On a clear morning in the Crescenta Valley, the San Gabriel Mountains rise behind the rooflines like a painted backdrop, and Mount Lukens catches the first light above the foothills. Below it, in the quiet streets that climb toward the wilderness, the Armenians in La Crescenta have built one of Southern California’s most comfortable corners of the diaspora, a place chosen less for a downtown than for its schools, its air, and its distance from the noise of the city.
The Place
La Crescenta, paired with neighbouring Montrose as the La Crescenta-Montrose census area, sits in the Crescenta Valley in the foothills of Los Angeles County, just north of Glendale and east of the wealthier enclave of La Cañada Flintridge. It is an unincorporated community of roughly 19,660 people, hemmed in by the Angeles National Forest above and the city of Glendale below.
The name dates to 1888, when an early settler named Benjamin Briggs looked out and saw three crescent-shaped hills, and chose the Spanish-inflected La Crescenta. The valley itself was once part of the Verdugo family’s vast Rancho San Rafael, established in 1798, and later of the 1843 land grant known as Rancho La Cañada.
What the valley offers now is not commerce but calm: detached houses on hillside lots, ranked public schools, and a short drive down to the Armenian heart of Glendale. That combination is precisely what drew so many Armenian families up the hill.
How It Became Armenian
The Armenian story in La Crescenta is, in large part, the story of Glendale told one valley higher. To understand why families settled in the Crescenta Valley, you have to start with the great migration that turned the city below into the largest Armenian community in the United States.
The waves that filled Glendale
Southern California’s Armenian community grew in distinct waves, each tied to upheaval abroad. Armenians left Iran around December 1978, ahead of the revolution, and many landed in Glendale within months. The Lebanese Civil War pushed another wave through the 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s sent the largest cohort of all, Armenians from the newly independent Republic of Armenia.
Later arrivals fled the Iraq War of the 2000s and, more recently, the Syrian civil war. By the end of the 1980s, Glendale had become the epicentre of Armenian life in the region, anchored by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the Homenetmen athletic and scouting movement, and a dense web of churches and schools.
Up the hill
As families who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s found their footing, many followed a familiar American arc: from the apartments and starter homes of central Glendale to the single-family streets of the foothills. The Crescenta Valley had been built out for exactly this kind of household after the Second World War, when returning veterans and young families filled the hillsides with detached homes.
For Armenian parents in particular, the move up the hill was rarely about prestige. It was about classrooms. La Crescenta and the surrounding valley are served by the Glendale Unified School District, and its schools, led by Crescenta Valley High School, carry a reputation that travels by word of mouth through extended families.
The valley itself was made for this. The population boom that followed the Second World War turned the Crescenta Valley from a sparsely farmed slope into a grid of single-family streets, built for the young families who poured into Southern California in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, that same housing stock, modest by the standards of nearby La Cañada Flintridge but generous by Glendale’s, was exactly what an arriving Armenian family could aspire to own.
The school magnet
Crescenta Valley High School was named a National Blue Ribbon School in 2000 and a California Distinguished School in 2005, and for a generation of Armenian families it became a destination in its own right. The pattern is well known across the valley: a household saves, then relocates from a Glendale flat to a La Crescenta house specifically so the children can attend the local schools.
Glendale Unified, which spans both cities, has long served one of the most heavily Armenian student bodies in the country. The district runs Armenian world-language classes at several of its high schools and stages an annual commemoration of the Armenian Genocide that draws students from across the valley, Crescenta Valley High and Rosemont Middle School among them.
A community within a community
The Armenian share of La Crescenta-Montrose itself is modest on paper, a little over a thousand residents by recent counts, far smaller than Glendale’s tens of thousands. But the figure understates the texture of daily life. Families move between the two communities constantly, sending children to the same Saturday schools, worshipping at the same churches, and shopping along the same stretch of Foothill Boulevard.
The result is a kind of bedroom diaspora: an affluent residential valley whose Armenian families keep their cultural centre of gravity a few minutes downhill, while the foothills supply the houses, the gardens, and the schools.
The Landmarks
Holy Archangels Armenian Apostolic Church, 4459 Lowel Avenue. Established as a parish in 2007, this congregation under the Western Prelacy serves the Crescenta Valley’s Apostolic faithful. Its founding gave the area its own anchor of the ancient Armenian church, with Sunday Divine Liturgy at the heart of the week.
Christ Armenian Church, 4441 La Crescenta Avenue. An Armenian Evangelical congregation led by Pastor Saro Khachikian, the church has been sharing the Gospel with the Armenian community of greater Los Angeles since the 1980s, receiving its federal nonprofit recognition in 1989. It reflects the often-overlooked Protestant strand of Armenian religious life.
Crescenta Valley Meher and Satig Der Ohanessian Youth Center, 2633 Honolulu Avenue, Montrose. Rededicated under its current name in April 2018, this Armenian Cultural Foundation centre is the secular heart of valley life. It houses the Homenetmen Shant Chapter scouts, an Armenian Relief Society chapter, Armenian Youth Federation juniors, a Saturday school, and summer day camps.
Byblos Mediterranean Bakery, 3115 Foothill Boulevard. A neighbourhood fixture serving lahmajoun, kebab plates, and fresh-baked breads, Byblos is the kind of everyday Armenian and Levantine table that anchors the foothill stretch of Foothill Boulevard. It is where weeknight dinners and weekend trays of pastry come from.
Crescenta Valley High School, 2900 Community Avenue. The Blue Ribbon school that draws Armenian families up the hill, CV High sits at the centre of the valley’s reputation. Its student body, drawn from across Glendale Unified, has long included a substantial Armenian contingent.
Rosemont Middle School, 4725 Rosemont Avenue. The valley’s main middle school feeds Crescenta Valley High, and its pupils take part in the district’s annual Armenian Genocide commemoration. For many families it is the first rung of the ladder that ends at CV High.
Foothill Boulevard, La Crescenta-Montrose. The valley’s spine, this long commercial corridor carries the Armenian bakeries, markets, and family businesses that knit the residential streets to everyday life. It is the closest thing the foothills have to a high street.
Where They Came From
The Armenians of the Crescenta Valley trace their roots to no single homeland but to the scattered geography of the twentieth-century diaspora. Many came by way of Iran, leaving Tehran and Isfahan around the 1978 revolution. Others arrived from Lebanon, displaced by the long civil war, carrying a distinctly Beirut-Armenian culture of language and cuisine.
The largest group came after 1991 from the Republic of Armenia itself, joined over the years by families from Iraq and, most recently, Syria. What they shared was a route through Glendale before climbing into the foothills. The scale of that settlement, which made Los Angeles County home to the largest Armenian American community in the country, is the backdrop to every foothill street here.
The pull was always practical. The valley promised what the homeland and the first American apartments could not: space, safety, clean air against the mountains, and schools good enough to justify the move.
La Crescenta Today
Today the Armenian presence in La Crescenta is felt less as a visible quarter than as a quiet, settled fact. There is no Armenian main street here the way there is in central Glendale; instead there are family names on the mailboxes, churches tucked onto residential avenues, and the steady traffic between the foothills and the city below.
The valley’s Armenian families tend to be established second-wave households, the children of the 1980s and 1990s arrivals now raising their own children in the houses their parents worked toward. They commemorate the Genocide each April, send their children to Saturday school, and keep one foot in Glendale’s institutions while enjoying the calm of the hills.
Much of what binds the community is invisible from the street. The youth center on Honolulu Avenue hums on weekends with scouts in Homenetmen uniforms and children sounding out the Armenian alphabet. The churches fill on Sunday mornings. And the bakeries along Foothill Boulevard send home the lahmajoun and pastry that turn an ordinary American suburb, on the right evening, unmistakably Armenian.
It is, in the end, a story of arrival completed. For the broader picture, the community here is best understood alongside the Armenians in Glendale just downhill, the older established Armenians in Pasadena to the east, and the immigrant gateway of Little Armenia in Los Angeles. La Crescenta shares its foothills, too, with a sizeable Korean community in La Crescenta, drawn by the very same schools.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there many Armenians in La Crescenta, California?
The Armenians in La Crescenta number a little over a thousand within the La Crescenta-Montrose census area, a modest figure compared with neighbouring Glendale. Their influence on daily life, however, is far larger, since families move constantly between the two communities for church, school, and shopping.
Why did Armenian families move to La Crescenta?
Most Armenian families moved up from Glendale for the schools and the quieter foothill setting. La Crescenta is served by the highly regarded Glendale Unified School District, and Crescenta Valley High School in particular became a destination for families seeking strong public education.
What Armenian churches serve the Crescenta Valley?
The valley is home to Holy Archangels Armenian Apostolic Church on Lowel Avenue, established as a parish in 2007, and Christ Armenian Church, an Armenian Evangelical congregation that has served greater Los Angeles since the 1980s. Many residents also attend the larger churches of Glendale.
When did Armenians settle in the Crescenta Valley?
The Armenians in La Crescenta arrived mainly from the 1980s onward, following the waves that built Glendale: Iranians around the 1978 revolution, Lebanese during the civil war, and the largest group from Armenia after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Families then moved up into the foothills over the following decades.
Is La Crescenta part of Glendale?
No. La Crescenta-Montrose is an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, separate from the city of Glendale, though it sits directly above it and shares the Glendale Unified School District. The two communities are closely linked socially and culturally.
Where do Armenians in La Crescenta gather?
The Crescenta Valley Meher and Satig Der Ohanessian Youth Center on Honolulu Avenue in Montrose is the secular hub, hosting scouts, the Armenian Relief Society, a Saturday school, and summer camps. Churches and the bakeries along Foothill Boulevard round out community life.
If your family’s story passed through La Crescenta, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the towns of Iran, Lebanon, and the Republic of Armenia to a house in the Crescenta Valley foothills, to wherever you are now.