they have other canyons, Hand said.

“Look what happened to Laurel Canyon--the money moved in, and the ambiance . . . disappeared.”