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September 6th Through the Years.
Let us pick one day off the calendar and compare the weather in Los Angeles on September 6th for every ten years since 1950. It’s hot today, (nearly 100 in Van Nuys) and we’ve had days in the last week when it was 106, 110, 113 and only dropped below 90 well after midnight. All of…
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Apartments Over Ground Floor Stores: January 1929
In the January 1929 Architectural Record are these photos of a retail/residential development in Evanston, IL on the corner of Chicago and Grove. This is exactly what they should be building on the corner of Vanowen and Van Nuys Blvd.
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Where Have All the People Gone?
It has been some two and a half years since the pandemic began, and somehow it is sort of (not) over. In that time, since March 2020, America has been in a slow-motion meltdown, proceeding quickly, an epoch unlike any other with riots, lockdowns, and a lunatic who would not and will not accept that he…
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Poppy Days and other festivities.
Today, I came across this colorful poster advertising Poppy Day at Van Nuys, Saturday, April 12, 1913. For fifty cents, round trip, you could board a Pacific Electric streetcar and ride from downtown to the new community of Van Nuys, where developer and sales manager, WP Whitsett, promised frolicking amongst the thousands of beautiful, golden poppies,…
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Myrna Loy and Arthur Hornblow, Jr.’s “Lime Orchard” Home 1938
The Criterion Channel is showcasing the actress Myrna Loy (1905-1993) in its August line-up. One of the most popular and lauded performers of the 1930s and 40s, Ms. Loy was famous as the co-star of “The Thin Man” films with William Powell, characters who solved crimes in the well-dressed and liquored penthouses of Manhattan. She was adept…
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Portraits of Dovid K. and “Kester Ridge.”
Actor Dovid K. was raised in Los Angeles, and he came over to our neighborhood last week for some agency photos. The houses in our area (Victory/Kester/Columbus/Vanowen) were built in the 1950s, and due to the modesty of the neighborhood, many look roughly the same. There are the criss-crossed windows, the board and batten siding,…
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Here in Van Nuys 