B&W – Here in Van Nuys

Walking Along the 6th Street Bridge.

August 28, 2023Posted in ArchitectureTagged 6th Street Bridge, Architecture, B&W, California, City of Quartz, Crime, design, Engineering, Fujifilm, Los Angeles, Mike Davis, Photo Essay, Safety, securityLeave a comment

I finally made it down to the 6th Street Bridge.

It’s an impressive structure that leaps and struts and flies over rail tracks and factories, electric yards and the river. It is startlingly plain, almost crude in its sculpted mass and bending arches. There are raw bolts attaching the cables to the concrete. Steel fences stretch along the pedestrian walkway. Dark shadows and blinding sun mark the bridge from beginning to end.

Unyielding in substance, rigid, unforgiving, brutal; it is a stage for fast cars, reckless driving and unintentional suicide. But also a balletic performance of geometric shapes and unexpected revelations along the way.

Mute yet expressive, untested in the long term, it is a baby of this metropolis. And born to a city that abandoned it to a wasteland which one day may be remade with trees, parks and apartments; or left behind to become yet another great, unfulfilled California promise.

Walking here last Saturday, August 26th, I thought of the late Mike Davis (City of Quartz) who wrote brutally and trenchantly about Los Angeles.

I don’t have his exact words, but in that book he described an architecture of barbed wire, steel gates, security cameras, the way this city is set up like a penitentiary with hostile inmates surrounded by deterrents, police and threatening lethality.

The 6th Street Bridge, ironically, has earned a reputation for criminal mayhem: daredevil driving and people who climb upon the arches to show off. I saw no rowdiness, in fact the road was remarkably empty and we only passed a few pedestrians. But in all directions artificial and man made structures are the entirety. Absolutely nothing is natural. The lone exception I saw was a cellphone tower who identified as a palm tree.

They Had Promised Rain.

February 16, 2016February 16, 2016Posted in ArchitectureTagged B&W, El Nino, Essay, Hancock Park, Noir, Photography, rain, Shadow, Sun, weather3 Comments

They had promised rain.

We were going to be drenched, drowned, and flooded.

The clouds would stay overhead for months, and there would be endless days of mudslides, dark clouds and gray skies.

They had promised rain, clearly, and said it in English, many times; the word was rain, but there was so much of it and they had renamed him El Niño.

For maybe one or two days there was rain and it came down and drenched the garden and it seemed that relief was on its way.

But the heat and the sun, and that blinding light, the kind that throws deep shadows on surfaces, came back.

The hot winds, the cloudless skies, the bees and the mosquitos, the dust and the fires, and the furnace of the car parked in the sun with black seats that burn your ass when you sit down.

In Hancock Park, last Saturday, the air smelled like smoke, and lungs labored hard to bring in oxygen.

But on curved streets with swept sidewalks and trimmed hedges, homes glowed, in the inferno.

Movie star beauties, these residences, from the 1920s and 30s, photographed like Garbo and Gable, in black and white.

They retained dignity, reserving in elegance, those rights given to the rich, to remain unaffected by external events, to quietly succeed by dint of elitism, and transcend the hot weather through graceful form.

Woodley Avenue Near Roscoe.

May 18, 2011May 18, 2011Posted in Architecture, Environment, Links, Transportation, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged B&W, CA, industry, Railroad, Roscoe, San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys and the Valley, Woodley Ave.Leave a comment

Woodley Near Roscoe, Train Tracks — Woodley Near Roscoe, Van Nuys, CA b

Woodley Near Roscoe, View South, Van Nuys, CA

Woodley Near Roscoe View East, Van Nuys, CA.

West of the 405, the vista opens up.

The skies are big and the mountains vast.

This is the land of beer and jets, trucks and steel; gasoline, fire and the burning sun.

This is the Van Nuys Airport, the Flyaway, the Anheuser-Busch Plant, many warehouses, and an enormous sod farm.

Here men and women are working, a necessary condition.

And the horizon of the San Fernando Valley, the blue skies and the straight wide streets, the planes taking off, the delivery trucks speeding across Van Nuys, and a commuter train blowing its horn; this is work and we are in need of work and we live and work; and hope that work returns to our nation as it did in times past.

Expo Train Construction in Culver City, CA.

May 14, 2010May 14, 2010Posted in ArchitectureTagged B&W, California, Construction, Culver City, Expo Line, Hayden Tract1 Comment

The “Hayden Tract” neighborhood of Culver City. National near Washington Blvd. The construction of the Expo Train. has provided a boon to this area and will provide a new alternative way of life to this section of LA.