Links – Page 2 – Here in Van Nuys

Crisis of the Month.

March 2, 2018March 14, 2018Posted in LinksTagged Crime, history, Homeless, Laws, Links, VagrantLeave a comment

Los Angeles sometimes wakes up to discover that not enforcing the law somehow becomes self-fulfilling.

If you allow anyone to sleep anywhere, if you permit trailers to park on the street and become permanent housing, if you think it’s OK, tolerant, liberal, open-minded, sympathetic, empathetic to turn parks, bus benches, 7Eleven, parking lots, cars, river banks, every square inch of public space, into a homeless encampment, then you will turn every square inch of public space into a homeless encampment.

You get on a Red Line train to ride it downtown, and you see five or six people and their belongings sleeping on board. Nobody does anything to stop it. Some kids get on the train, turn up a radio, start dancing and go around asking for donations. Nobody stops it. You are living in a loony bin. But it’s all cool….

If you think its Ok to see women defecate on Hollywood Boulevard, if you have to walk to the other side of LaBrea because a man is urinating on the sidewalk in front of you, it’s just the way it is. At least you are not homeless! So have some regard for everyone who is!

Those ten people with shopping baskets who moved in next door. Just ignore it. Let it be. Those twenty people living in tents on Bessemer and Cedros? Just use the 311 App. The city will clean it up. Mayor Garrett and the LAPD and Ms. Nury Martinez know about the situation. There is nothing law enforcement, city government, or the military can do.

Sometimes the city becomes alarmed. The LA Times writes profound editorials that nobody reads. It is March 2, 2018. The problem, the crisis, the war on affordable housing, all of it must be a priority!

An emergency is called. The government asks citizens to pay a tax to solve a problem which the government created by not enforcing the law.

And suddenly it becomes normal to live in a filthy garbage dump of a city, Los Angeles, and nothing can be done about it.

In neighborhoods all over the city: break-ins, thefts, assaults, burglaries, stolen bikes, panhandling, illegal drugs, drinking in public, all of it is cool man, it’s OK dude. No worries…..

Vine St. From Hollywood to Melrose.

January 30, 2018January 30, 2018Posted in LinksTagged "Transit Oriented", Camerford, Cash & Loans, Cops, Hollywood, Homeless, Kut N Go Hair Salon, LAPD, Lexington, Metro, Orange Line, Paramount Studios, Red Line, Super Mercado El Rancho, transit, UCLA, Vagrancy, Vine St.Leave a comment

Today I went down to Hollywood for a meeting at Paramount Studios.

I parked at the Orange Line lot, near Sepulveda and Erwin (2/3 of which is now leased by Keyes to store unsold new cars), bought a $7 Metro pass, and took the bus, which connected to the Red Line subway at North Hollywood. I rode three stops and disembarked at Hollywood and Vine.

Compared to other times on the train, there was definitely a boosted security presence. Some cops were checking passes at North Hollywood and four LAPD cops boarded a train at Highland and rode it for a few stops.

The pathologies of LA are now deeply embedded in the transit system. Many homeless were riding the train with their belongings, and at Vine I heard jostling and two men arguing with “fuck you” screamed loudly. Other times I’ve ridden the train and with smoking, eating, feet on seats, loud music, and absolutely nobody doing anything about it.

But considering how much might go wrong, the ride was all right, and I walked, for a few miles, along Vine and arrived on time for my 11am appointment at Paramount where everyone smiles and says thank you.

In black and white, editing out the poverty, Vine Street presents itself as a neat and tidy noir place. There is Stein and Vine Drums, the DWP Service Building, erected 1924; Bogie’s Liquors, the Army/Navy & Earthquake Supplies, and Camerford Avenue, a street I never heard of until today.

Back in Hollywood, there are hucksters and con artists all around Vine near the W Hotel.

One guy came up to me with a hunk of cash in his hand and said, “You got a $20 for a ten and five and some ones?”

I said, “Let me see what you got.”

But he refused to unfurl all the cash. Then he said, “C’mon man. I just interviewed for a job at Starbucks and I got to get to Oceanside and I’m short six bucks!”

I said, “I’m sorry,” and walked off.

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The Lost Art of Selling Auto Parts.

May 15, 2017Posted in History, LinksTagged "Diamond Tires", "Fred C. Wood", "Nelson and Price", auto parts, cars, DeSoto, Dick Whittington Studio, history, Links, Photography, tires1 Comment

Back when Los Angeles was younger, at the dawn of the automobile age after World War I, tires, gasoline and cars were sold in buildings and displayed in a manner befitting a jewelry store.

Among the rich archives of the USC Digital Library, are photographs of local businesses, who put extraordinary artistry into their signage and architecture to draw in customers, while projecting an image of modernity attractive to the growing city.

Many of these photos come from the Dick Whittington Studio.

Greedy Developers: Los Angeles in the 1920s.

September 24, 2016Posted in Links, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged 1920s, Architecture, Greedy Developers, Links, Out of scale, Overdevelopment, USC3 Comments

dw-1926-611-19-5819-x2 — Completely out-of-scale building towers over one story house next door.

dw-1926-611-19-5809-x2 — In a neighborhood of single family homes, a greedy developer built this apartment populated by people who selfishly can afford to live here.

dw-1930-03-17-14510-x2 — A true monstrosity, more appropriate for Manhattan than Los Angeles.

dw-1926-611-19-5808-x2 — A towering colossus of land exploitation without any surface parking lots.

dw-1926-611-19-5806-xl — Disguising something as European does not hide that this enormous building is completely out of scale with the little houses only a block away.

dw-1926-611-19-5804-xl — Neighborhood Council should sue to take down this enormous theater whose builder put it right on the street without any parking lot. Sign is too bright and too big and disturbing to spotted frogs who live in the park across the street.

All photos from the Whittington Gallery at USC Digital Archives.

Dreaming of Exile

April 25, 2016April 25, 2016Posted in LinksTagged Architecture, Effie, Essay, Exile, Gateways, Hidden, Lakeshore, Photos, Silverlake, trail2 Comments

Even if you have given up on LA, cursed its tackiness, screamed at its traffic, revolted from its inanities, choked on its air and dreamed of exile from its toxicities, you might be seduced on Sunday afternoon, as I was yesterday, by a place hidden away that seems like a small town in the Poconos.

I accompanied a friend on an errand. She manages properties, and was cleaning up after renters at a small house on a street called Lake Shore Avenue.

East of Glendale Blvd, south of the 2, west of Elysian Park, it sits snuggly into a hill that blocks the setting sun. Shady, built with little bungalows, it bisects, at Effie, an institution: Gateways Hospital and Community Mental Health Center.

A mid-century sign sits at the entrance to the facility.

Egregious, garishly lettered in big vertical typeface, it announces, creepily, its authoritative medicinal mission (rehabilitation, research, hospital) as if they were triple feature films from the 50s like “I Want to Live”, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “The Blob.”

We parked on Effie and looked ahead at a wide dirt path climbing up a steep hill where nets were laid down to trap water and debris that may pour down here fiercely.

My friend went to work on her property, and I climbed up the trail.

Around me were dried, parched grasses, the remnants of homeless blankets and bags of clothes, and, at the top of the hill, a stucco shack of a house, with a pitted asphalt driveway, and a wooden deck. It was guarded by ziggurat cinder block walls and reinforced steel window bars.

The dilapidated home was a find, unusual in its state of disrepair. For we live in a city of brutally competitive property investment, where every top elevation has been captured by someone richer. This mountain hideaway lacked the hidden cameras, the expensive cars, the pool, and the pretense to architecture. An eccentric hermit might inhabit it.

Moby if he had no money might live here.

Its views stretched out to Silverlake, downtown, and tall radio towers across the way. Yet it was an uneasy isolation. It felt dangerous, not reassuring.

Bucolic and rustic in Los Angeles never exists in purity.

Helicopters and sirens in the distance, the threat of fire, the presence of people without homes, the surprise of events that might end our life erupting from the deepest earth, or from a violent intrusion through an open window. These are the sights, sounds and conjurations of the imagination haunting happy moments.

That is how that house and hill felt.

Back down on Lake Shore Avenue I walked past institutional houses, illuminated by industrial floodlights, set along the street, behind gates. Two older men were on the stoop of one place, smoking. They nodded to me and I waved back.

Outside the property of Gateways, dominating the bright part of the hill on Lake Shore Avenue, was a tall, two-toned, red and white brick house looming over a row of old garages. Homely, graceless, squinting in the sun, it refuted the lovely myth that everything historic is charming. The white “sanitary” bricks, glossy and washable, were often used in the 1920s on building facades for bakeries and cleaners.

A small signifier of community well-being, a landscaped traffic circle, ended my walk up Lake Shore.

That idea that a street could come together in a circle, unified by architecture, common purpose, cafes and conversation, there was something of that here, but I saw no other pedestrians. The only movement was daylight in retreat, shadows moving over the street.

After walking around, I came back to my friend’s property and went inside. We stacked dishes in the dishwasher, carried out bags of food from the refrigerator, and a basket of dirty towels. She turned on the alarm and locked the door. We got in the car and left to return to the real city beyond.

Visit to a Dying Bridge

February 8, 2016February 9, 2016Posted in History, Links, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged 6th St. Bridge, demolition, LinksLeave a comment

The sun was out, the winds were blowing, the air was dry and we drove over in the Super Bowl ghosted city to see the 6th Street Bridge, an 85-year-old patient whose arms and legs still spanned the Los Angeles River, but whose execution was now under way in Boyle Heights.

We parked on the west side of the bridge next to steel gates and barbed wires. Homeless people still gathered in the shadows under the arches. A lone woman on a bicycle pedaled up and shot some photographs; as did an old man in a bright yellow Porsche convertible who sat in his car and then drove off.

Fascinating to me, even after 21 years in Los Angeles, is how civic grandeur and public spaces are degraded and neglected. I grew up in Chicago, where Buckingham Fountain, Grant Park, the Lakefront, Soldiers Field, the Field Museum, and Water Tower were proudly shown off and cared for. They left an impression on a small child. We drove downtown to admire our city, not run from it in fear and revulsion.

What is one to make of the disrespected and defiled 6th Street Bridge with its decapitated light posts, the arches sitting in mountains of trash, the human beings laying underneath the noble, carved, Art Moderne piers? Where does 3,500 feet of concrete, erected in the grandest and most elegant way, where does it go?

Some who spoke of the life of the condemned bridge talked about movies that were filmed here. Is nothing real or important unless it starred in a film? Does Los Angeles exist as an actual city or is it only a stage set whose humanity only matters when it is on celluloid? For all of the 85 years that the bridge sat in a sea of defiled urbanity did it only fulfill its importance when fakery was filmed around and on it? Is that why the exploits of the Kardashians are so valued, but thousands who set up mattresses under bridges in our city are ignored and forgotten?

One has heard from the leaders in Los Angeles, recently, that “working class Boyle Heights” and the new “Arts District” will mutually benefit from a new $428 million dollar bridge designed and constructed in modernistic form.

But that is what they always say, these politicians and people in power, the ones who spend hundreds of millions, and, in the end, where are the human spaces, the parks, the housing, the stores, the markets, the schools, the health care, all those markers of civilization?

If life doesn’t exist under the 6th St. Bridge, then no bridge itself is capable of conceiving the rebirth of a neighborhood. It takes a village, as some obscure old woman once said.

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