The hilltop portion of Castle Heights has been called part of both Cheviot Hills and Monte-Mar Vista, which it preceded. “Castle Heights” now designates the neighborhood east of what is commonly called Cheviot Hills.
Tract 7156, marketed as Country Club Highlands, was registered with the City of Los Angeles on November 26, 1923, several months after the area was incorporated into the city through the “Ambassador Annexation” (a.k.a. Ambassador Addition).
Initially the highest end homes in the area, with buyers required to spend so much on homes that many combined lots to build larger homes. Power lines were underground to preserve views, and it had concrete streets when its neighbor Cheviot Hills had oil and crushed rock macadam.
In 1929, Tract 10440 covered the block between Rountree Road, Exposition Boulevard (now Northvale Road), Overland Avenue, Ashby Avenue, and Manning Avenue with lots for 49 homes. In 1932, 29 of its lots were resubdivided into a 4½ acre parcel (Tract 9976) for Overland Avenue Elementary School. The remaining 20 homes were excluded when the Cheviot Hills Home Owners’ Association formed in 1963 “to cope with problems created by high-rise development at Century City” (i.e., traffic).
Sanford Adler followed the success of his California Country Club Estates development with the 68-lot (immodestly named) “Sanford Adler’s Hillcrest View Estates” (Tract 19015, filed October 22, 1953).
On August 18, 1954, Roy B. Warring filed Tract no. 19364 with the City of Los Angeles, laying out ten homesites along a new street – Girla Way – between Sanford Adler’s contemporaneous developments: California Country Club Estates and Hillcrest View Estates.
