Erwin at Sepulveda, Metro Orange Line Parking Lot.
When the Metro Orange Line opened in October 2005, it was a stunningly different type of transport system which combined a bus only road with a landscaped bike path that ran alongside. It cost about $325 million.
It connected North Hollywood with Woodland Hills, and eventually carried over 30,000 riders a day. Since 2015, due to Uber and Lyft, ridership has fallen to about 22,000 a day.
Hundreds of homeless encampments have sprung up on the bike trail.
But Metro forges ahead!
There are plans to create gated crossings at intersections to speed up bus travel. There are long-term ideas to convert the entire system to light rail and also build elevated bridges over Van Nuys Boulevard and Sepulveda.
In Van Nuys, at Sepulveda and Erwin (north of Oxnard), there is a car parking lot for the Orange Line Metro riders. It is over 526,000 square feet, paved in asphalt, planted with trees and shrubs, and comprises over 12 acres.
Today, over 2/3 of it is used as an outdoor storage lot for Keyes Auto.
Red area is the parking lot of the Orange Line. It is now used predominately to store autos from Keyes Audi. (Source: ZIMAS)
The Sepuvleda/Erwin site is “Exhibit A” in the DNA of Los Angeles, because the right thing to do would be constructing 10-20 story apartments along the public transit route and creating incentives for residents to ride buses, take trains and use bikes for daily commuting.
Singapore Housing Estate with parks and nearby public transportation.
If LA were Singapore, Tokyo or Toronto we would do that.
Instead our city languishes and fights and wishes to preserve a 1950s idea of everyone going somewhere by car.
And thousands of new cars are lovingly housed on land paid for by public taxes which should be used as housing and parks for the greater good of this city.
Nothing beneficial for Los Angeles ever happens overnight. It takes years of planning and legal battles, for example, to build assisted or low cost housing, or parks.
One can imagine the fury and fear that might arise if a 12- acre park and housing development were planned on this parking lot ranch.
Imaginery view from Sepulveda and Erwin looking west. In reality, Singapore.
What, by miracle of God, might be possible here in terms of a park or high-rise group of apartments, placed near the bus line, with a buffer of trees, water features, and gardens between the new residential city and the single-family houses to the north of the site?
Yet here, alongside a public transit route, taxpayer funded Metro Los Angeles chooses to rent its land for an auto dealership. How does that benefit the surrounding residents?
For people who are obsessed with traffic, imagine that thousands of vehicles are parked here ready to be turned on and put onto the roads. How does that feel Van Nuys?
If the new planned housing estate were policed, regulated, secure, and it also provided a new park wouldn’t that be an improvement?
Automobiles travel in both directions on Sepulveda Boulevard where it crosses Saticoy Street in Van Nuys; direction shown is unknown. A billboard advertises Signal Gas, pumped next door at the service station (left).
Six decades or more along Sepulveda Bl in Van Nuys, life was very different than today.
People conducted all their daily activities, from work to shopping, in automobiles. They were frustrated by traffic, and there were many accidents. This started early in the morning, before sunrise, and continued long after dark, in a slow, honking, and impatient parade of tens of thousands of trucks, cars and buses.
Photograph caption dated January 5, 1961 reads, “This modern supermarket at the corner of Sepulveda and Victory boulevards in Van Nuys is the latest addition to the expanding Dale’s Market chain which now operates 10 stores in the Valley.” (LAPL)
The buildings along Sepulveda were a motley, junky collection of fast food, auto repair, filling stations, car washes, cheap motels, hardware, liquor and supermarket businesses dropped down between billboards and wooden power poles.
There was nowhere that was pleasant, in the sense of a community, with proper landscaping, trees, amenities, or aesthetic zoning regulating signs or advertising.
There was no trace of grace, of history, of the old Spanish missions, the orange and walnut groves, the spectacular trees, flowers, and natural beauty that characterized California. Everything was garish, commercial, toxic, selling everything that polluted and sickened human beings in a circus of raucous, blind, aggressive hucksterism.
Photograph caption dated March 9, 1959 reads, “Hub Furniture Stores newest location on Sepulveda and Nordhoff in Van Nuys marks the 14th Hub Store in the greater Los Angeles area. March 14 is the opening day.”Photograph caption dated March 3, 1961 reads, “Sherman Way and Sepulveda.” This intersection tied with Century and Airport boulevards for fifth worst intersection, each with 20 accidents in 1959.;
Even with many new, lovely ranch homes, built after the war, on the residential blocks nearby, the general appearance of Sepulveda was ratty, unappealing, low class and frightening.
Mr. and Mrs. Audie Murphy and son, 6233 Orion Ave. Van Nuys, CA, 1953
Holdups at liquor stores, kidnappings, harassment of women by men driving past, littering, dumping, intoxicated drivers; in every respect related to civilized life, mid-20thCentury Sepulveda Bl. was so very different than today.
The only thing that remains the same is the presence of openly gay events, something that was even advertised on a sign in 1954.
Photograph caption dated October 20, 1954 reads “‘Gay Ninety Days’ at Builders Emporium, Van Nuys, is opened by Victor M. Carter, at driver’s seat of early-day Cadillac, firm’s president. Featuring month-long event is ‘good old fashioned prices,’ bearded salesmen, and 5,000 derbies to be given customers. In picture, left to right, are Jay Delia, Mel Goodman, Carter, Margaret Porth, Marthie Ferderer, Helen Ireland, George Blum and Lou Johnson.”
Over the weekend, I was invited to a wake held in a family home somewhere up high in the hills of Sherman Oaks.
The house was set at the end of an ascending private driveway.
But it was not an exclusive house, the intimidating kind we imagine these days. I saw no cameras or threatening signs. There was no menace, only hugs and handshakes.
It was a 1952 ranch, un-gated, welcomingly decrepit, covered in shingles, set atop a ridge overlooking The San Fernando Valley, and a view to a vast, wild nature preserve. It was, indeed, charming, an adjective now banished from most residential dwellings in Los Angeles.
Inside was a dark, sprawling, old house with mourners, family members and friends, a table set with food, and more people sitting out on a flagstone patio, on plastic chairs, or, around the corner, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A lazy hammock sat in a dirt yard under many trees; a yard that lead up into a steep trail, also a part of the property, with mature oaks and wild grasses and an open steel trash can with discarded bottles and cans.
Back inside the house, I walked into the kitchen, still furnished with the original knotty pine cabinets, and a 1970s Tiffany lamp that hung over a small breakfast nook.
There was a pamphlet on a table printed for the deceased, Angelica, who was born May 14, 1948 and died March 25, 2019 leaving behind a husband and two grown sons.
A photo of her, taken perhaps in the early 1970s, when she was about 25, showed a radiant, dark-haired woman.
I remarked to one guest that I expected young Natalie Wood, circa 1955, to walk out and greet us. Then, overhearing me, a very old man with a hearing aid, white-haired and frail, spoke up.
“I dated Natalie Wood,” he said.
He went on to talk about his one date with the young actress. He called her home the next week to take her out again. But her mother said her daughter “was out with Jimmy.”
And that was the end of a beautiful friendship.
I spoke again with the widower, smartly dressed in an old, well-made, V-neck cashmere sweater, in a heft and weight no longer made, and I offered my condolences.
Unsure of where to go, I wandered out into a tool shed in a room neither indoor nor outdoor. Decades of equipment was hung on walls, piled up on tables, and stacked six or seven feet deep. There was multiples of everything: clippers and rakes, ladders and screwdrivers, hammers and spray cans.
This was a house where you might have gone to a wild high school party one weekend at 16 or 17. There would have been 50 or 100 people, a live band playing, kegs of beer, people sneaking off into dark trails or behind closed doors to get high or get off. Vomiting, burgling, breaking, burning, the party would have ended with police cars, screaming parents and fistfights.
Our California Dream, a nostalgia for it, is a fantasy so intoxicating and so mesmerizing that we lust for it, we fight for it, and are consumed with getting it, but yet we must not devour it all at once, for it will eventually devour us.
How I miss those thrilling years I never had here.
Two days ago, I was wandering here, around the California I never knew, but the one that existed until very recently, a place where people never threw anything away, a region where houses were intertwined with wild nature, a state of life where people were high, intoxicated, sensual, creative, and building; an industrious land where leisure was work and work was leisure and no grown man ever outgrew childhood, happiness was just one hit song away, and every night at six a cold bottle of Chablis was uncorked.
Two days ago, Sunday, I took a platonic liking to a (middle-aged, how I hate that word) woman who looked like she was born inside a VW van, grew up in Malibu, and went to school barefoot near a rocky stream. She had the glazed look of someone who had too many compliments and too much stimuli thrown at her, so she withdrew, behind vagueness, to a guarded, opaque sensitivity in an emotional jewel-box.
I took her photo in the little hallway behind the kitchen. She was one of the cousins.
Two days ago, I stopped to sit down with those not so young, boyish guys drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. My plastic chair kept bending, like it was about to snap, so I got up and went out to the driveway, and started to say good-bye to the host. We hugged and promised to get together soon.
But that house, a type marked for extinction, built for $16,000, purchased for $88,000, it haunts me.
A verdant, natural, nestling, cozy refuge from the city, destined for the bulldozer and the investor. Why can’t it just stay the way it is? Why must people die? And why must their houses, their stories and their hearts fall into oblivion?
Rise up dead people and sing again!
Last Sunday, up on Marble Drive, I was somewhere special. I met a ruined beauty still singing the old songs. She sang for me too, and I listened. And I hope to go back soon to hear her sing again.
On Architizer, an architectural website, I found a photo and description of a residential/commercial development built in Mountain Brook, AL in 2014.
Pleasant, as all ideal architectural plans and photos are.
But it also fired up an idea…
Why couldn’t buildings like this go on the NW corner of Van Nuys Bl. and Oxnard St.?
Where currently there is a large, unoccupied glass building that once housed a car dealer (what else?) it is now a yawningly empty welcome to the alleged business and government district of old Van Nuys.
The Mountain Brook, AL buildings (architects: Wakefield Beasley & Associates) anchor the street with ground floor shops, landscaping, sidewalks, trees and diagonal parking. They invite people to walk and to park in front.
276 apartments are built above the stores, with one, two and three-bedroom plans, and are spread between the structures. Various modern amenities, including fitness centers, parks, yoga and meditation areas, wifi, are added to entice renters.
What is it that makes this type of building a dream and not a reality on the main street of Van Nuys? Why, in a city starved for housing, is there not a furious effort by Councilwoman Nury Martinez and the City of Los Angeles to rev up the pace and quality of apartment construction?
Stylistically, the traditional look of this building would probably elicit snickers from the Christopher Hawthorne/Frances Anderson crowd. It is much too literal and polite and pseudo-historic for a cult which takes its abstract, contorted meals at Frank Gehry’s feet.
Frank Gehryism
But Van Nuys is starved for anything that can bring us up from the homeless, trashy, neglected place we are today. An above-average, but suitable design such as the one from Mountain Brook, AL is better than shopping carts full of garbage and people sleeping in cars.
It would work because it cares about the urban context around it.
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.
Here in Van Nuys 
You must be logged in to post a comment.