Yesterday, in Manhattan Beach, the low pressure storm that had blown in a few days earlier lingered. Evident in the sky were dark clouds. Visible in the ocean were enormous waves. The sand was wet and filled with debris, for the high tides had come ashore the night before, and soaked everything along the beach.
It was New Year’s Eve, the last day of 2023, a year of personal growth in a world that seemed to be going backward intellectually, morally and ethically. All I could to steady myself was to tune out much of the noise, especially online, and for the first time in decades I didn’t watch the news, and I limited how many opinions I read.
I try and do my best and hope for a positive outcome.
On a few blocks between S. Barrington Avenue and Bundy Drive, north of Olympic Blvd. the streets are dotted with “light industrial” buildings that most likely manufacture digital media.
It’s a flat place, with the oldest buildings dating back to WWII, many parking structures, and a generous amount of architecture, in the Eccentric Faddish style which encompasses everything from steel to wood to concrete and whose only commonality is expensiveness in land, material, rents and value to landowners and tax assessors.
Despite the liberal feeling of the district, everything is guarded, policed, and patrolled. We walked past a building, on the public sidewalk, and a robotic voice ominously announced: “You are being video recorded!”
There are still a few RVs housing unhoused people.
And everywhere there are asphalt parking lots.
You will look in vain for any park, organic garden, or affordable housing. Is this the best we can do? As long as the streets are clean it seems so.
Returning from Pasadena last Sunday, we crossed into Highland Park and randomly drove up N Avenue 66, a street along the Arroyo.
There were old houses, once gracious houses, that a century or more ago were single family residences with wide gardens and porches and plantings. Most had been disfigured and broken up into rooming houses or torn down for crappy apartments in the 1950s.
Climbing into the hills we entered into another sub-district of mid-century ranches on small plots on curving streets, one, perhaps jokingly named Easy Street.
Then we stopped to admire 936 Fortune Way, a 1966 home built for $40,600 by architect PJ McCarty.
A box on concrete blocks with decorative panels and metal screens, it has a large, flat roofed portico supported by two tall steel posts with hanging globe light, concrete steps and a second floor balcony shaded by the overhanging roof and privacy screens along the rail.
Though there are palms and desert plants implanted into the blocks, the overall effect of the surroundings of the home is one of deadness in the hot, blinding, relentless sun; lifeless streets without pedestrians, enormously wide for maneuvering and parking enormous vehicles; and the strange, atomized artificiality of suburban numbness, a place where the people are inside in darkness and air-conditioning, on digital devices, high, drunk or napping.
Trained by media to desire and salivate for now unaffordable homes like this one, we don’t often think how very weird and self-destructive LA is, where multi-million dollar houses can exist without anywhere nearby to walk to, without any sense of community, only a coming together to fight crime or development, actions which make people feel better without accomplishing anything significant, lasting or beneficial.
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.
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.
AI knows everything about Van Nuys. But it has no opinions about Van Nuys.
It hasn’t lived here 20 years, woken up under helicopter patrol, been robbed, assaulted, attacked or killed.
It hasn’t driven down Victory Boulevard on a Saturday afternoon in the summer heat when there isn’t a soul walking down the street, just eight lanes of vehicles speeding past trash, ugly apartments, homeless encampments and mini malls. It hasn’t witnessed charming ranch houses with flower gardens, mature oaks and picket fences turned into concrete paved, iron fenced, security camera rentals with dozens of SUVs and strangers smoking weed next door.
It knows nothing about the way Van Nuys was in the 1950s when every boy and girl was blond haired and rode their bicycle to school and lived on fifteen cent hamburgers and never gained a pound.
So perhaps ignorance, absent biases and prejudices, is the best approach to exploring Van Nuys.
Why not give Van Nuys a chance to succeed in fantasy where it has failed in reality?
Magictravel is artificial intelligence for travel planning. I asked it to come up with a three-day itinerary for a visit to Van Nuys, and it supplied me with a refreshing, cynicism free, daily calendar of events.
Blithely ignorant but well-informed, practical minded in suggestions, woefully dumb in logistics, it served me up activities and destinations timed for travel and visits.
Day One:
For breakfast they recommended Nat’s Early Bite and I do like that place. I’ve eaten there many times. French toast and coffee for two in 2017 was about $20 so I assume that will be $45 now. 8-9am.
Breakfast would be followed by a shopping tour of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which, if pre-pandemic memory serves me, has about three shops, many vacancies, and twelve places to eat, eleven of them frozen yogurt. 9-10:30am
Exhausted by so much shopping there, I would drive for 36 minutes to have lunch at Tokyo Fried Chicken in Monterey Park. 12-1:30pm.
Then I would get back on the freeway, drive 25 miles, all the way from the San Gabriel Valley to Encino, to spend three hours in 5-acre Los Encinos State Historic Park with its 19th Century Adobe House. I would spend three hours here, walking around in the hot summer heat, from tree to tree, truly stimulated by this fascinating place. 2-5pm
For dinner I would dine at The Front Yard on Vineland Avenue in the Beverly Garland Hotel. I only know from a recent visit there, that this is (shockingly) a quite lovely place with flowers, trees, fountains and a very civilized atmosphere quite unlike that which exists on Vineland under the freeway. 6-7:30pm
After dinner I would return to Woodley Park and take a nighttime stroll from 8-9:30pm. There are no cafes, no breweries, no dessert places, just many parking lots, a duck pond, and darkness. A little boring but this is considered top notch in Van Nuys.
I didn’t ask for a suggestion on where to stay, so just assume I spent it at my home in Van Nuys.
Day Two:
We are eating breakfast (from 8am to 9am) at Crumbs and Whiskers 7924 Melrose Avenue. I leave my house at 7am because I know traffic is heavy over Laurel Canyon.
But now, after coffee with cats, I have a sneezing attack. Crumbs and Whiskers was (surprise!) a cat café and I am highly allergic to felines. No worries. I will take a Claritin.
Magictravel.ai does not suggest post-breakfast activities near this restaurant, such as walking around Melrose, visiting Farmers’ Market, exploring Hollywood, LACMA or the Petersen Automotive Museum.
Being LA it suggests more driving.
We will get back in the car and drive 15 miles, 35 minutes away, to Woodley Park and walk around The Japanese Garden. 9-10:30am.
Lunch will be at Mariscos Los Arcos at 14038 Victory Bl. Family-run Mexican seafood. This sounds really delicious. ….12:30-1:30pm
After eating I’m anxious to get going to arrive at my next destination which is the Van Nuys Airport Observation area on Waterman Avenue, just west of Woodley and south of Roscoe. Yet another activity which takes place on hot asphalt, this is a delightful suggestion in the 100-degree heat. 2-3:30pm
After the thrill of watching jets tax, land and takeoff, there is refreshment at The Great Wall of Los Angeles (12900 Oxnard) where a 2,754 foot mural painted on the concrete wall of the LA River near Valley College seduces you with its depictions of women and minorities who helped build our stunning state of California. From 4:00-5:30pm I will walk back and forth along the dry concrete river and enjoy the artwork from the other side of the sewage channel. It cannot be seen up close by pedestrians, only by high sewage waters.
Finally, from 7:30-9pm we are having dinner on Sepulveda Boulevard in a very charming section of Van Nuys near Saticoy at Mercado Buenos Aires. Speeding cars, police sirens, car washes, and nowhere to walk add to the feeling of an endless vacation in paradise.
Exhausted from driving back and forth all day, I retire to bed in my house in Van Nuys. I may ask Magictravel for a body wash suggestion.
Day Three:
The last day of touring in Van Nuys. Visitors can leave after today.
Unluckily, for me, I have to live here full time.
Here is my itinerary:
8am-9am: Breakfast at Sabor and Sazon 14540 Vanowen St. I arrive there to find it is no longer in business but is now a marijuana dispensary.
Still hungry from not eating breakfast, I rush over to the Woodley Park Archery Range where I will spend the next hour and a half wandering around an archery range without a bow and arrow. 9-10:30am.
But I’ve got lunch plans. Picnic lunch at the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve. I will eat here (consuming the lunch I haven’t bought) surrounded by shopping carts, charred plants burned by hundreds of encampment fires, and try not to watch men having sex nearby. 12-1:30pm
Woodley Park/EncinoWoodley Park, 2018.
Still in the park, I plan to play golf which seems nice enough since there are trees and irrigated lawns watered with recycled H20. 2-3:30pm.
Nearly my entire second day in Van Nuys has been spent inside the confines of Woodley Park. Then I’m off to a more glamorous destination: Valley Glen.
Being a real foodie, I’m excited to eat authentic mid-century American “Italian” food at Barone’s Italian Restaurant at 13276 Oxnard St. with its retro vinyl booths and wood paneled rec room. I will probably order Fried Zucchini, Frank’s Special Pizza with Barone’s Famous Cheesecake and a few beers. 6-7:30pm.
After this great meal I will drive over, in the still hot, humid, smoggy night, to the Skyzone Trampoline Park 7741 Hazeltine 8-9:30pm where I plan to jump up and down with my stomach full of pizza, cheesecake, fried zucchini and three beers until I barf all over the trampoline.
In Southern California, we are so used to living under full sun with no clouds, that the presence of an impending storm is a revelation. The illumination inside our house changes, and there are real shadows hitting the walls and the sofa again just as there are in other real cities around the globe.
Introspection and thoughtfulness, a pause in the frantic, occluded light, the end of the year.
It takes days for the rain to come. We know it’s coming, the way we knew the virus was coming in February 2020, like a slow-motion freight train. But precipitation, no matter how meager, is a benevolent threat we can get excited about.
Yesterday we were still in the midst of a refreshing cycle of weather: cold nights, cool days, sun and partial sun, rain and no rain.
Around 4 pm I looked outside and saw a stunning sight of a gold leafed tree against a blue, pink, and gray sky. It would only last a few minutes so I grabbed my XE3 camera and ran out.
It was a strange hour. There was a menacing helicopter chopping up the sky, and reckless, going back home drivers speeding down Columbus and Hamlin in monster trucks.
Death was just beyond my driveway so I wandered out cautiously.
Somewhere along crudely unpaved Columbus, where there are no sewers or curbs, I could see the vast sweep of the northern sky and those fantastic clouds miles away.
Here in Van Nuys 
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