“Valinda” is a contraction of valle linda – Spanish for “pretty valley”. It was coined in 1947 for Valinda Village, a new retail-focused subdivision that was advertised as “The Westwood of the San Gabriel Valley”. The former Covina Avenue was renamed Valinda Avenue in 1949. A year earlier, in fact, there was a petition to change the name of West Covina itself to “Valinda”, but Camille Alphonse Garnier (1915-1968), who developed the subdivision with his widowed mother Constance Blanche Garnier (1882-1973), was protective of the Valinda brand and wouldn’t allow it. The Garniers were no strangers to this area: Constance’s late father was Auguste Amar, a French sheepherder who had bought the land back in 1880. Unfortunately, she and Camille wound up at legal odds with each other until he died in Las Vegas of undisclosed causes.
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