Boats – Here in Van Nuys

In the 1960s, the swamps of south Venice became a multi-million dollar building project that culminated in what we now call Marina Del Rey.

Pleasure boats, yacht clubs, nautical facilities, circular high rises with balconies overlooking the harbor, landscaped roadways with palm trees, office buildings, pharmacies, tennis courts, a hospital, a fire station, a library; and many restaurants overlooking the yachts, sailboats and motor boats.

A district devoted to tanning, drinking, carousing, love making, and living the good life amongst airline pilots, stewardesses, restaurant workers, aspiring actors, and retirees. The 1960s dream of accessible pleasure for anyone white with a convertible.

They even built the 90 Freeway to get people in fast, before the boat left the dock. Imagine the high quality of life 60 years ago, when a new freeway was affordable and considered the highest and best use of land.

Oct 16, 1968: View SW from Washington Bl and Oxford Avenue to Admiralty Way before the Marina City Club was built.

From its inception, Marina Del Rey feigned a public purpose while raking in the dollars fencing off the best parts for private use of yacht clubs and apartment dwellers. Docks are locked up and there are many barriers to prevent the use of the harbor for the general public unless you are there to purchase a dinner and drinks on a boat, bar or restaurant.

Over the years, there have been community projects to create usable public space, such as Yvonne B. Burke Park on the north side of Admiralty Way which has athletic equipment, bike roads and jogging paths. That park too has recently been incarcerated when Bay View Management built a cinder block wall that closed a public access point behind a Ralph’s store on Lincoln Boulevard.

God forbid a pedestrian in a park might access a supermarket on foot.

Other luxury apartments, understandably fearful of crime, vagrancy and violence, have illegally built obstructions along their land to prevent the park from becoming a way to enter their properties.

Every few hundred feet, the green parks become parking lots. An athlete running, riding a bike or rolling skating will eventually stop at a busy road where vehicles speed by at 60 miles an hour. And other cars and trucks will be entering the parking lots or exiting, creating additional hazards for the non-driver.

The big, popular restaurants, anchored in seas of asphalt, offering seafood, steak, alcohol, valet parking, and private parties to corporate diners and red nosed, melanomatous men in Tommy Bahama, have all gone out of business. Café Del Rey and Tony Ps with their crumbling, dated, Brady Bunch style restaurants are empty. The cigarettes, cigars, Aramis and lounge singers gone with the wind.

The great pandemic meltdown which has stolen our lives, taken our movie theaters, pillaged our department stores, and defecated upon our civic dignity, has now obliterated the big dining establishments of Marina Del Rey.

These popular places, that seemed immune to time, forever serving enormous plates of grilled lobster, prime rib, baked potatoes, cheesecake, ice cream sundaes and voluminous cocktails are now dead. Silent as Hiroshima after the bomb, these outposts of high on the hog, intoxicated living were ailing, out of fashion, and are now exiled from our spartan, self-consciously healthy era.

For a pedestrian who is trying to stroll one mile of the harbor west from Bali Way to Palawan Way, with the boats in view along the south walkway, there are several private obstructions that make it impossible to complete the walk.

I speak from experience as my friend Danny and I did the walk today.

The California Yacht Club locks up the walkway with their own use of the property.

One is forced to detour to Admiralty Way with the unused parking lots of the long-gone restaurants on one side, and the near-death experience of speeding cars on the other.

To reenter the harbor walkway, you find the Los Angeles County Fire Department Station #110 (4433 Admiralty Way) and walk behind the building to rejoin the path along the water to once again enjoy the public recreational qualities that are supposedly there for everyone to enjoy, not just yacht members.

Marina City Club on Admiralty Way with the closed Fanta Sea Yachts building in the foreground.

The Marina City Club encompasses three early 1970s high rises which are entered securely by several guarded driveways on Admiralty Way. This complex has swimming pools, tennis courts, a convenience store, but is threatened by similar structural defects that brought down the Surfside, Florida condominium in 2021, killing 98 persons.

For now, residents who own property there pay high HOA fees, and even those who bought in cheaply face repairs that will surely cost collectively in the hundreds of millions of dollars to make these three, 55-year-old buildings safer in a location where tsunamis and earthquakes are always visiting unexpectedly.

Concluding the walk today, we went north along a dirt path on the west side of the Oxford Basin “Wildlife Refuge” which connected to Washington Boulevard.

As we passed a vagrant man sprawled on wall, shopping cart and garbage nearby, my friend Danny shouted, “Get going, walk faster.”

Danny had spotted a handgun in the vagrant’s hand.

Just another reminder, if any is needed, that nobody should assume that this is a safe area, regardless of how much homes sell for. The demoralizing and unsanitary aspects of Los Angeles are all around, because we live in perhaps the dirtiest metropolis in the United States, one that believes public trash camping is a civil right and mental illness is only a danger after it kills.

How this city will present during the 2028 Olympics is something Orwell would have pondered.

A new mural, painted by Guy Ellis, on the side of Showcase Cabinets at 14823 Aetna St. Owner Peter Scholz (L) and Artist Guy Ellis.

The proposed Metro Los Angeles scheme (“Option A”) desires, through eminent domain, to flatten 186 small businesses employing some 1,500 workers just steps from downtown Van Nuys.

The 33-acre area extends from Oxnard St on the south to Calvert St on the north, Kester St. on the west and Cedros on the east. In this area, rows of shops straddling the Orange Line will be extinguished by 2020.

Light rail is coming, the trains need a place to freshen up, and here is their proposed outdoor spa.

The engine of public relations is roaring. Mayor Garcetti needs to remake LA for the 2028 Olympics. He has gotten the city into full throttle prepping for it.

It is comforting to think that property owners will be reimbursed for their buildings, that businesses “can relocate”, that the city will take care of those who pay taxes, make local products, and employ hundreds.

But most of these lawful, industrious, innovative companies only rent space. Yes, they are only renters, and they face the dim, depressing, scary prospect of becoming economic refugees, chased out by their own local government. Some of these men and women have fled Iran, Armenia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico, places where war, violence, corruption, drugs and religious persecution destroyed lives and families.

Others were born in Van Nuys, those blue-eyed, blonde kids who went to Notre Dame High School and grew up proud Angelenos, driving around the San Fernando Valley, eating burgers, going to the beach, dreaming of making a good living doing something independently with their hands.

They all expressed shame, disappointment, anger, and betrayal against Councilwoman Nury Martinez and the Metro Los Angeles board for an action of insurmountable cruelty: pulling the rug out from profitable enterprises and turning bright prospects into dark.

Scott Walton, 55, whose family purchased the business Uncle Studios in 1979, said, “I think I’d sell my house and leave L.A. if this happens. I would give up on this city in a blind second.” His mother is ill and his sister has cancer. His studio now faces a possible death sentence.

What follows below are profiles of three men, who come from very different industries, but are all under the same threat.

Bullied at the Boatyard: Steve Muradyan

At BPM Custom Marine on Calvert St., Steve Muradyan, 46, services and stores high performance boats at a rented facility. Here are dozens of racing craft costing from $500,000-$1 million, owned by wealthy people in Marina Del Rey and Malibu. The boats winter in Van Nuys, where they are expertly detailed, inside and out.

Mr. Muradyan, a short, broad-shouldered, sunburned man with burning rage, threw up his hands at the illogic of his situation. He takes care of his wife, two children, and aging parents. He pays 98 cents a square foot in 5,000 SF and he cannot fathom where he might go next. A wide driveway accommodates the 50 and 70-foot long boats. And he can work late into the night drilling and towing, without disturbing others.

He once ran an auto repair shop on Oxnard. Later he had a towing service. Then he started his boat business in 2003. He had raced boats as a young man, and this was part of his experience and his passion. Why not?

He deals with all the daily stress of insurance, taxes, payroll, equipment breakdowns, deadlines, customer demands, finding parts, servicing the big craft. He worries about his business, his family, his income. And now this impending doom, dropped from the skies by Metro. He prays it will not happen to him. He cannot fathom losing it all, again.

Art and Soul in Stained Glass: Simon Simonian

Over at Progressive Art Stained Glass Studio, 70-year-old architect and craftsman Simon Simonian rents a small unit on Aetna where he designs and molds exquisite stained glass for expensive homes, churches, synagogues and historic buildings.

He knows all the local businesses, and often he sends customers to the cabinetmakers and metal honers steps away. There is true collaboration between the artisans here.

A kind, creative man with a penetrating gaze, Mr. Simonian, with his wife and young son, came from Tehran in 1978 to study in Southern California and escape the impending revolution in Iran. He speaks Farsi, English and Armenian.

He is an Armenian Christian and his family was prosperous and made wine. His father had escaped the turmoil in Armenia when the Communists took over after WWII, which was also preceded by the massacre by Turkey of 1.5 million. His people have suffered killing, expulsion, persecution, and the loss of dignity in every decade of the 20^th Century.

The Simonian Winery was doing well in Iran in 1979. And then the Islamists came to power and burned it down. By that time Simon and his wife and son were in Southern California. He begged his father to come but the old man stayed in Tehran and died five years later.

Tenacity, survival, and intelligence are in his genes.

“I love what I do. I have loyal customers. The location is excellent. I know all my neighbors here. I want to stay rooted. I don’t want to have to start all over again. Where can I find space like this? Where will I go?” he asks with the weary experience of a man who has had to find another way to proceed.

The Man from Uncle: Scott Walton

55-year-old Scott Walton looks every bit the rocker who runs the recording studio. He is longhaired and lanky. With a touch of agitation and glee, he slips in and out of the dark, windowless rehearsal spaces of Uncle Studios, where he has worked since 1979.

His father, with foresight, loaned $50,000 to his two sons, Mark, 20, and Scott, 17 to buy a recording studio. Here the boys hosted thousands of aspiring musicians including Devo, The Eurythmics, Weird Al Yankovic, Weather Report, Yes, Black Light Syndrome, No Effects, The Dickies, Stray Cats, and Nancy Sinatra.

When Scott first started he didn’t play any music. He learned keyboard, classical piano and he also sings. He went on the road, for a time, in the 1980s, playing keyboard for Weird Al Yankovic. He also plays in Billy Sherwood’s (“Yes”) current band.

Despite the proximity to fame, talent, money and legend, Uncle Studios is still a rental space where young and old, rich and poor, pay by the hour to record and play music. Something in the old wood and stucco buildings possesses a warm, acoustic richness. Music sounds soulful, real and alive here, unencumbered by the digital plasticity of modern recordings.

But Scott Walton is also a renter. He does not own the building bearing his business name. If his structure is obliterated, he will lose the very foundation of his life, his income, and his daily purpose. He will become an American Refugee in the city of his birth.

This is only a sampling of the suffering that will commence if Metro-Martinez allows it. The Marijuana onslaught is also looming.

On the horizon, Los Angeles is becoming dangerously inhospitable to any small business that is not cannabis. Growers are paying three times the asking rental price to set up indoor pot farms for their noxious and numbing substance. There may come a time when the only industry left in this city is marijuana.

The new refugees are small craftsmen running legitimate enterprises. Some may not believe it. But I heard it and saw it on Aetna, Bessemer, and Calvert Streets.

The pain is real, the fear is omnipresent and the situation is dire.

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Tag: Boats

Navigating Public Space in Marina Del Rey.

Option A: “Where Will We Go?”

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