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You can’t find a small cafe serving zuppa di pesce or even order a glass of Valpolicella in Van Nuys’ Little Italy, but you will find “Luigi’s Tailoring” next door to “Giovanni Barber Shop” in this quaint little section of Sylvan Street across from the Van Nuys Civic Center.

Luigi Della Ripa showed me a panoramic photo of “downtown” Van Nuys in 1911, when there were just a few buildings dotting an otherwise empty vista. Luigi has been in his shop since the mid 1960’s, right next door to barber friend Giovanni Caputo. The changes in Van Nuys have been lots of bad and lots of good. The crime and pawn shops came in, along with the burglars and abandoned stores.

But now the revitalized Van Nuys Civic Center and the Busway have brought a fresher and more optimistic feeling to the area. The shops where Giovanni and Luigi practice their crafts are a throwback to a time when Van Nuys served as a meeting place and town center of the San Fernando Valley. There is new paint on the facades, and when these old guys retire, it may be that old Van Nuys will be ready for a new rebirth.

“Wad” who often comments on this blog, has written a factual and interesting account of his ride on the new Rapid Bus 734 that travels the Sepulveda Route between Sylmar (?) and Sherman Oaks (?).

Tragically, one has to be a “nerd” to even understand or be aware of the rapid transit alternatives in Los Angeles. Wad’s admirable and even arcane knowledge of the bus system in LA is something that many of us do not know. But highly respect.

Kevin Roderick of LA OBSERVED recently wrote that “tales about riding Metro Rail and buses make up a growing subset of the L.A. blogosphere.” But are there more writers than riders on our buses and trains?! Of course not, it just seems that way in what Arianna Huffington might term “La Blogosphere”.

With all the literate commentary out there concerning our public transport system, why do most of us know more about where Nick Lachey ate last night than how to get on a bus and ride from Studio City to Hollywood?

Photo: North Hollywood houses awaiting demolition.

Peter McFerrin, to quote his own description, “is a PhD student in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California, where he studies transportation policy. A native of Illinois, he currently lives in the Mar Vista district of Los Angeles. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a registered Democrat, and a firm believer that the best tacos are on wheels.”

He is also the publisher of a fascinating new blog, “Clueless and Slightly Slack” which expounds on his own interests in urban neighborhoods. He has photo essays on Carthay Circle, Hancock Park and Koreatown.

He thinks in economic rather than purely aesthetic ways about how to solve LA’s housing shortage: “Bernard Parks would have been a terrible mayor, but he was the only one running who had the right idea about the city’s housing affordability crisis. Rather than creating all sorts of gimmicky, kickback-laden programs like Antonio Villaraigosa’s affordable housing trust fund, Parks proposed just “glutting the market” to drive down occupancy rates (currently somewhere between 98 and 99 percent). First-year microeconomics teaches that it’s much less costly to simply remove constraints on supply than to engage in subsidization, let alone impose price controls.”

Surpisingly he is sympathetic to families who buy small homes, and tear them down to build something better:

“A family that drops half a million dollars on a piece of land probably isn’t going to want to live in a cramped, thin-walled, low-ceilinged house with ancient fixtures and inadequate storage space, regardless of the size of the backyard. Sometimes, renovation can address these problems, but often there just isn’t a whole lot that can be done to make a small postwar tract house fit modern demands. Nobody should be surprised that, especially in greater Los Angeles, much of the housing stock built between the late ’30s and the early ’60s is wholly inadequate for contemporary buyers.”

He believes that LA should rezone many of its R1 single family lots as R2 to allow duplexes, triplexes and multi-house lots. Yet this solution might destroy some of the loveliest areas of LA like old Studio City and Hancock Park. North Hollywood has already been ruined by thoughtless up-zoning.

HIVN believes that LA should rezone the single story retail stores along its boulevards, to build residential housing over shops. We need to also pursue imaginative re-uses of industrial lands to integrate housing with warehouses in the NE San Fernando Valley.

Photos: Jim Frazier

General Motors has jealously watched the revived Ford Mustang’s success and is planning its own resurrection of the Camaro for 2007.

Yet looking at the Mustang, and most cars on the road today, there is something missing. From the Toyota Camry to the Audi Q7, these cars are eons more technologically advanced than the ones we drove 40 or 50 years ago. Yet in personality, it is really difficult to distinguish between the thousands of bland, homogenized and engineered vehicles that clog our roads today.

Growing up in Chicago, I still have memories of the cars that our neighbors drove. There was red haired Mrs. Marx in her gold Sedan de Ville convertible driving to the race track in Arlington Heights. Jerry LaPak on Sunday afternoon, washing his black 1963 Fleetwood on his driveway. The Sanders had the 1964 Black GTO, Eli Graubart had his 1963 Sedan de Ville green convertible, the oddball Weiss family drove a 1970 Audi, the Bergers had a 1968 Ford Station Wagon, Henry Gurrentz had the 1976 Eldorado Convertible. Mrs. Haggard Johnson parked her blue, two door, Ford Maverick in the driveway and rarely drove. We had the 1966 Pontiac Catalina that always died in the bitter Chicago winter and later on we bought the 1972 green Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible.

Every year the cars were significantly different than the year before, and they didn’t look at all like each other. An Oldsmobile didn’t look like a Mercedes, and there were no Lexus, Acura or Hyundai around.

Now I ask my readers: who can picture a 1999 Toyota Camry as compared to a 2005 Toyota Camry? Who knows what a Dodge Caliber looks like? How about the Hyundai Elantra? When the stylists do take charge, they come up with clumsy ideas such as the Cadillac.

The 2006 Cadillacs have monstrously oversized front headlights that pair up with a Godzilla like grill for an aggressively ugly style. Yet the macho posturing is strangely mute. There is no whimsy or artistry, chrome, fins or ornamentation that once marked the Cadillac. Every edge, from the lights to the windows to the hood to the trunk, is sliced straight. What sex appeal is there in straight lines? Have you ever wanted to make love to someone with a body of right angles?

[“Look at that ass, it’s like a floor tile!”]

Detroit has become as fearful as a TV development exec. Imitation, of Japan and Germany, with their “superior engineering” is driving the look of American cars. They are pretending to be those bland, scientific and quiet Teutonic and Asian machines.

But we Americans are loud and brash and we like to roar when we have fun. Why can’t our cars return to the time when showing off was just as important as fitting in?

Detroit needs to grow up and act childish again.

I am thrilled that they are finally having a retrospective of his work.

Here are some quotes from his 1980 autobiography, “Einfache Weisen” (Simple Ways):

“Architecture begins with a line”

“A home should be created by one for all”

“Mr. Lu gave me a deposit and I gave him an idea”

“Neutra broke the rules but I stole the baton”

A home construction worker, on the 5300 Block of Woodman, was buried in a collapsed trench today as he was constructing a sanitary sewer line. The LAFD arrived on the scene at 9:55am and immediately began a rescue. The victim was buried at a 45 degree angle, with only his head above soil. He was removed, from under hundreds of pounds of wet dirt, and taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The Fire Department blog explains it in detail.

Here is a Flickr photo set of the rescue.