Where life slows down

Rich, poor and in between enjoy the charm of Huntington Boulevard together.

Published online on Wednesday, Jul. 02, 2008

At dawn, an anonymous lip-pursing virtuoso on a bicycle whistles a wake-up call to the neighborhood. Everyone knows him simply as "The Whistler."

And with that, the parade begins.

All day, every day, there are people walking, jogging, biking in the wide grass median and sidewalks of Fresno's Huntington Boulevard. In the evening, when the shadows lengthen and the day cools down, the party really begins.

There are other neighborhoods with gracious homes, historic pedigrees and canopied shade trees beckoning people out for a walk. But Huntington Boulevard is more than a neighborhood and more than nostalgia. This stretch of old grandeur, surrounded by troubled southeast neighborhoods, is where northside lawyers and southside ironworkers stroll side-by-side. Even the people who own the most manorlike homes say everyone in the area has ownership of the street, especially the kids from nearby apartments without yards.

Huntington Boulevard is the anti-gated community.

Chuck Manock, a partner in a 100-year-old Fig Garden law firm, says his four children -- then high school and college students -- suffered culture shock when the family moved here in 2005.

"They were raised on the other side of town. They'd never been over here," he says.

Manock, 45, also had to do some adjusting.

His 1915 house was originally owned by A.G. Wishon. ("Have you seen the movie 'Chinatown?' " Manock asks. "Wishon was the agent of the John Huston character. He was the leading light of Fresno.") Manock's expansive front yard is rolling grass shaded by camphor trees and scented by wisteria.

Every once in a while, an entire family will put a blanket on Manock's lawn. The kids run around and play, and the grown-ups lie back and look at the sky. There's a drunk from a nearby bar who tends to visit regularly. Once he passed out between the two palm trees.

"But it's like Otis the drunk. More Mayberry than dangerous," says Manock.

And every Christmas, after the lighting of the Wishon Redwood Christmas tree in their front yard (a tradition they inherited when they bought the house), his wife, Katie, invites everyone inside.

"I remember standing in the front yard thinking, 'I don't know those people in my house,' " he says. "But I've changed."

He says he loves not knowing the identity of The Whistler -- just that he's a "real songbird," that there's a nightly soccer game in the median in front of his house, and that every evening he comes home to a parade.

"I was sitting on the veranda with a buddy and he said, 'Doesn't all this bug you?' And I thought, 'No.' There's an energy to this. It's fun to come home to.

"Here, I run into people I wouldn't normally run into because it's the whole social strata," Manock says. "It's hard to explain, but there's a difference to the conversations. Up north it's 'How many square feet do you have? How did you work your mortgage?' Here it's 'Did you know those sconces are 70 years old? What kind of tree is that?' "

From the beginning, Huntington Boulevard boasted some of the grandest homes in Fresno. It was part of the Alta Vista Tract, a development that began about 1910 on 190 acres of what had been an alfalfa field. The tract was annexed to the city in 1912, before anyone had even moved in.

The properties were marketed intensively -- the Harlan Ranch of its day.

A streetcar ran down the wide median of Huntington, providing transportation from the neighborhood to downtown and the County Hospital -- handy for prominent doctors and lawyers.