Drive Foothill Boulevard east from the Sun Valley line and the signs begin to change. A bakery window stacked with lavash and gata. A market with Armenian lettering above the door. The Armenians in Tujunga did not arrive with fanfare or a founding wave. They came quietly, family by family, climbing the foothills of the San Gabriels in search of cleaner air, cheaper houses, and a little more sky than Glendale could spare.
The Place
Tujunga sits in the far northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, tucked against the San Gabriel Mountains in what is geographically the Crescenta Valley. It is usually paired with its neighbour Sunland as the hyphenated district of Sunland-Tujunga, a stretch of foothill Los Angeles that feels half-rural even now: oak-shaded lots, decomposed-granite yards, deer that wander down from the wash.
Foothill Boulevard runs the length of it, roughly five miles of strip commerce and old storefronts that double as the district’s main street. The median household income here sits around 79,500 dollars, comfortably above the national figure, and the median home is worth more than 800,000 dollars. It is not Glendale money. It is foothill money, the kind that buys a yard.
That distinction matters. Down on the Valley floor, Los Angeles is flat, hot, and dense. Up here the streets bend with the slope, the lots run large and irregular, and the San Gabriels close off the northern horizon. People who choose Sunland-Tujunga tend to choose it deliberately, trading the convenience of the city for space and air. For an Armenian family with a little equity behind them, that trade was the whole point.
How It Became Armenian
To understand Armenian Tujunga you have to understand the town it grew on top of, and the city eight miles down the hill that sent it most of its families.
The Little Landers utopia
Tujunga began as a dream of small plots. In 1913 the journalist William E. Smythe, a believer in the redemptive power of irrigation, founded a colony here called Los Terrenitos, the Little Lands. Families bought acre and half-acre parcels and set out to live off them, an agrarian utopia in the chaparral.
Their meeting house was Bolton Hall, built that same year from granite and river stones hauled out of the Tujunga Wash, the rocks set in place much as they had fallen from the cliffs. Over the next half century the building served as American Legion hall, library, city hall, and jail. The colony itself faded, but the foothill character it left behind, semi-rural, independent, a little stubborn, is exactly what later drew a different kind of settler.
The Glendale overflow
The Armenians did not come to Tujunga first. They came to Glendale, and they came in enormous numbers. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Armenians fleeing the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution, and later the collapse of Soviet Armenia poured into Los Angeles, and the Armenian community in Glendale became the unrivalled centre of the diaspora. By the time the 1988 Spitak earthquake and the Soviet exodus added their waves, nine in ten Armenians leaving the USSR were settling in greater Los Angeles.
Glendale filled. Rents rose. And families who had landed there, established themselves, and begun to climb looked for somewhere with more room.
For decades Glendale absorbed nearly everyone. Middle Eastern Armenians, the families out of Iran and Lebanon, gravitated to Glendale, while many of the Soviet arrivals settled first around East Hollywood. But a town can only hold so many. By the 1990s the enclave was straining at its edges, its housing scarce and dear, its avenues thick with traffic. The pressure had to release somewhere, and the foothills to the north were the natural valve.
The move up the hill
Armenians began settling in Tujunga in real numbers only in the mid to late 1990s. The logic was straightforward. Tujunga sat close enough to the Glendale enclave to stay inside its orbit, the churches, the schools, the grandparents, a short drive over the hill, while offering bigger lots, lower prices, less traffic, and the clean foothill air. The same pull shaped its immediate neighbours up the Crescenta Valley, the Armenians of La Crescenta and the Armenians of La Cañada Flintridge, each a quieter foothill alternative to the city below.
Crucially, the newcomers were not renters passing through. They bought. Where earlier Armenian arrivals in Los Angeles had rented their way up, the families moving to Tujunga were buying houses, putting down the kind of roots that change a neighbourhood for good. Today residents of the Sunland-Tujunga area name Armenian as their single most common ancestry, around 17 percent of the population, a concentration that ranks among the densest of any neighbourhood in the country alongside its Iranian-American share.
The Landmarks
Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Avenue. The 1913 granite meeting house of the Little Landers, now run by the Little Landers Historical Society as Tujunga’s local history museum. It is the town’s anchor and oldest civic building, the place that defined the foothill character every later wave inherited. Free, open Sundays and Tuesdays.
Yerevan Bakery, 8358 Foothill Boulevard. Named for the Armenian capital, this is the everyday heart of the community on Foothill: lavash and barbari bread out of the oven, trays of pastry and gata, the smell drifting onto the sidewalk. The kind of family-run shop that tells you, without any sign, that Armenians live here now.
Calvary Armenian Congregational Church, 10158 Johanna Avenue. Founded in 2017 to serve Armenian families scattered across the northeast Valley, a young congregation for a young settlement. Its arrival marked the moment Tujunga’s Armenians stopped commuting down the hill for everything and began building institutions of their own.
The Foothill Boulevard corridor. Tujunga’s five-mile main street is lined with the small businesses that mark an Armenian district: liquor stores, markets, bakeries, repair shops, many of them family-run and Armenian-owned. It is commerce rather than spectacle, the quiet economic infrastructure of a community that lives here rather than performs here.
Verdugo Hills High School, 10625 Plainview Avenue. The neighbourhood’s comprehensive public high school and the place where the children of Armenian, Latino, and longtime Anglo families share a campus. For upwardly mobile families who chose Tujunga partly for its schools, the Stallions are the local institution that knits the generations into the town.
The Tujunga Wash and the foothills. The boulder-strewn wash that supplied Bolton Hall’s stones still runs out of the San Gabriels along the district’s edge. The mountains, the oaks, and the clean air were the explicit draw for Armenian families leaving denser Glendale, and they remain the reason people climb up here rather than spread out across the flat Valley floor.
Where They Came From
Tujunga’s Armenians did not arrive directly from one homeland. They arrived from Glendale, and Glendale itself was a confluence. Its families traced back to Iranian-Armenian networks that began settling in the 1950s and 1960s, to Lebanon and the wider Middle East after the wars of the 1970s, and to Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia after 1988.
The same broad currents seeded Armenian neighbourhoods across the Valley, from the Armenians of Encino to the historic core of Little Armenia in East Hollywood. That layered origin is why Tujunga’s Armenian community feels established rather than raw. These were not first-generation refugees stepping off a plane. They were second-stage settlers, families who had already found their footing down the hill and were ready to trade up for space, ownership, and quiet. The move to Tujunga was a sign of arrival, not of flight. It is the difference between a refuge and a destination, between the apartment you take because you must and the house you buy because you can.
Tujunga Today
Tujunga today is a working blend rather than an ethnic island. Armenians are the largest single ancestry, but they share Foothill Boulevard with a substantial Latino population, mostly of Mexican origin, and a smaller Filipino community. The result is a foothill town that is Armenian in its bakeries and churches without being Armenian in the totalising way Glendale’s Pacific Avenue is.
The community here is still young as a settlement. Its flagship congregation dates only to 2017, and its commercial life is dispersed along five miles of boulevard rather than concentrated in a single plaza. This is a place still becoming itself, a second-generation enclave growing into its own institutions.
You can read the change in the storefronts. A liquor store with an Armenian surname on the licence. A repair shop, a market, a bakery whose Saturday queue spills out the door. None of it announces itself the way a designated enclave does, with banners and a name on the map. It accumulates, sign by sign, until one day the boulevard has quietly become something it was not twenty years ago.
What holds it together is geography and family. The drive down to Glendale takes minutes, so the new church, the old church, the grandparents, and the Saturday-school run all stay within reach. Tujunga gives its Armenian families the yard and the mountain air. Glendale, just over the hill, still gives them the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Armenians start moving to Tujunga?
Armenians began settling in Tujunga in significant numbers in the mid to late 1990s. The Armenians in Tujunga largely came up from Glendale, drawn by lower housing costs, bigger lots, and cleaner foothill air while staying within reach of the established enclave.
How many Armenians live in Sunland-Tujunga?
Armenian is the single most commonly reported ancestry in the Sunland-Tujunga area, around 17 percent of residents. The neighbourhood has one of the highest concentrations of Armenian and Iranian ancestry of anywhere in the United States.
Why did Armenians move to Tujunga instead of Glendale?
As rents and home prices climbed in Glendale, families looked uphill. Tujunga offered larger lots, lower costs, less traffic, and the clean air of the San Gabriel foothills, all within a short drive of the Glendale enclave’s churches and schools.
Where can I find Armenian food in Tujunga?
Yerevan Bakery at 8358 Foothill Boulevard is the community’s best-known spot, baking lavash, barbari bread, and Armenian pastries. The wider Foothill Boulevard corridor also holds numerous Armenian-owned markets and shops.
Is there an Armenian church in Tujunga?
Yes. Calvary Armenian Congregational Church on Johanna Avenue was founded in 2017 to serve Armenian families across the northeast San Fernando Valley. Many Tujunga Armenians also worship at the larger Armenian churches a short drive away in Glendale.
What is the connection between Tujunga and Bolton Hall?
Bolton Hall is Tujunga’s 1913 stone meeting house, built for the Little Landers utopian farming colony and now a local history museum. It established the semi-rural, independent foothill character that later drew Armenian families seeking space outside crowded Glendale.
If your family’s story passed through Tujunga, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the bakeries of Beirut and the boulevards of Glendale, to a granite town in the San Gabriel foothills, to wherever you are now.