Architecture – Page 11 – Here in Van Nuys

Obliterating the Past.

November 24, 2015November 24, 2015Posted in HistoryTagged "14242 Victory", "14827 Victory", "John Hendry", Architecture, Demoltion, history, San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys and the Valley, victory, VNCC6 Comments

Mr. John Hendry, resident of Van Nuys and board member of the VNCC, sent me an email alerting me to the impending demolition of two old houses on Victory east of Kester.

14827—33, one a stucco house with pillars, the other a Spanish style (1936) with an arched entrance, stand on the windswept wasteland of six-lane wide Victory Boulevard. Few who speed past here, munching frosted donuts in black spandex, bother to look at the two architecturally historic properties that soon will be bulldozed for a 9-unit apartment.

It turns out I had photographed the Spanish house a few years back. But more strangely, I realized that Mr. Hendry’s homes were not the soon-to-be-demolished ones on Victory I drove past a few days earlier.

I had seen two others with ropes and signs up the street.

At 14242, east of Tyrone, on the south side of Victory, was built in 1923, and is a unique looking structure with an arched center door entrance flanked by two symmetrically placed windows framed with decorative metal hoods and lattice work.

Sentimental, pinkish, feminine, lovely: it is also on Death Row. Next to the frilly lady is a plain blue and white frame house that looks like Dorothy Gale’s Kansas cottage. It shares the same fate as its neighbor.

92 years ago, Victory was a semi-rural street, narrow and flanked by pepper trees. It was a verdant and new settlement convenient to nearby government, post office, library, school and church. Streetcars made it possible to get to Hollywood or downtown.

In 2015, Van Nuys, willfully ignorant and wantonly wasteful, pursuant of profit and devoid of imagination, will sweep away even more of its history so that ugliness and plasticity can triumph.

We know what ISIS did to the ruins of Palmyra, Syria. And we rightly condemn it as the work of ignorant savages.

But what are we doing to our own history by our own actions or inactions?

Teardown on Kester

July 9, 2015July 13, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged apartments, Architecture, Delano, Development, Kester, Teardown, Van Nuys and the Valley1 Comment

Up until a few days ago, a blue and yellow auto repair building with Honda, Datsun and Toyota signage stood at Kester and Delano, a retro oddity imprisoned behind high, steel- spiked fencing.

Now the fence is down, and a bulldozer is making fast work tearing up the asphalt and the evidence of the existence of the former business.

What will go here? It seems likely that it will be another modern apartment, like the one just to the north of this lot. That makes sense, as this area is predominately residential, and the auto repair was the only one of its type north of Delano.

What is sadder is the probable fate of the mid-century building. It might, in a more imaginative use, be saved, and surrounded by gardens, trees and chairs, transformed into a cafe. It could, in this area, provide badly needed nature and respite from the violent cacophony of grit, crime, and poisonous fumes that surround it.

And if an apartment is built, let us hope it imitates the modernity, restraint and white crispness of the new units next to it. We have had enough of the multi-colored, brown and rust, red and orange, loopy, asymmetrical, glib, cartoonish and “fun” styles that have disfigured much of modern Los Angeles housing.

Even Kester, once on the critical list, seems to be turning a corner.

Sunday Morning Victory

June 14, 2015June 14, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Van Nuys Blvd.", Abandonment, Architecture, Desolation, Empty, Friar St., Poverty, San Fernando Valley, Storefronts, Vacancy, Van Nuys and the Valley, victory2 Comments

On a Sunday morning along Victory, east of Kester, the wide street is mostly empty.

It is also empty on Van Nuys Boulevard.

And the only person on Friar Street pushes a shopping cart with her belongings.

Under the dull fog, Van Nuys might be sleeping late.

Sleeping off Cervezas.

Many work on Sundays, but some do not.

Here are sidewalks without trees or humans.

Cars speed past the ghosts of late The Modern Era.

Where medical doctors practiced the most advanced medicine in 1960.

Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson were the Presidents.

And confident young builders hired talent young architects and erected thin paneled office buildings along thriving and newly widened Victory Boulevard.

Men worked at jobs back then. They wore suits.

Women smoked and wore high heels and lipstick and gloves and called themselves ladies.

And kids got in trouble, riding skateboards on the sidewalk or chewing gum in class.

It was a troubled time when blacks were called negroes.

And men were sent off to fight war in Vietnam.

But Van Nuys was still fine, still humming along: safe, secure and industrious.

We live in a rich nation. But all around us, people sleep on benches, and push their belongings in shopping carts.

People sleep on the sidewalk in front of the Chase Bank which has assets of $2.6 trillion and is the largest bank in the United States.

They are sleeping under the arches of the Marvin Braude Center, seat of the government of the City of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley.

And what you see today can break your heart.

A Quiet Enclave

May 22, 2015Posted in Architecture, Culture, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Mary Cardea", "Mayor Garcetti", Adirondack, Architecture, burbank, Charlie Beck, Chevelle, Equestrian, glendale, Griffith Park, LAPD, LosAngeles, Nury Martinez1 Comment

There’s a little area of Glendale or east Burbank or whatever you want to call it, a quiet neighborhood nestled into the confluence of Griffith Park, Victory Blvd, and Riverside Drive.

Old, snug, shaded, smelling of horse and hay, hit with the low, dull roar of the nearby 134, its winding houses and cottages are silent, eccentric, redolent of the old Western town, and completely out of tune with the flash, bang and sprawl city of Los Angeles.

I’m drawn back here. Especially on days like yesterday when the skies were dark, and gray clouds spread over the San Gabriels in a convincing display of more ominous meteorological conditions.

It was cool and autumnal when I turned up Winchester Avenue and parked near Riverside.

Hidden in the crook, under large trees, I found a sprawling, two-story high, hacienda apartment with a red tiled roof, white painted brick and a lush green lawn obliviously and joyfully unworried by drought. Adirondack chairs, twig chairs, plastic chairs, and a barbecue threw off an impression of eternal leisure and life without worry. A 1965 Turquoise Chevy Chevelle sat on the driveway: as if yesterday was still today and what was old was still young.

California, up until about 1960, built apartments that looked like well-to-do homes. You might live here poor, work as a waiter, scrape by on next-to-nothing, but you were surrounded and intoxicated with hope and dreams and a stage set of domestic happiness. Your aspirations were given to you the moment you arrived at Union Station. Only later did you realize they would be taken away.

The streets are clean in Burbank and Glendale, often spotless.

Coming from Van Nuys, which gives a social excuse to every ill around us, it is remarkable that Burbank and Glendale are run so seemingly well, with a presentable public face that is simultaneously progressive and traditional.

Streets are swept. Windows are washed. Alleys are paved. Walls have no tags or markings. There are no shopping carts of clothes tied to trees. There are no tent cities of the dispossessed under the overhangs of buildings.

And there are many small motels here. But I didn’t see prostitutes and pimps and hookers and johns and the sex community walking along Victory in Glendale.

Maybe the laws are tougher here. Maybe the police and the courts and the residents work together. Whatever they are doing here they are not doing on Sepulveda Boulevard.

At a public safety meeting last week in Van Nuys, held jointly by Councilwoman Nury Martinez and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, the issue of homelessness came up. Ms. Martinez spoke to a resident complaining that public sidewalks are now taken up with the private possessions of individuals. The Councilwoman said the courts had sided with the people who tie their shopping carts to trees and put up tents in the alley. “You can’t haul away their belongings.”

Legally, the illegal is legal.

And that is the way the new world works. What would have been unimaginable in 1945, 1955 or 1965 is tolerable today because everyone knows that toleration—not the law—is the highest principle liberalism can aspire to.

The inhumanity and injustice of allowing people to live on sidewalks and eat trash and set up tents anywhere, that must be tolerated because “we are understanding.”

Maybe it would be inconvenient for him, but Mayor Garcetti should allot some time in his schedule to drive way out to Glendale from LA City Hall and contemplate what they are doing that provides some space for civilization and contemplation that is missing in much of the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles.

Changing Kester

May 5, 2015May 6, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Ori B Fogel", "Part of Sherman Oaks", 14851 Victory, Architecture, Barry Pyle, Best Tires, Califa, City Council District #6, decay, Development, Elbar, Elbar Investments, John P Webster, Kester, Nury Martinez, Oxnard, VanNuys, William Mellenthin5 Comments

Kester Avenue, a narrow North/South artery between Sepulveda and Van Nuys Boulevards, is, north of Oxnard St., an industrial and immigrant arrival point, a place of car repair shops, small apartment buildings, bodegas and liquor stores.

Long neglected, like the rest of Van Nuys, it has undergone some positive change, small but not insignificant: apartment construction, remodeled houses, some cleaned up properties.

At 14801 Califa, (near Kester and Oxnard) a property investor has taken a large industrial park and transformed it into a modern post-industrial building. It has been landscaped with trees and plants, painted gray, adorned with metal doors and windows in a style best described as Culver City North. Envisioned as a rental property for media companies, it is within walking distance of the Orange Line.

Walls are untouched by taggers, possibly due to discreet security cameras ringing the property.

Remnants of old Van Nuys before and during WWII are also in evidence around the area. Steel buildings, used as citrus packing houses, and Quonset Huts with their arched rooflines, still exist near Oxnard and Kester.

Walk on Kester north of Oxnard and you are in a man’s world of marijuana, liquor, used tires, transmissions, clutches, sand, gravel, cement, cheap beer, lottery tickets, tow trucks and dogs on chains. This is un-distilled and un-filtered Van Nuys, where hard-working immigrants take flat tires off cars and put bald ones back on.

At sunset, the meanness is softened by orange and pink hues. Piles of tires turn into melted chocolates next to green boxes. Long hot days are ended and extinguished in icy lager Coronas.

At Kester and Delano there long stood an old wooden house, a broken down slum place with discarded tires and trash. It has since been cleaned up and stuccoed up, as hygienic and impersonal as any Burbank tract house. But it is clean, which is notable, in a place where slumlords from Encino and Bel Air could care less.

Mr. Pancho’s Market, long a fixture in the area, in now called “Los 3 Potrillos” (The Three Colts) and has been painted bright orange and I don’t know if they sell horse meat.

A four-story apartment building has been under construction for some time near at Erwin and Kester. It stands in uncompleted modernity behind scaffolding and plywood.

On the west side of Kester, one walks past the last seven decades of architecture and development.

6315 Kester is a two-story courtyard apartment building built in 1961. A bizarre (or unique) frieze of Roman soldiers on horses decorates the exterior. Starved for ornamentation, post-war architects in the late 1950s and early 60s borrowed from epic movies like “Ben Hur” (1959) or “Cleopatra” (1963) to cinematically embellish properties.

6321-6323 is a 1949 multi-family dwelling decorated with developer William Mellenthin’s (1896-1979) characteristic “birdhouse” designs over the garage. Mellenthin brought a rustic, Northern California feeling to this structure with board and batten siding, red brick, double hung windows and exposed beamed roof.

Sadly, this subtle, historically Californian style has little appreciation to The Vulgarians who now build in the San Fernando Valley. But in1949, it must have been a fine place to live, at a time when one could leave a window open at night, for ventilation without fear, and fall asleep to Tommy Dorsey on the radio.

And the 2015 tour wraps up at 14851 Victory, the slum mini-mall whose most notable feature is the trash on the side of the building that the tenants and the owner never clean up.