I am looking up at the Google Maps aerial photo of modern day Northridge, which is basically a gigantic sprawl of mediocrity consisting of asphalt, shopping malls, and homely houses. The one speck of green is the surviving Oakie estate.
I haven’t any lawful argument to make against the “legal” wishes of those members of the Oakie family who endowed USC with this beautiful property, which is now likely to be paved over with those horrendous stucco boxes that disfigure most of the post-1976 Golden State.
The only human, civic and civilized gesture that would matter here is to preserve both the house and the grounds around it as some sort of a public park. It is not to pave over the land, build 60 crackerjack houses, cheek and jowl against each other, and fill it up with Hummers and electric gates.
Northridge, and most of Los Angeles is starved for parks. We don’t have enough of them. Part of the ills of this city are traceable to the lack of nature that we urbanites endure. A historic home and lovely tree shaded park would be a great gift to the Valley.
There is sometimes the legal reason why something is allowable, but that doesn’t always make it morally or ethically right. If the Oakie property is bulldozed so that some already wealthy developer can devalue and destroy a historic home and gardens, and we don’t protest it, then we forfeit our own rights as Americans and Angelenos.
Here in Van Nuys 