The Metro Planning Board will not recommend the demolition of 33 acres of light industry near Kester and Oxnard that would have obliterated 58 buildings, 186 businesses and endangered 1,000 jobs within walking distance of downtown Van Nuys.
“Option A” was a proposed light rail service yard that would have serviced a 9.2 mile public transit train line that will be built from Sylmar/San Fernando to Van Nuys.
Instead, the board said “Option B”, a site around Keswick and Van Nuys Bl., near the existing Metrolink trains, is a better choice for the new site of the service yard.
Construction is anticipated to begin in 2021, with the line opening in 2027.
There are businesses in the “Option B” area that must relocate and they are, predictably and understandably, upset by the decision.
But the “Option B” district is not adjacent to a residential area, and has far fewer parcels, making it a cheaper and faster choice for Metro to demolish and compensate property owners.
Option A
Imagine this as a beer garden, an outdoor restaurant, a park, or a site for new courtyard housing.
“Option A” runs along the Orange Line with its bike path and bus line slated for conversion to light rail.
It is a bustling and well-located area of affordably priced light industry which one day could also be used for inserting cafes, small retail stores, low profile apartments and multi-family dwellings, providing a new residential/work/recreation district in Van Nuys.
To lose it to the bulldozer would have been a tragedy, and let us hope that community activists, architects, investors and city planners will recognize the potential in the “Option A” area and design a new prototype for progressive living in Van Nuys.
One day, soon, there will be a revitalization of Van Nuys Boulevard.
Gone forever will be the hopeless days when people laughed to mock it, or ran away in revulsion.
All the central gathering places that should be occupied by civilized things, all the lots that hold parking, all the empty buildings along Van Nuys Boulevard, will be replaced with vibrant, happy, upbeat, successful businesses and residents.
It will take nothing more than $5 billion dollars to invest in new transit, new apartments, new multi-family housing, new police officers, a new police station, an army of street cleaners, and law enforcement people who will ticket illegally parked cars, handicap placard abusers, unregulated street sellers, unlicensed signs, and unpermitted businesses.
The narrowing of Victory Boulevard, the planting of 200 oak trees from Kester to Van Nuys Boulevard, will bring about a revitalization of the formerly crappy strip of low rent mini-malls, slum apartments and empty stores. The LAPD Victory Precinct at the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Victory, and its drop-in center there will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
150 new LAPD officers, out of a police force of some 10,000 will be specifially assigned to the area.
Some 50 new apartment buildings, from Sherman Way to Oxnard, with 10,000 new apartments, will be built and 20% of them will rent for under market value.
Security cameras will enforce the law to prevent speeding, red light running, assault, vandalism, burglaries of properties and hold-ups on the street.
There will be decorative streetlights, three new parks, new benches, and thousands of shade trees planted along the boulevard to protect against temperatures that get hotter every year.
Bike lanes, light rail, automobiles and pedestrians will share a new Van Nuys Boulevard divided between all types of transport, from foot to motor to public.
And the architecture will be inventive, modern, and integrate environmentally such necessities as solar energy and district wide free wi-fi.
In a nod to the old Van Nuys, the first orange grove planted in the Valley in 90 years will be manned by formerly homeless men and women who will guard the orchards as they would their own children. There will be 10 houses planted around the grove to ensure the safety and security of the new urban agriculturalists.
The low industrial buildings in the neighborhood around Kester and Oxnard, all 33 acres, were preserved in 2018, and later became an incubator for creatives who settled in the area and built narrow houses near the Orange Line, and worked and lived next to artisans, musicians, brewers, car restorers and craftspeople of every skill.
All of this is possible.
The people who will decide whether this is fantasy or reality are reading this post.
“Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne is leaving the paper to take the newly created position of chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles.
According to a release from Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office, Hawthorne’s new role will include bringing a “unified design vision to projects that are shaping Los Angeles’ urban landscape,” and collaborating with city officials, departments, and architects on a wide range of public projects including housing, parks, and transit.”
-LA Curbed 3/12/18
Imagine Los Angeles and “unified design vision” in the same sentence, and you might be able to swallow the strange challenges Christopher Hawthorne will face in “shaping Los Angeles’ urban landscape.”
A laudable, admirable position, Chief Design Officer, but how will it work?
In Van Nuys, if this area can be considered a microcosm for the city as a whole, nobody has the slightest idea, in power or out-of-power, what design the broken down district should undertake.
There are people like me, believers in public transport and walkability. And law and order: with clean, safe, well-maintained streets and sidewalks.
There are others, hating any building taller than four stories, fearing road diets, terrified the Orange Line will bring dense development to Van Nuys.
Public projects in Los Angeles are almost invitations to desecrate. I see the archway erected over Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood, north of Camarillo, a pile of steel whipped together like tsunami debris and wonder who ordered and paid for it?
In Westlake, in MacArthur Park, in Pershing Square, the public realm must fight against the persistence of homelessness which seeks to establish its own rights within the public parks.
Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
In our city, the billboard is holier than religion. Will the Chief Design Officer fight against the outdoor advertising industry even as their pervasive ugliness destroys the public roads all over Los Angeles?
We need public squares and public places to gather, like they have in any impoverished Mexican town. But who will stop traffic in Mar Vista to carve out a plaza? Who will put a monument like the Washington Monument in the middle of Sepulveda Bl. to commemorate Francisco Xavier Sepúlveda? Can you think of a quiet conversation in the Fairfax District with a room full of old people as you propose carving out some back alley for public gathering space?
Where will they park? Who will hang out here? I don’t like it!
Almost every neighborhood honors the car first, and identity politics second. Can you imagine the fights in South Central, Boyle Heights, Koreatown, and other areas when trying to unite the indifferent, the angry, the argumentative members of the community on something as small as a little pedestal honoring a local somebody chosen for their ethnicity first and achievements second?
Every civic proposal will need to pass the gender test, the inclusion test, the not-a-white-man test. Even if the Eiffel Tower were built it would need to pay tribute to some forgotten and abused figure.
Los Angeles is a place where the historic car wash, the historic bowling alley, the historic hot dog stand all have a place in the civic realm. And perhaps that is a good thing, we simply don’t live in a city definable by standards used to measure Barcelona, Paris, New York or Boston. When we try to be grand, we do it privately, behind gates, on our own property.
When we erect grandly, we like to ruin it, with tags, trash, and irony. See any of the new bridges going over the LA River.
And lovely old homes, and fascinating vintage buildings are bulldozed regularly. See the two examples below from Van Nuys. Now gone forever.
14827 Victory Blvd. 6/14/15 DEMOLISHEDVintage Auto Repair 6200 N. Kester Ave. 7/9/15 DEMOLISHED
We lived for the day when Echo Park was redesigned, and now people sleep all over it, and anyone with a cart can sell anything anywhere. So we modify our laws to accommodate and placate illegality. You want to get high here? You want to sleep here? You want to park your RV here? No problem. Everything is allowed no matter how it demeans.
The problem with civic life is there must be civilization and there must be a minimal, publically acceptable standard of how to conduct oneself in public. And we don’t have that. Just ride the Metro Red Line, daily, and see how often people ignore rules. And get away with it.
We can’t just build ourselves into civic pride. We have to bring it up through our own character. And right now we are busy ripping it down, hoping that our urge for destruction will somehow open up a bright new world of self-realization. But it won’t.
So good luck to Mr. Hawthorne and his Chief Design Office.
I imagine he will be a regular on KCRW and KPCC, there will be plenty of conferences and appearances with Frances Anderton and Frank Gehry, and Instagram posts at Intelligensia and MOCA.
And then a year from now, the job and the title will quietly be gone, and he will find another position up in the Bay Area as Apple’s Chief Aesthetician, “devoted to the virtual civic realm on Apple devices.”
Here in Van Nuys 
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