They pet horses, don't they?

Jensen's Armstrong Stables are an oasis, where long friendships and the feel of country are preserved.

Published online on Sunday, Jul. 20, 2008

The driveway to Jensen's Armstrong Stables is a passageway into the country from the center of the city.

The portal is marked by a yellow horse-crossing sign in front of a graffiti-tagged banner advertising apartment move-in specials.

The stables date back more than 80 years, to a time when fig orchards grew where apartment complexes now stand. Eventually, the city closed in around and the boarding stables became an isolated island of hay and shade trees and horses and people who live in that world.

The property once stretched to Palm Avenue and had a large riding area, but the Metropolitan Flood Control District bought part of the land in the 1980s. Now there are the stables, a small jumping arena and the homes of those who own and care for the place on 4.5 acres.

Down the private driveway, at the arena, is a group of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s who have known each other since they were children, sitting under a tree shooting the breeze after jumping their horses. Dogs, kittens, goats, geese, ducks, chickens and peacocks wander about.

It's even a different temperature in this speck of country. Without the asphalt and with a breeze off the moat that is a nearby irrigation canal, it's balmy on a day when the temperature hovers near 100.

Out on busy Fruit Avenue, just south of Ashlan Avenue, it's hot and the traffic is loud, and the only glimpses Keyana Thomas, 11, has of rural life are two horses fenced near the street and the sounds she can hear from her apartment when she wakes up.

"I hear chickens in the morning and horses neighing and the train," she says.

Keyana has never had a pet. Not a dog or a cat or even a hamster. She sat on a horse once, at the fair when she was little. So it took her a long time to reach out and pet the horses she passed walking to school at Williams Elementary.

"When I had extra time, I looked at them a lot, right at them, but I'm not used to animals so it took me a long time to touch them," she says as she reaches through a chain-link fence and scratches a thoroughbred's muzzle.

"Moving here changed my life," she says. "In the apartments we used to live in people would to go outside and do nothing. But here, there's a lot of things to do and lots of things to see. I visit the horses every day."

Alan Cregan, who married into stable life when he wed Phyllis, the stable's widowed owner, notices Keyana at the end of the driveway when he comes home for a lunch break from his job as a geologist.

"We're the petting zoo for this neighborhood," he says with a smile.

Jerry Clay, 33, walking by on the street, has never touched a horse and says he never will.

"I'm not such a tough guy. I'm afraid of horses," says Clay, who has tributes to his 3-year-old son tattooed on both arms and a cell phone at his hip.

"But I watch them every day. The horses go right up to the kids. There's lots of smiles. It's beautiful to see," he says. "But when the little gangbangers go by, they don't look at the horses and the horses don't look at them. I think the horses have a mind about who is good or bad."

Eddy Sanders, 53, bicycles up. He's taken a bus from downtown. The unemployed truck driver heard there were stables and is hoping to apply for a ranchhand job.

"I came up working around animals," says the Massachusetts native.

"I love nature!" he shouts over the roar of traffic.

There isn't a lot of interaction between the disparate worlds of the stables and the nearby neighborhood.

The people at the stables never report the sound of street gunfire they sometimes hear, hoping people who live in the apartments won't complain to the city about the sound of a rooster crowing at 4 a.m.