Chris Corrao has started a blog about his neighborhood, Tujunga Village.

I’m not an LA City Nerd, so I cannot go into detail about the first white occupants of this historic district or how exactly how many street lamps are within a one mile radius, but I can tell you my subjective impressions of Tujunga Village.

It’s one of my favorite sections of LA. It is filled with tree lined streets, mostly built up in the 1940’s and 50’s. There are several areas with magnificent homes, well tended gardens, and a refreshing absence of security gates and the kind of cheap ornamental vulgarity that characterizes Encino and Beverly Hills.

Along Tujunga there is the Aroma Cafe, with its gardens, bookstore and delicious sandwiches, coffee and desserts. I’ve also eaten in Caioti with its excellent pizzas and pastas. There are small boutiques filled with circa 1995 Shabby Chic furniture, and those feminine oriented candle, moisturizer, jewelry, shoe and scarf shops patronized by bored women with too much time on their well manicured hands. Naturally, there are yoga and acting studios and countless hours devoted to conversations about relationships.

There’s lovely Woodbridge Park at Elmer and Moorpark, where quite often I see mothers play with their own children, rather than outsourcing the work. The park is clean and there are only one or two vagrants, about 50 less than one finds in say, a Santa Monica playground.

The street names have a nostalgic and rose scented sound to them: Elmer, Klump, Farmdale and Chiquita. Window boxes, picket fences, lavender, big oak trees and double hung wood windows with louvered shutters are just around any corner.

The bloody killing of Robert Blake’s wife Bonnie Lee Bakley on May 4, 2001 just outside of Vitello’s Restaurant, was an anomaly. Murder in Tujunga Village mostly occurs only in the scripts penned by area writers.

The whole neighborhood feeling evaporates just to the east where the brutal and environmentally murderous Hollywood Freeway slices through the area.