Sales brochure for North Oaks, 8 pages, 10½x14 inches (interior pages 10½x11 inches), n.d. (1961).

Where can you find "genuine pre-war pricing" on spacious 3- and 4-bedroom homes complete with sliding-glass doors, birch kitchen cabinets and a "huge 2-car garage?" Look no farther than the brand-new, 2,000-home North Oaks development near Newhall. (A decade later, "near Newhall" became "near Magic Mountain.")

Although housing tracts weren't exactly a new idea in the Santa Clarita Valley — e.g., Bermite homes in the 1930s, Rancho Santa Clarita (Bonelli Tract) in the 1940s — North Oaks was the SCV's first large, master-planned subdivision and the first to style itself a "city."

So brisk were sales that entry prices skyrocketed from $11,995 in April 1961 to $12,995 in June, and developer Jerome Snyder of Signature Homes announced the purchase of more land for an additional 1,700 home sites (total 3,700).

Plans called for a new junior high school (Sierra Vista) and three new elementary schools, while the existing Hart High would accommodate the older kids; as well as a new 20-acre shopping center and a "modern medical and professional center" in the area that would soon be named Canyon Country.

To get there from the Valley, simply drive north on Sepulveda, Balboa or San Fernando Road until you reach the Golden State Freeway. Take the right fork — U.S. 6 — and continue north to Soledad Canyon, then left to North Oaks.

Note: The same developer also built Friendly Valley in 1965.