Category: Uncategorized

Our gardeners, who normally cut the grass and blow the leaves on Wednesday, were unable to do so last week, so they showed up early Thanksgiving morning to complete their work. This prompted a neighbor, who operates a one man, illegal carpentry shop in his detached garage, to call up and start screaming about “your god-damned gardeners and their leaf blowers working on a holiday!”

Though I find his self-righteousness about noise to be hilarious, considering he covertly works with high pitched saws and drills and has never once heard us complain, I must agree that the leaf blower and lawn mower is an abundantly annoying suburban thing.

There are many noise complaints that I have about my neighborhood: police, ambulance and fire vehicles; LAPD helicopters, the constant low groan of the 405 freeway, boom box car stereos, barking dogs, and jet airplanes— all contribute to a lower quality of life.

But some of the noise belongs to devices and systems that benefit me. If the police get to a crime faster, if the ambulance arrives to save my life seconds earlier, if the jet plane brings me home to New Jersey in five hours, then I am better off. The dog who barks away burglars and the leaf blower that keeps the neighborhood looking cleaner and property values higher…These are trade offs for a better way of life.

I just wish I could convince myself of that when I’m awakened at 4am by a copter buzzing my neighborhood.

Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, 7 p.m. Dec. 14 in Room 1-B at the Marvin Braude Constituents Service Center, 6262 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys. Call (818) 908-1840.

We Americans are privileged to live a country where we can speak openly to government officials and if enough of us show up to voice our complaints, things do change.

From the LA Daily News:

“Study leads to preservation zone
By Rick Orlov, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

A landmark Van Nuys neighborhood known for its unique homes has become the first area in the San Fernando Valley to receive protection against new development.

The Los Angeles City Council, after years of study, agreed this week to create a Historic Overlay Protection Zone for the area around the Van Nuys Civic Center.

“We’ve been trying to get this through from before I came on council,” Councilman Tony Cardenas, who took over the effort started by former Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, said Friday.

“This is a special neighborhood and it will give residents the protections they want and also preserve an area that is important to the city.”

With the designation, a board will be created to oversee renovations, tear-downs and replacements of any of the homes, which include a mixture of bungalows, Craftsman and other styles.

Residents are protective of their neighborhood and want to see it remain as it was developed nearly 80 years ago.

Cardenas said there were only a handful of residents concerned about the impact such a designation would have on their ability to sell their homes in the future.

“We know there are some people with questions and who are upset and we hope to show them they don’t have to worry about it,” said Cardenas, whose district encompasses the proposed historic zone and who used to sell real estate in Van Nuys.

Jamie Cordaro, president of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, said his group supported the designation.

“As you go through some of these neighborhoods, you begin to appreciate the care people have for the homes and it would be a shame to see these neighborhoods torn down to make room for two- and three-story mansions,” Cordaro said.

“This gives a sense of history to how the city developed and it’s important to send a message we care about our neighborhoods.”

The official designation could pave the way for similar efforts in several other areas of the Valley that have expressed interest in having similar zones, including the Balboa Highlands in Granada Hills and Stonehurst in Shadow Hills.”

Rick Orlov, (213) 978-0390rick.orlov@dailynews.com

The HUMMER a.k.a. the “Iceberg Melter” ,has opened up glamorous new headquarters on Van Nuys Boulevard. Metal clad and brightly lit, the showroom is a welcome architectural addition to this area.

But the Hummer itself, a grossly aggressive monster of the road which gulps gasoline like an alcoholic in a beer garden, is not welcome. To think that in the age of terror, there are Americans who willingly finance Al Queda by driving this obese SUV, is disturbing. As the Earth warms up and the oceans rise, these Hummers are like a million little bullets in the planet Earth’s coffin.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), was a Federal agency created during the Great Depression to provide work for the unemployed. Workshops and theater companies produced plays. Public buildings were painted with magnificent murals. Parks and trails were constructed. A few such legendary names as Dorothea Lange, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Orson Welles and Sidney Lumet were given their start in the programs of the WPA.

Here in Los Angeles, the USC DIgital Archive has an astounding collection of color illustrated land maps which the WPA created from 1933-1939. 460 square miles were covered and the descriptions covered every type of possible land use in the 1930’s:

” 9 different types of farming (mixed, livestock, field crops, row crops, bush fruits, orchard, nursery, woodland, farming); Vacant; 16 residential classifications (broadly grouped as: single family residential; multiple residential (2 to 4 families); unlimited multiple residential (i.e. hotels, boarding houses, chicken or rabbit ranches, etc.)); Institutional; Commercial (31 classifications: i.e. undertakers, theaters, restaurants, etc.); Industry, utilities, recreational, agricultural, open uses, problem uses, combined uses, electric railway, steam railway; Manufacturing (30 classifications: i.e. cannery, oil well supply, ice manufacturing, motion picture studio, etc.)”

The above map shows Van Nuys. It is bounded by Oxnard on the South, Sepulveda to the West, Van Owen on the North and Van Nuys Boulevard to East. Most of the area to the west of Van Nuys Boulevard was agricultural. The red areas are commercial, the green ones are either farming or ranching, and the purple horizontal line is the Southern Pacific– which is now the MTA’s Orange Line “Busway”.

Click on the title above which links to the USC WPA website.

I went to the 1pm meeting of the LA Planning Board in Van Nuys yesterday as they took up the matter of the sub-division of 15137 Gilmore. They will be building two homes, whose illustrations show them as one story ranches. There was one other person there named Katherine, who lives next door, and we both could find nothing to object to. These days, architectural mediocrity is something to be welcomed as long as it is not a McMansion.

However, I stood up and told the sewer, fire, engineering, lighting and zoning board members about the poor condition of Columbus Avenue north of Victory. I talked about the “illegal” sub-division of Roya Street (where three homes and a street have been jammed into an 18,000 square feet lot that backs up to the trash area of the Chinese market on Sepulveda). I also spoke up about the continuing leak of water on Columbus, the lack of sidewalks and curbs and the general bad condition of the roadway. They all took notes and tape recorded me…. so maybe this will help.

Zoning boards work off paper plans and follow rules that are mathematical but frequently illogical. We all know that Los Angeles is oftentimes ugly and hideously planned, so how is it that it is also the most “planned” city in the world? On paper it looks OK to jam 36 homes into a hillside in Woodland Hills, but when that development is completed, the results will be wall to wall garage doors with sun baked asphalt and clone housing. In Bel Air, one developer is planning to build four houses on four acres, and there were longtime residents there who also objected to the deforestation and destruction of the natural environment.

Is there also a way to stop the development of undeveloped land? I mean that there are literally thousands of one story buildings in Los Angeles which could be turned into multi-story residences with walking and public transportation as a way of life. We have freeways and homes and malls stretching from Joshua Tree to Santa Monica from Ventura down to National City at the Mexican border. Orange County has barely an orange tree left to pick. Can’t we concentrate our new homes in walking districts and start building up rather than out?

At the meeting yesterday, I also asked why Gilmore St (between Kester and Columbus) had new sidewalks but nobody had bothered to plant trees. Katherine agreed that the street looks bad because there is no consistency in the foliage. Well we are getting somewhere, we just need to work on:

Guns
Graffitti
Junk trucks
Loud music
Barking Dogs
Litter
Prostitution
Smog
Illegal immigration
Billboards
Traffic
Sprawl