The big break-thru this week in the process to buy this new house was figuring out where I would live.

I mean, you think it would be easy to figure out, wouldn’t it?  You would think that all I would have to do is stand in front of the house, point at it and say “Right There”.  Heck, there’s an address and everything really.

What was tricky was actually trying to figure out what town my new house was in.  Again, you think that would be simple, but … nope.

So the end of this comes down to saying – my new home is in La Crescenta.  The US Postal Service straight up told me that with the new zip, the city is La Crescenta.  Which should be an easy ending to this conversation.  But La Crescenta is an unincorporated city.  This means that while it exists in name and in theory, it doesn’t exist in any self-governing way.  Instead La Crescenta is more in lines with a neighborhood of the city of Glendale.  Therefore, the US Postal Service also says that anything mailed to me with the city of ‘Glendale’, it will arrive.

The tough thing is that it is hard to identify with Glendale with where La Crescenta is at.  La Crescenta lies within the Crescenta Valley, wedged between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Verdugo Mountains.  Glendale proper is on the other side of the Verdugos.  So to get to where our ‘city’ is, you have to climb a mountain.  Not exactly feeling neighborly is it.  La Crescenta isn’t the only community like that, I mean, they named the valley after us but there are others here.  La Cañada & Flintridge to the east are also Glendale communities.  To the west is Tujunga & Sundland; while also are unincorporated communities, they are actually a part of Los Angeles.

In fact, the current town I live in, Montrose, is just like La Crescenta in that it is a part of Glendale – and sometimes is directly connected with La Crescenta so far that maps sometimes show them as the hyphenated “La Crescenta-Montrose”.  Heck they share a Wikipedia page even.

Honestly, that is part of the confusion on where I will live.  As I mentioned before, this house I am buying is literally four blocks down from where I live now.  I don’t even change streets.  Yet one house is in the zip code for Montrose, and the other is in the zip code for La Crescenta.  Part of the problem is just the visualization of the location.

The Crescenta Valley is split by Interstate 210 (the Foothill Freeway).  Northeast (or more logically described as ‘uphill’) from the 210 is generally considered to be La Crescenta & La Cañada.  Downhill from the freeway is considered Montrose.  If you ever lived near a freeway, or in a town with train tracks, you know how it seems a city can be divided by that thing that is so easy to cross.  It’s not like there is a good side or bad side, but for the most part there is stuff you can get up the hill and stuff down the hill.  As a result, the house feels like it is in Montrose.  This move puts me no further from downtown Montrose as much as it isn’t any closer to the center of La Crescenta.

In the end. it really doesn’t matter.  Cause for most people who are reading this … ya probably don’t know:
A)  where La Crescenta is
B) where Montrose is
C) what’s a Glendale
D) why you are still reading this
E) all of the above
Chances are, I am going to tell everyone out of the area that I live “next to Pasadena” because they will just assume I live in the Rose Bowl.  Then I’ll tell everyone locally that I live in Montrose, cause there’s a chance they have had brunch there once.  And put my mailing address as Glendale – cause it’s easier to spell than La Crescenta.