For Christmas I received a great book,
Weird U.S.: Your Travel Guide to America's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets by Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman. Immediately I flipped through it to find anything about San Diego, and soon came across the legend of Midgetville.
Midgetville refers to the legend of a town consisting of scaled-down houses built for little people. Midgetville is said to exist in various places throughout America. As Moran and Sceurman note, the most credible rumor locates such a town in
Jefferson Township, New Jersey, on the former estate of circus mogul Alfred T. Ringling. There really is a collection of small-sized houses there that could conceivably have once been home to a colony of midgets. However, another
very persistent legend locates a Midgetville in San Diego.
Moran and Sceurman don't go into much detail about the San Diego Midgetville, but I realized that I had heard this legend before (my wife had also heard it). This is how it goes: back in the 1930s a group of little people who had made a lot of money in Hollywood appearing in movies such as
The Wizard of Oz supposedly came down to San Diego and built a collection of miniature houses on Mt. Soledad where they could live in comfort together. But of course, nobody seems to know exactly where on Mt. Soledad this group of small houses was or is, though everybody has heard of a "friend of a friend" who once accidentally found the houses (though this FOAF can never remember how to get back there).
Determined to find the houses, I did a google search and came across
an article from 2003 written by Kenneth Smith for the
Daily Aztec detailing his own efforts to track down San Diego's fabled 'Munchkin Houses'. After many false starts, he finally discovered that they were most probably "a group of four cottages on Hillside Drive in La Jolla... built by
famed architect Cliff May." Although no midgets or little people were ever known to live in these houses, Smith says that, "The houses do indeed have smallish features, accentuated by an optical illusion. The steep road that passes them makes them seem even smaller than they actually are." Unfortunately only one of the four cottages remains standing, but Smith provides directions to find it: "take Hillside Drive from Torrey Pines Road. The house will be on your left-hand side. Look for the crazy midget handwriting." He also mentions that if you peek through the window (the house is unoccupied) you'll see "cobblestone-like tiled floors and a little round fireplace."
Of course, I had to see this for myself, even if no colony of Wizard-of-Oz midgets had ever lived there. So on New Year's Day I convinced my wife to accompany me on a search for the Munchkin House. The results were mixed. It was no problem finding Hillside Drive, but as it turns out Hillside Drive is fairly long. We were driving up and down it (as a line of cars formed behind us) wondering 'exactly which house on the left did he mean.' None of the houses leaps out at you and screams 'Munchkin House.' But finally we settled on one house that we figured must be it: Seventy-Four Seventy-Seven Hillside Drive. It had
small windows and a small door. Plus, the address written beside the door looked a bit like
'crazy midget handwriting' (though I think Smith was joking about this). Ignoring the
'No Trespassing' sign (even though part of the legend of Midgetville is that the midgets who live there fiercely defend their land from the Bigs), I peeked through the window and saw the
cobblestone-like tiled floors and a little round fireplace. So I think I found the Munchkin House, though I'm not 100% sure. It's certainly not anything that would catch your attention if you weren't specifically looking for it since it's really not that small, which made the trip a bit disappointing. But the weird thing is, I've already forgotten how to get back there.
Comments
I'm a magician in New York and always looking for the odd story. The Museum of Hoaxes is not only a great site, I loved the book too.
I heard that toward the end of the run, the midgets were encourage to display some lewd acts.
if anyone has like the location or a street by it please tell
also i live in montclair only a couple min away from clairmont and they say there is a midget town there too can anyone help me find that place
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?q=hidden+road+fort+worth&mkt=en-US&FORM=BYFD
Yes. We should have minded our manners as well. I have seen posts here that the Fort Worth village was made for kids or did not exist at all, but we who have seen or spoke with the occupants back then know it was very real.
Looking at the Bing bird's eye view photo I see the chapel is still there and you can see spaces where other houses used to be.
When I lived in Alamance County there is a town called Glen Raven. When I heard the story it was referred to as "Munchkinland"
In Glen Raven there still exists the "Row Houses" which were one time company houses for the employees of the local textile mill. I saw the street in question. Imagine if you will, a long straight street with row after row of identical houses with large front porches. These houses have now been renovated and protected as historical buildings.
In the 1950's as the story was told to me, there lived little people on this street that tended to keep to themselves and inter-bred with each other so that the street had a large population of little people on it. This being the 50's there was no air conditioning so people tended to sit on their porches at night, with the porch lights on. Imagine if you will row after row of identical porch lit houses with little people sitting on them. It became a local tourist attraction for the 1950's "cruising" scene to drive down this street honking your horn in the middle of the night. Eventually the little people became irritated to the point they took to hiding in trees and throwing rocks at passing car. What I heard was they eventually all moved to a dead end street somewhere in town.