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 
The Fred 62 liquor license has been protested as of February of 2006, and per the abc web site, its fate is still up in the air.
LikeLike
The Old Bank Building, as you show in photos, is currently being upgraded to be turned into a Fred 62’s (of Los Feliz fame) and adjoining club. The re-use should continue to re-energize this stretch of Lankershim in NoHo, just caddy-corner to the Metro Station.
LikeLike
The Old Bank Building, as you show in photos, is currently being upgraded to be turned into a Fred 62’s (of Los Feliz fame) and adjoining club. The re-use should continue to re-energize this stretch of Lankershim in NoHo, just caddy-corner to the Metro Station.
LikeLike
The Old Bank Building, as you show in photos, is currently being upgraded to be turned into a Fred 62’s (of Los Feliz fame) and adjoining club. The re-use should continue to re-energize this stretch of Lankershim in NoHo, just caddy-corner to the Metro Station.
LikeLike
Because of the availability of ornamental pieces has return to a high and precast, custom fabrication have become abundant, I think designing buildings like these is again cheaper than before. So that is, what many Modernists will argue that we no longer have the trained labour and therefore the financial choice to do a classical building justice maybe an overstatement now. That’s not to say that we have returned to the time of the Beaux Arts glory; that was over, never to return definately. I am saying those little buildings you have pictures of. They are essentially simple boxes with classical detailings and ornamentation that are to good scale. We can reinvent that reatively in a sense. Now, the issue becomes why we must do that. Why don’t we do other eclectic building styles? What about Chinoiserie? Neo-gothic? Romanesque? Hellenic? You see, as the “parts” are being manufacturedd cheaply again in these day and age, the “style” arguement becomes important. Culturally, there was a reason to forsake the “classical” (i.e. Greck-Roman) and “romantic” (medieval, Islamic) formal reinterpretations. But still, these remanat structures of yesteryears are irreplaceable milestones of a time period gone.
LikeLike