Photo: Cal. Digital Library.
Walking through the construction site that is North Hollywood these days, one’s eye is still drawn to the two most distinguished buildings in the area, both of which date from the 1920s.
Through 80 years of architectral upheavals, from the Bauhaus to Frank Gehry, there is still something suitable and solid about the old classical commercial buildings from the early 2oth Century. They managed to communicate a dignity that is absent from most contemporary architecture.
There is also courtesy in the red brick building. Its corner meets the corner streets with a respectful angle. The symmetry and proportions, the red brick and red clay tiles, and the easily understood front entrance, make one long for a time before attitude and coyness overtook the building arts.
North Hollywood is busily remaking itself into an important limb in the body of 21st Century Los Angeles. It will be the transportation shoulders connecting the head of the city into the arms of the Valley. Let us pray it also rediscovers its heart.
Here in Van Nuys 