Community Center

The settlement grew from the valley's need for a high school and a more central grade school, and Simi's first high school class graduated in 1924. That year a neoclassical Methodist church went up at Los Angeles Avenue and Church Street. The city bought it in 1991 and reopened it in November 1995 as the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center. Community Center was one of the valley's separate communities, along with Simi, Santa Susana and the Susana Knolls, before Simi Valley became a city in 1969.

The county's 1945 aerial photo shows the old core as a few tree-shaded blocks beside the school grounds, ringed by orchards and field crops. That land became tracts of single-family houses on lots of roughly 6,500 to 12,000 square feet, and 44 condominiums followed on Deacon Street in 1982. Apollo High, the district's continuation school, and Monte Vista School sit on School Street and Blackstock Avenue, and the Arroyo Simi runs along the south edge.

The lay of the land

A small 1920s street grid around School, Church and Deodora streets, surrounded by 1960s tract blocks, with the Cultural Arts Center on Los Angeles Avenue and the Arroyo Simi along the south edge.

Community Center has no official boundary. This guide uses the name for the 1920s blocks around School, Church, Court and Deodora streets and for the tracts recorded around them from 1960 to 1982. That area runs between Sycamore Drive and Olympic Street, from Los Angeles Avenue south to the Arroyo Simi and Royal Avenue, with the east-side tracts reaching just past Royal to Shenandoah Street.