L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission met at City Hall Thursday morning to determine whether to designate Tujunga’s Verdugo Hills Golf Course a historic-cultural monument, not because it’s a golf course, but because it was the site of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, Immigration, and Naturalization Service — a World War II internment camp where 90 percent of the detainees were Japanese.

But the Los Angeles Department of City Planning’s Staff of Historic Resources recommended against the designation, precisely because the site is now a golf course — and has been one for more than 50 years. And the Commission agreed.

A group of passionate speakers voiced their support for historic designation, including Japanese-Americans with personal ties to the site, and David Scott, whose grandfather, Merrill H. Scott, was a guard at the internment camp. They were just a few of the representatives from the community who have been trying to preserve the golf course after Snowball West Investments bought the property in 2004 for over $7,500,000, with plans to turn it into a housing development.

It’s been a complicated and contentious debate for both those in favor and against historical designation, but at least everyone agreed on one thing: the site is very rich in history.

Originally a Native American Tongva village, the federal government first developed the land in the early 1930s, building a Civilian Conservation Corps work camp as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal public-works program. Immediately after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the government used the site as a temporary internment camp for more than 300 people of Japanese, Italian, Polish, and German decent, most of whom were legal Americans.

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