SIMI ICON—With a little help from the City Council, Northridge gardener Sonny Klamerus got permission to restore the wellknown happy face to the hillside at the city’s eastern entrance. IRIS SMOOT/Acorn Newspapers Overgrown with weeds after two years of neglect, Happy Face Hill will soon be smiling again.

Four weeks ago, the happy face “perpetrator,” as Sonny Klamerus calls himself, went before the City Council to petition for the city’s assistance in getting him back up on the hill at the eastern entrance of town.

This week, the Northridge resident got the green light to do just that.

But it wasn’t as easy as simply unlocking the gate at the base of the hill at the north end of Kuehner Drive. The trouble was the property owner, Jon Friedman, wanted Klamerus to have liability insurance but the gardener couldn’t afford it.

The creator of the smile said he never had an issue before because Larwin Co., the previous landowner, and Mt. Sinai Memorial Park, which owns the land that bears a heart on the other side of the hill, gave him permission letters to be on the property as long as he wasn’t a nuisance. The gardener will also restore the heart.

Sonny Klamerus Friedman put Klamerus in touch with a local Rotary Club that had expressed interest in helping to rejuvenate Happy Face Hill, since they could supply the coverage.

Klamerus said he was open to the idea of a partnership at first but ultimately decided he’d rather do it on his own, telling the council that “too many cooks spoil the broth.”

“It’s a one-man job really,” he said. “I spend around two hours at a time several times a year. More people up there seems to be overkill and a simple gesture becomes profane.

“I do like the 15 minutes of fame I’m afforded, but I shouldn’t be more, and the Rotarians shouldn’t be more, than the message of the happy face or the heart,” he told the council.

The council was glad to hear that Klamerus wanted to give the hill a “face-lift,” and Councilwoman Barbra Williamson had one request: that the heart be restored to its former glory by Valentine’s Day.

After his appeal to the council for help, the city facilitated conversations among all the parties involved. On Monday, Friedman said his lawyers were finishing a liability waiver for Klamerus to sign. The next day, he signed it.

“He can go up and put happy face back up on the hill and with proper notice he’ll be able to maintain it,” said Friedman, operating manager of Palmdale 47th LLC.

The company bought the graded land last October and is moving forward with plans—abandoned by Larwin after the company fell into bankruptcy—to build 66 condominiums on the site. Construction is slated to begin this summer, Friedman said, but it won’t interfere with the hillside grin.

“We think it’s a nice asset to the community,” Friedman said.

Some apparently do see Happy Face Hill as more than an odd work of landscaping. In fact, a Facebook page created in its honor has garnered 2,600 fans.

Klamerus is surprised by the hoopla, saying the happy face and the heart have come to mean more to locals than he ever imagined. When he first trekked up the thenunfenced hill in 1998 armed with Roundup and a string trimmer, his only goal was to do something nice.

“You know how Oprah talks about doing a good deed, a random act of kindness? . . . That’s pretty much what it is,” he said. “It’s a benign, good thing. It’s not religious, it’s not political. It’s a nice thing to do and people can’t get angry at it.”

Brian Dennert, a world history and government teacher at Royal High School, created the Facebook fan page for Happy Face Hill in December as a way of honoring “the simple things that make our city home.”

“I was just thinking about stuff in Simi to celebrate,” he said. “As a teacher thinking about local geography—what makes this place unique compared to the next town over? And I was brainstorming and I came up with Happy Face Hill.”

Dennert never thought the page would gain so much popularity.

“I was excited to think it could hit 500 (fans),” said Dennert, who’s also created fan pages for other local landmarks including Duck Pond Park and Mt. McCoy. “I didn’t realize there were so many other people who had hiked up into the hills to take a picture of it. . . . Or college students, when they come back (to Simi), how it makes them feel like they’re home.”

While it’s been disheartening for the hill’s fans to watch Simi’s smile slowly disappear, they should be happy to know that after undergoing a Roundup “face-lift” Wednesday, the face—and the heart—will soon reemerge.

It looks like Williamson will get her Valentine’s Day wish.