“6500 Sepulveda” – Here in Van Nuys

6500 Sepulveda Bl., a 160-unit rental apartment complex, built and managed by IMT Residential, is nearing completion.

Located about a block north of Victory Bl. it’s right next to the 99 Ranch Market.

This one-acre lot once held the notorious Voyager Motel (1965-2016), a working laboratory of prostitution. It also, incongruously, was where we went to vote.

The Voyager, abandoned and empty, was destroyed in a massive fire on February 13, 2016. Inexplicably, it caught fire just as it became hugely desirable for a large development. “Fire Party”, a post in this blog, captured the gleeful moment it burned.

The Voyager in 2015.

New construction of the IMT building began in 2017 and computer renderings were stamped out soon after.

There are some joyous and glorious illustrations of the new apartment building, at dusk, illuminated against the violet sky. Eight black blocks are set against a white background with a butterfly angled top. Palm trees are planted to provide shade for mosquitos.

Sepulveda has just been hosed down and glistens. And some eleven people are out strolling along the boulevard, including a woman, across the street, holding a purse stylishly embossed with the word “Paris.” Other pedestrians are walking, jogging, or pushing a baby carriage. A person unfamiliar with this location might think they are viewing an exclusive section of Stockholm, Sweden.

Rendering

I walked past the near completed apartment yesterday afternoon, and shot some photos of the hot, bright, Sunday afternoon, daylight reality of the surroundings.

In person, you pass numerous homeless men and women who reside all around, setting up sofas and tables to make rooms which can be dismantled and carted around in minutes. The environment is beyond redemption: billboards, overhead power lines, muffler shops, car washes, trash, debris, illegal dumping, speeding cars, massage parlors, Carls Jr., El Pollo Loco, and that ever present sewage smell from the water treatment plant in Balboa Park.

Homeless Room: Signature Plaza, Victory near Sepulveda.

A few hundred feet to the west is Midvale Estates, with spacious ranch houses, designer kitchens, hot tubs, lush swimming pools, gated properties, guest houses, circular driveways, landscaped herb gardens, and media rooms. This is their village, their Larchmont, their Mayberry. How and why the finest and grossest co-exist, is perhaps a topic for psychiatrists who study the psychology of cognitive dissonance.

Back on Sepulveda, across from 6500 , there are more discarded beer bottles on the median than people on the street. An upturned coffee table with four legs in the air looks like it is ready for a good time. This dried up dump runs alongside many apartments, where owners, managers and residents either don’t care or don’t act to clean up the blight.

All is not gloom.

One cannot deny that the food offerings are many and varied and include an Asian market, several Vietnamese restaurants. And on many nights, taco stands, like streetwalkers, materialize along the street.

Costco, Wendy’s, Sam Woo, Perfect Donuts, Subway, Lido Pizza, and Fatburger are within minutes of waddling distance, or accessible by scooter, Uber or bike. Just across Sepulveda, a chiropractor, a nail salon, laser hair removal, tax preparation, foot massage, hair salon, boba drinks, medical clinic and Fred Loya Insurance ensure that every critical need of life, death, or snack will be answered. And perhaps the best car wash ever, Bellagio, offers free vacuuming for all post-hydrated vehicles.

Estimated rents on the new apartments will start at perhaps $2,500 for the smallest apartment and quickly go up to $3,000 or even $4,000 a month. (I base these numbers on another IMT building in Van Nuys at 14500 Sherman Circle.)

If you are 23 and moving here from Kansas and want to get into production, and you find a PA job that pays $650 a week, your entire monthly gross income, before taxes, could pay for a tiny 1-bedroom apartment.

But things could improve. You might be 40, divorced, with two children, 7 and 11, and work as a nurse at Valley Pres., and earn $75,000 a year. And then you could afford a 1 bedroom apartment for you and your two kids.

On N. Sepulveda Blvd., between Victory and Vanowen, three apartment projects are now underway.

At 6500 N. Sepulveda, the former site of the notorious Voyager Motel is completely cleared. It was a crack-y whorehouse of ill repute. But also a patriotically, quadrennially decorated neighborhood-voting place. It burned in a gratifyingly appropriate fire earlier this year.

The 53,382 square foot parcel is now void of anything natural or man-made. It is simply flat, vast and magnificently empty. It emulates Van Nuys, as it might have been in the late 1940s, when tracts of orange and walnut groves were bulldozed to make way for ticky-tacky houses and shopping centers.

An apartment is planned for this site. I don’t remember its design, but if it follows any of the other projects in Van Nuys it will come by way of big and boxy, designed by big and boxy men, near architects who also moonlight as junior builders, and amateur bankers. It will be three or four stories tall and cover every square inch of land. Parking will be provided in excess of what is needed because the most important feature of any project in Los Angeles is how many parking spaces are provided. We need more parking. And just a reminder: Please make sure there is parking. Everywhere.

At 6536 N. Sepulveda, on 28,146 square feet, another apartment is going up. This is on that charming stretch of the street where new hookers walk and old couches come to die. Nightly helicopter patrols and pounding rap music enliven the air. A house was recently bulldozed here and gargantuan sized orange bulldozers now occupy the parcel.

At 6725 N. Sepulveda Blvd, on 30,647 square feet, between Archwood and Lemay, another flat and modern multi-family is planned. This was the site of the low self-esteem Ridge Motel, whose police reports and trashy clientele attested to a level of service usually seen only in jails.

The Ridge Motel, still a menace in its dying days, was kept behind security fencing, like King Kong in captivity. Its campy, catapulting roofline was somehow not in the sights of the LA Conservancy, whose members work tirelessly to preserve other historical buildings such as bowling alleys in the San Gabriel Valley.

The rose-bushed, picket-fenced hood of working moms and worked-out fathers bordering these three Sepulveda Blvd. properties are relieved that some badness (and discarded condoms) has departed. Some see the Day of the Bulldozer as Saul saw Jesus. Sin cleansed by salvation.

teardown-2 — 14827 Victory Blvd. 6/14/15 DEMOLISHED

teardown-1 — Vintage Auto Repair 6200 N. Kester Ave. 7/9/15 DEMOLISHED

581092427_9a5f27e470_o — The oldest house in Van Nuys, once owned by the original developer, WIlliam Paul Whitsett, is cleared for condominiums. 6/7/07 DEMOLISHED

Bulldozers are like angels in Van Nuys. They are sent by the Good Lord to flatten and knock down anything standing in the way of new banality. Even when they are used to destroy history, they have a mission. They will bring, don’t you know, “jobs” and “opportunities” and “housing” to the San Fernando Valley.

We see the stuccofied greatness of our environment every day, along Vanowen, Sepulveda, and Van Nuys Boulevard. Someone, somewhere is surely looking out over all this destruction and construction, making sure that the architecture and the design enhances our landscape.

Or perhaps nobody is in charge. And we live in a kind of roulette table of a city, spinning a wheel and hoping that the building that lands next to us is a winner.

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