For 22 years I’ve had front row seats to the shit show that is Van Nuys.

I moved here in 2000 and started this blog in 2006. My purpose: to apply creative writing and photography to the realities around me. 

I walked around and photographed Van Nuys, from the alleys to the houses to the buildings. Vanowen, Victory, Kester, Sepulveda.

At times my blog gave some visibility and notoriety, and I was brought in to observe the workings of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. 

But I never cared to swim in sewers of public life. I saw how small minds functioned, the old fools who fought against housing, and always pushed for more parking lots and wider streets.

“Hey Andrew, what do you think about naming the Van Nuys Post Office the Marilyn Monroe Van Nuys Post Office?”

“Hey Andrew, can you help us fight to preserve that parking lot behind the going out of business furniture store? We want to make sure they don’t build apartments there!”

“Hey Andrew, they want to build a five-story apartment on Vanowen and Hazeltine. That’s too much!”

The VNNC was strangely absent with the modern representatives of Van Nuys, it seemed to be the preserve of old white people who fought to preserve in their imaginations a city that no longer existed.

“My parents bought my house for $11,000 in 1956 and I used to ride my bike to Tommy’s for a chili dog. Gosh, those days are gone forever. I still live there. Yeah I pay $312 a year in property taxes. Thank God I have a pension from the post office.”

There was Councilman Tony Cardenas. He wanted to tear down the Art Deco era fire station on Sylvan. Under his watch Van Nuys further disintegrated, a decade before this pandemic started, and from what I’ve read Van Nuys has been in decline since about 1975.

Nury Martinez replaced Cardenas in 2014, and I often communicated with her office, and met with her people, and got her help cleaning up the streets, picking up dumped sofas, pushing to get traffic lights installed, pedestrian crossings painted, or illegal cars towed.

She was a great ally in defending dozens of small businesses from the 2017 threat of demolition when Metro proposed a 33-acre bulldozing of hundreds of industrial buildings between Kester and Van Nuys Bl. North of Oxnard. This blog acted as an advocate for small business owners who employed locals serving as an economic incubator for new immigrants to prosper in Van Nuys. 

We had a wonderful Senior Lead Officer, Erika Kirk, the kind of woman you would want to work as a police officer. She drove around here and involved herself in matters large and small, but you felt safer with her presence.

The councilwoman, the cop, the council people: everything impersonated order, law, safety, and well-being.

But the reality of Van Nuys, (and greater Los Angeles) is that nothing nice stays nice without the constant threat of law enforcement. 

You must fight every single day to keep homeless encampments out, marijuana farms from the houses down the street. You have to fear for your life from criminals robbing your house, from mentally ill people in the shopping mall parking lot, from the car speeding 80 miles an hour through the red light as you begin to make your left turn. 

Nothing unlocked is left untouched: bicycles, decorative lights, cactuses, cars, mail, pumpkins, packages are stolen around the clock, from every lawn and every stoop, by every type of criminal. Most every crime is recorded on camera and hardly anybody is arrested.

Is this the fault of Nury Martinez?

I don’t think so. 

She spoke her mind in private, in a cigar filled room with other hacks and dealmakers, and she is no worse than anybody else who criticizes her for blatant bigotry. 

Is she worse than Mike Bonin who allows hundreds of violent, destructive, drug abusing and criminal people to camp out in West Los Angeles while flying the flag of compassion, and egregiously ignoring his constituents because he is on a morally higher plane of governance? When the pandemic emptied the streets of legitimate commerce he made sure that vagrants took over the sidewalks.

But in all fairness to him nobody recorded him making bigoted remarks in a room.

The truth is that Los Angeles is a primitive, ugly, violent, disorderly, hateful, self-centered, grotesque city of billboards, blight, traffic, fires, bad air, bad food and bad actors. It is a city that promotes promoters, celebrities, and fake makers of merriment in Hollywood. 

It’s a city where the Hollywood Walk of Fame is populated by people shitting on the sidewalk, fighting with knives and guns, or walking around stoned and drunk and looking for a reason to kill.

If you are rich or famous or the child of someone rich or famous both are considered markers of high achievement.

LA takes comfort in its privileged folk in the cozy and winding streets of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Westwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills.  People here must have been shocked that to the small minded leaders of Los Angeles the city is still divided into pieces of pie: South Central, Pacoima, Westside, White, Latino, Black, Armenian, Oaxacan, Korean, Jewish. 

“Why that little bitch got LAX?”

As they say on Yelp, in every single sentence, “How amazing!”

The loudest liberals who cry the loudest about injustice drive their kids ten miles away to the whitest schools.

All the broken hearts on Twitter who heard what Nury and the bad men said about the little boy, how sad they are to know that hatreds and provincialism and ethnic warfare are the foundation of the great leaders of Los Angeles. 

And why is it that we still are shocked when a Latina refers to Oaxacans as ugly and short and can call a little Black boy a monkey? Have we not heard, ad nauseum, that Nury was to be praised because she was our first Latina city council president?

“She grew up poor and her family is from Zacatecas!”

Don’t judge her.

She’s what the American Dream is all about.

And a woman too.

And a mom.

And a LATINA!

LATIN-X!

If you think it’s worthy of praise to cite someone’s accidental ethnicity as an accomplishment don’t be surprised if that same person speaks and acts as only a representative of that identity!

All the identities who regularly label themselves by their identities, divide this nation, this state and this city into even more identities, and victimized identities. All the ones who think it’s modern, progressive and praiseworthy to admire ethnicity (instead of character), they too share blame for tearing apart our city and our country.

“The first transgender fireperson! The first movie with an all-Asian cast! The first Pacific Islander marathon winner!”

“I go to that coffee stand, even though I hate their coffee, because it’s Black owned!” 

Hooray!

Is there anyone who looks at this city and wonders how it might be built to benefit all its inhabitants humanely and environmentally? 

If you were in power, like Nury, wouldn’t you burn with passion to rebuild, to clean, to beautify the ugliness of the San Fernando Valley? Would you arrive at work every day like Nury and walk down Van Nuys Boulevard and think that you had accomplished something?

The conversations we heard in that room were vile. 

But what we have seen with our own eyes on the streets of Los Angeles is worse.