Category: History

New Housing at Old Bank.

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Last week, the LA Planning Commission approved 179 townhomes and 8 low-income apartments built partially out of the old North Hollywood Savings and Loan (later Chase) Bank at 4445 Lankershim Bl. at Riverside Dr. according a recent story in the Daily News.

The 1961 building will be readapted for residential use, and include over 5,000 SF of ground floor commercial space along with 263 car spots and 237 bike spaces. The architect is Winston Chang, principal of Next.

For years I have driven past this building as I traveled on the 134 or along Riverside Drive. 

Curious about its history, I dug up some old LA Times articles.

Roscoe W. Blanchard, Sr. (1882-1977) owner of the Blanchard Lumber Company, founded the North Hollywood Savings and Loan in 1923 when the San Fernando Valley was in its earliest boom days. 

Here is his 1977 obituary:

After WWII (1945), the boom in residential building made the bank prosperous, and in 1960, with over $40 million in assets, they announced a new $2 million dollar, six-story tall skyscraper with 73,810 SF of space. Earthquake resistant and fireproof, it was also the tallest structure in the San Fernando Valley. 

In a 1963 ad, the bank stated they would pay depositors 4.80% interest, a tidy amount for the time. In 1969, they promised 5% interest for new deposits.  Those were the days when a person could save money by opening a savings and loan account, and count on a guaranteed level of annual growth.

But the go-go 1960s ended with a decline in the Los Angeles realty boom. And the days of a secure savings and loan specializing in residential housing loans was numbered.

A Feb 9, 1969 LA Times article entitled, “Realty Boom is Fading as Prices Stay Stable” lamented high interest rates of 7-8%, and the inability of many families to afford the average $25,000-$35,000 SFV home, with more than 2/3 of SFV families earning less than $10,000 a year.

Overbuilding in 1965-66 had resulted in rental vacancies of 22% and almost 2,000 new homes unsold. One-third of the new, un-bought homes in Los Angeles were in the San Fernando Valley.

In 1969, both rents and residential prices fell as supplies increased, a widely accepted fact of economics which seems to have been forgotten by modern Angelenos who believe that building more housing is only for “greedy developers.” 

But back when the developers were allowed to develop, this was the result:

1970: In Woodland Hills, the average rent was $172, the highest in the Valley. 

Encino had the most expensive homes, averaging $50,000 in value.[1]

Today we have this:

According to CoStar, the price of an average apartment in the Woodland Hills sub-market—which includes Warner Center—stood at $2,200 per month. 

In 2018, Redfin said the average Encino home was $980,000.

In 1979, Proposition 13 froze property tax rates at the original level a home was sold at, not currently assessed at. Lucky owners of homes bought in 1974 for $40,000, which became $300,000 properties in 1980 (or $3,000,000 in 2019) were still taxed at 1974’s $40,000 purchase price. 

The tax rebellion was partially a white reaction against the increase in illegal migration and resentment in paying taxes for darker complexioned students. Today, most people who can, drive their children out of “bad” school districts to “good” ones thus exacerbating our air pollution and traffic problems. 

People who once rode the bus now take Uber or Lyft, thus exacerbating our air pollution and traffic problems.

We don’t build enough housing. Our housing is in short supply because many of the occupants here don’t legally have a right to be here. But that is stating what should not be said.

Part of our hypocrisy is being liberal and being racist and wanting good education for our children. And none of these traits can co-exist in modern Los Angeles without being hypocritcal. This is not an indictment, just merely a statement of fact from speaking to white parents who live on my street in Van Nuys and drive their kids out of the area to attend school.

The great shortage of homes in Los Angeles began its 40-year ascent and has now culminated in the lovely sight of human beings, unable to afford shelter, sleeping under bridges and along sidewalks. 

Mental illness is blamed for some of this but I wonder how mentally healthy I would be after eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in an alley for a year.

That some of the fortunate inheritors of parental properties, and low property taxes, are also some of the biggest opponents of new residential construction, especially in wealthy sections of Los Angeles, is a cruel irony. 

In the 1980s, the Savings and Loan crisis, brought on by government policies that bankrupted local S&Ls, resulted in the consolidation of many small banks into the large regional ones such as Chase or Bank of America.

In 1976, North Hollywood Savings and Loan was incorporated and merged into San Diego’s Central Federal Savings and Loan Association. 

So in the next few years, a building that once housed a savings and loan which played an instrumental role in lending money to young families buying homes in the San Fernando Valley, will become itself a home for some 179 families, (and 8 units or 4% of the total units will be low income).

Los Angeles, here in Van Nuys, and here in North Hollywood, and all around the city, will move along and build expensively and sluggishly until its leaders accept that it must become denser, higher, and less car dependent. An enormous push for more affordable and multi-modal transport accessible housing is paramount for our survival as a viable metropolis. 

Because we don’t build enough housing, we cannot afford to live in areas we might want to, which leads to more segregation and more bitterness and more helplessness in a city where homelessness is never far off and being housed is conundrum of insanity and indebtedness.

That we need to build more was something Roscoe W. Blanchard, Sr. would have understood with his expertise and success in building materials and financing homes 100 years ago.

We are trapped between the reality of our city and our dreams of its potential. We know what it is. We see this place with our own eyes.

But we really don’t want to accept its degraded condition, or the responsibility for how grotesque, unequal, cruel, barbaric and sadistic it often is. To look at the ugliness in this city we would have to accept that ugliness in ourselves. And why we make illogical and self-destructive choices and choose prerogatives that hasten the decline of Los Angeles.


[1]Valley Population Near Million; Growth Slows

–LA Times, April 29, 1971

Van Nuys: Vigorous Valley Hub 12/13/1959

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It was “230 square miles encircled by mountains and roofed by a blue sky.”

Its 800,000 residents were more populous than Boston or San Francisco and its land size equaled the city of Chicago.

It was famous for “its distinctive way of life” a “perpetual exhibit of Modern Suburbia at its brightest and biggest. Valley people live outdoors with patios, swimming pools and gardens all year through. They wear sports clothes and drive sports cars.”

Vigorous Valley Hub, Page 2

So exclaimed the Los Angeles Times on December 13, 1959 in breathless prose accompanied by an aerial illustration of the Valley Municipal Building surrounded by open parking lots and flat topped office buildings floating in a sea of spaciousness.

And Valley industries were tops, in the forefront of electronic, missile and space age developments. PhDs were hired by the thousands, and the Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce sponsored more than 239 courses for upgrading personnel including 60 UCLA classes taught right here in the San Fernando Valley.

The Air Force and the US Government loved the spaciousness of the valley and its highly educated workforce and spent over 1/3 of ballistic missile budget dollars here.

90% of all filmed television was produced at such studios as Warner Brothers, and Disney in Burbank; Universal in Universal City and Republic Studios in Studio City.

And to make sure the success, the glittering, shining, prosperous times continued, efficient government services were necessary. 

In 1959, a $7 million dollar streamlining of the Valley Administrative Center in Van Nuys, described as “second only to the Civic Center in downtown Los Angeles” began a sweeping, and comprehensive remodeling of the area by bulldozing hundreds of old bungalows and opening up a vast pedestrian mall which would one day be a glorious assemblage of courthouses, government offices, a new library, a new police station, and parking for tens of thousands of cars.

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If the luminaries, the citizens, the people of Van Nuys in 1959, could have only looked 60 years into the future, they would have been stunned by the enormous progress our town has made, truly a model of technological, architectural, social, cultural, and aesthetic achievement.

Today, a walk down Van Nuys Boulevard between Oxnard and Vanowen is fun, safe, entertaining, clean, delightful, a veritable model of city planning with great restaurants, wonderfully restored old buildings, friendly shops, and spotless sidewalks.

Councilwoman Nury “No Human Trafficking” Martinez keeps everyone on their toes, and should the police even hear of one intoxicated person nearby, they are immediately apprehended and taken into custody.

Our schools are wonderful, ranked first in the world, with the highest paid teachers in North America, and schoolchildren getting healthy exercise walking and biking to nearby classrooms. All students in Van Nuys are required to live near school so roads are not jammed with parents driving students to other districts.

Recent statistics show that only 1% of all children are obese; and diabetes, obesity, mental illness, marijuana and drug addictions are almost unknown in this healthiest of districts.

Mayor Airwick Garbageciti is adamant in keeping Van Nuys clean, lawfully prohibiting anyone from sleeping, camping, tenting, RVing on public property. Nobody disagrees because after all the public taxpayer pays for public property and expects it to be kept in tip-top condition.

Laws are faithfully obeyed, and drivers always obey speed limits, stop for red lights.  And illegal dumping, a scourge of the third world, is never seen here. 

A new law proposed by the City Council and supported by Mayor Garbageciti will require RHP (Registered Homeless Person) identity cards which will monitor people to make sure they report to 40 hour a week jobs cleaning parks and mowing lawns and working for $10 an hour to assist elderly residents who need house painting and yard maintenance. 

We, in 2019, are rightly grateful for what our ancestors built here, and we vow to keep it as perfect as it is for many years to come.

Exploring an Old Neighborhood on a Cool Summer Afternoon Near Dusk.

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21st St.

S. Central Av.

The First Spiritualist Temple (1911 & 21)

Second Baptist Church  2412 Griffith Av. (1926, National Register of Historic Places)

Yesterday Andreas and I drove over to an old neighborhood to walk around and take photos.

The location was south of downtown, and the 10; east of the 110, and encompasses streets such as Washington Bl, Central, San Pedro and Maple.

Most of the houses were built in the early 1900s. They are wood cottages with ornamental embellishments, front porches, little yards, along streets punctuated by a variety of churches.

Lincoln Theatre (1926)

There are some glorious old theaters, including the Moorish revival style Lincoln (1926), which was once the heart of the black live performance music community along S. Central Avenue.

The long, distinguished history of black businesses, churches, educational institutions and artists who lived and created here is much too long to discuss in this short blog post, but this is where, from the 1920s to the 50s, much of African-American creative life was centered.

Today, the shops, the residents, the people on the streets, are largely Latino, though that designation is sweeping and generalizing too, and cannot describe the immutable variations of life here.

Washington & Central

On our walk we encountered friendliness everywhere, from people saying hello on bike, to men grilling sausages, to porch sitters waving and engaging in conversation. There is street life here that is supportive, engaged, healthy, perhaps more grounded and nurturing than one could find in any area of the San Fernando Valley.

There are fine murals on buildings, and most of the alleys we walked past were shabby but kept free of debris, cleaner, in fact, than some in Van Nuys.

Washington Bl.

722 Washington Bl. (2017)

On Washington Boulevard light rail zooms past architectural relics from the past century: the Scully Building at 725 was built in 1930 and is a spectacular “Gotham City” type of Art Deco with steel windows and vertically decorated brickwork and carved stone; 722 was built in 2017 and is a new 55-unit apartment with government backed funding providing decent housing in a city starved for it. A mural on the side of the building is spectacularly subtle, artist unknown.

725 Washington Bl. (1930)

 

(Stanford Av. Near 20th.)

2010 Stanford Ave.
Site of a 1914 warehouse auction for the Arnold Furniture Co.

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Many of the streets down here (excepting Washington Bl.) are narrower than most in modern Los Angeles, creating an enveloping and embracing closeness between pedestrians and businesses, and making biking and walking safer. Every car that we encountered at an intersection, gracefully and politely, ushered us to walk in front. Yes, it’s the law, but its routinely flouted in richer communities of Los Angeles, but not down below Washington Blvd near S. Central Ave.

Washington Bl.

Washington Bl.

Mid-Century Commercial Building along Washington Bl.

Washington Bl. Bridge

Our tour ended, and culminated, in the glorious Washington Bl. Bridge (1930) that crosses the LA River, its majestic classicism fouled up by graffiti. Yet its polychromatic terra cotta frieze panels, depicting the art of bridge building, are still present, if grimy, on the four pylons on each side of the structure.

At that bridge, as Mother Nature blew the waning candlelight out of the sky, ushering in the night, the remnants of some deceased industrial glory and aspirations of greatness still cried out for recognition.

Washington Bl. Bridge 1930

1949: A $72 Million Dollar Flood Control Plan to Waterproof SFV

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Van Nuys Blvd. 1938 flood


Flooded area at Ventura Boulevard and Colfax Avenue in Studio City. 1938 (LAPL)

After March 1938 Flood: Lankershim Bl. looking north near Universal City. Photo: by Herman Schultheis

After the disastrous 1938 floods, the City of Los Angeles worked with the State of California and the Federal Government, specifically The Army Corps of Engineers, to encase the rivers of Los Angeles in a waterproof lined concrete sewer to expel waters during the rainy season.

These December 1949 photographs, archived at the LAPL in the “Valley Times Collection”, show the splendid progress of turning natural riverbeds into something distinctively man-made without natural life.  The cost, at the time, was $72 million, which is perhaps $800 million today, but sounds like a bargain, since the Getty Center mountaintop gouge and railroad itself cost $1.3 billion dollars upon completion in 1997 and the widening of the 405 five years ago was a $1.6 billion dollar project that has since added one lane in each direction and shaved 10 seconds off each commuter’s journey.

And let us ponder that our latest crisis, homelessness, will be remedied by taxpayer dollars close to $5 billion.  Not the Federal Government, not the State of CA, but taxpayers, you and me will shell out to well-meaning bureaucrats and post-collegiate interns, $4.6 billion to build housing — 10,000 units in 10 years — and “provide supportive services” for homeless people.  When every person in need on every continent around the world, every down and out person from every state, city and town in the US, Canada and Mexico, arrives in Los Angeles, we will see how well this plan goes down.  It once was against the law to dump garbage in parks, to set up tent cities on sidewalks, to sleep on benches, under bridges, but now this is a behavior eliciting “compassion” because that’s how you are directed and asked to speak of it. You must not condemn what your own eyes tell you is wrong.  Let it grow, let it expand, then create new programs to fight it, until it becomes unstoppable.

A city that once built hundreds of miles concrete rivers to stop flooding, cannot erect temporary shelters and police the filth and disorder and rampant grossness of the ever growing homeless situation. 1949 was a different time, for Angelenos were not intimidated and cowered into attacking threats that endangered the growth, health and well-being of this city.

Lankershim and Cahuenga

Riverside and Whitsett

Laurel Canyon Bl. near Ventura.

The concreting of the LA River in the San Fernando Valley allowed the development of housing right up to the edge of the old slopes. No longer would houses and apartments face potential destruction from heavy rains and overflowing waters.  Soon the freeways would come through, another onslaught of concrete that helped transform the San Fernando Valley from a place of horses and orange groves to one of parking lots and 10-lane local boulevards.

Today, in many parts of the LA River, most notably in Frogtown and along some sections of Studio City, there are naturalizing effects going on, and residents are biking, hiking, and even boating where it is permitted in the once fetid waters of the river.

 

Aerial Views: Van Nuys in the 1920s

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1930s Map of the San Fernando Valley (DWP)

Van Nuys was established in 1911, and soon after people settled here to work and live.

The Southern Pacific freight trains ran along tracks which are now the location of the Metro Orange Line.

An agricultural economy supported citrus packing plants, animal feed for horses, cows, chickens; and the burgeoning development of the San Fernando Valley brought lumber suppliers to Van Nuys.

These 1924 images of Van Nuys come from the Los Angeles Public Library Archives.

In the first photo below, we are standing near Oxnard and Van Nuys Blvd. looking north with the train tracks and crossing signals visible in the middle left side. The town has the air of a farming village with rows of fruit trees planted and open space between structures. In the very top of the photo one can make out Van Nuys High School which was badly damaged in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and rebuilt in an Art Deco style afterwards.

In the second photo, below, we are flying over the area near Oxnard and Van Nuys Bl. looking NE towards the site of our present day government buildings. Small, humble houses dot the landscape immediately adjacent to the industrial area along the rail tracks. Van Nuys Lumber Co. was probably located on Aetna St. one block north of Oxnard. One can also make out small rows of pitched roof dense houses in the middle right area. Perhaps these were “worker” housing for the people who loaded the trains, and did the manual labor which was required to move goods from Van Nuys to the freight trains.

Oxnard and VNB 2018

2018: Aerial View of Oxnard at VNB looking NE.

In the third image, below, from 1925, we have an overview of Adohr Dairy Farms (18000 Ventura Bl) and Runnymeade Poultry Farm.  This is in Encino west of White Oak.

CSUN has a large collection of Adohr Farms Images. On their website they have a brief bio of the Adohr story:

“The Adohr Farms milk dairy was located in Tarzana, California at Ventura Boulevard and Lindley Avenue. The dairy was established by Merritt Adamson 1916, and named for his wife, Rhoda (spelled backwards). During the Depression, the Adamson’s sold off most of their land. In the late 1940s, Adohr Farms moved to Camarillo, and was eventually sold to Southland Corporation in the mid-1960s.”
Photo below: Adohr Farms, 1937. Notice unusual udder-shaped topiary along road.

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Aerial view of Adhor Certified Farm at 18000 Ventura Boulevard, Reseda, circa 1937. (CSUN)

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1963: LAPD Warns Hitchhikers of Predatory Homosexuals.

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“Photograph article dated July 18, 1963 partially reads, “Valley police have been issuing citations in recent months to teen-agers who hitchhike up and down Van Nuys Blvd. The department is worried because several Valley youths have been the victims of homosexuals who pick them up and refuse to let them out of the car. Capt. Hagan pointed out that hitchhiking is against the law when it is done on freeways or any roadway where the hitchhiker walks out and stands in the roadway. The hitchhiker, however, is within the law if he stays on the sidewalk.” Motor Officer J. E. Nibes is about to tell Jeff Sillifant, North Hollywood, that he’s breaking the law. ”