Chatsworth, Los Angeles, California
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Chatsworth is a community of Los Angeles, bordered by the Santa Susana Mountains and unincorporated Los Angeles County lands to the north, Porter Ranch to the northeast, Northridge to the east, West Hills to the south, and the Simi Hills, Ventura County, Simi Valley, and Chatsworth Lake Manor to the west.
Chatsworth is named after Chatsworth House, home to the Dukes of Devonshire. ("Devonshire" is also the name of a major street in Chatsworth.)
As recently as the early 1970s, Chatsworth, California, located in the northwest San Fernando Valley, was rural. Movie stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had a horse ranch there. Many western films and TV shows were filmed at the Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth, which became the home of Charles Manson and his "family". The view fit the popular conception of the American West; boulders larger than most American houses strewn against a backdrop of mountains which completely ringed the valley. Oaks and sycamores, the native trees, along with imported Eucalyptus trees, and orange groves lent to the rural feeling.
Chatsworth is varied with many industrial areas, sleepy home communities, large apartment complexes, large condominium complexes, quiescent parks, ranches, horse stables, horse trails, and farms. For example, the downtown area is located near the intersection of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Devonshire Street, and within that intersection are shopping centers, restaruants, and a train station half a mile east, industrial warehouses and office parks a mile south, sleepy houses and an elementary school to the west, and farms half a mile north.
Chatsworth is also known for its abundance of covert adult film production studios, discretely located in the many industrial parks off of De Soto, Plummer, Lassen and Canoga Avenue, and it's sometimes called, correctly or not, the Porn Capital of the World.
Today, this suburb of Los Angeles, as well as in the rest of Southern California contains houses which are almost all single-story classic American ranch houses. The boundaries are not visible, marked only by signs on the streets, as a profusion of stores, apartments, and automobile traffic dominate.
But, on the Santa Susana Pass, through the along California Freeway 118, heading west from Simi Valley, you can still glimpse the town, in the orderly grid of streets, in the valley below. That valley is now home for millions of people, and only a few orange groves.
Frequent Phil Hendrie guest RC Collins (in his first incarnation) is a resident of Chatsworth and attends Chatsworth High, where he is a junior.