Van Nuys (b. 1911) began as a town, centered around a main street, connected to Los Angeles by streetcar and rail.
It built its fire station, library, city hall, police station, and its churches, schools, shops and post office steps apart. On foot, a person could buy a suit, take out a library book, mail a letter, and walk to school.
Come to think of it they still can. But it was all there in downtown Van Nuys.
Today you might stand outside the LAPD Van Nuys Station and smoke a joint, drink a can of beer, pee against a wall and nobody would raise an eyebrow.
The librarian, the cop, the priest, the attorney, they would walk past you and shrug their shoulders and mutter, “What can I do?”
We are so tolerant these days. Everything degrading is welcomed, while everything worthwhile is rare, expensive or extinct.
Posture Contest, Van Nuys, 1958. Impossible to imagine these days with all the cell phone spines.
Surrounded by orange and walnut groves, the growing town nonetheless managed to provide safe, civilized and opportune situations for its newly arrived residents with affordable housing, subsidized by low interest government backed loans after WWII.
And plentiful, well-paying jobs. Imagine that!
Van Nuys, circa 1938.Widening of Victory Boulevard: 1954.Van Nuys Blvd. at Friar (circa 1950). Notice diagonal parking and streetcar wiring.Van Nuys Bl. 2013
Somehow it was lost after 1945. The enormous shopping centers robbed Van Nuys of its clientele. The street widenings turned boulevards into raceways and the village feel was destroyed. Factories closed, banks shrunk, stores fled, and crime settled here to afflict, rob, disable and kill.
Why does Van Nuys flounder, while all around it other cities like Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and sections of Los Angeles, like North Hollywood, Studio City, Mid-City and Highland Park flourish?
Delano St. July 2017Delano St. July 2017
Raymer St. March 2017
A journalist from Curbed LA called me yesterday. He is writing an article about Van Nuys and wanted to talk.
I mentioned many things that I wish were changed here, from road diets to better housing, from cleaner streets to more law enforcement for illegal dumping.
But I also told him that so much of our political leadership is devoted to working on problems like prostitution, rather than building a coalition of architects, designers, investors, and planners who could build up Van Nuys and make it, once again, a coherent, safe, stimulating, and pleasant place to live and work.
I know what’s bad here. But what about making it good? Where are our dreams? Why can’t we be as artistic as our studios, as wild in our imaginations as our writers, directors, cinematographers, animators, and designers?
Why isn’t the whole energy of creative Los Angeles devoted to overcoming our civic afflictions?
Near Cedros and Delano.
Van Nuys Bl. Nov. 2016
The deadest and more depressing areas of Van Nuys are closest to the Orange Line, which is also a good thing. Because this is where Van Nuys should work to build new, experimental, and innovative housing and commercial buildings.
Van Nuys Bl. Oct 2016 A dead place for street life.The Empty Post Office/ Van Nuys Bl. Oct. 2016Dystopian Van Nuys Oct. 2016. No people, no chairs, no trees. Just concrete.Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
From Kester to Hazeltine, north of Oxnard, the “Civic Center” district contains an empty post office, vacated stores, underutilized buildings, and dystopian spaces of concrete, homelessness, garbage, and withering neglect.
The pedestrian mall on Erwin, south of the Valley Municipal Building and surrounded by the Superior Court, the library and police station, is a civic disgrace.
Ironically, all the law enforcement, all the government agencies, all the power that resides in Van Nuys….. presides over the ruins of it.
Meanwhile up in Portland, OR.
Holst Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)Works Progress Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)Works Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)Fujiwaramuro Architects, Kobe, Japan (Dezeen)Van Nuys Alley near Delano and VNB
On Dezeen, there are posts about new, infill buildings in Portland, OR and Japan where the general level of architecture and design far outpaces Van Nuys. These are sophisticated, modern, but humble structures with ideas for living.
Look at these and imagine how, perhaps 25 new ones, could transform Van Nuys.
In the midst of our wasteland, we need to go back to working to demanding the best for Van Nuys, rather than accepting squalor and mediocrity.
I was in Santa Monica yesterday afternoon. I parked near Pico and Ocean to capture the waning light of day on camera.
The entire “Civic Center” area, surrounding the toxically secretive Rand Corporation, is undergoing massive redevelopment. There is a new park, a new subway line (arriving 2015), new condos and “affordable housing”, plus promised shops, restaurants and hotels.
The City of Santa Monica has a website describing the project.
“The three-acre site is an urban mix of 160 affordable rental residences and 158 luxury condominiums, 20,000 square feet of retail and restaurants, and walkable plazas and gardens. A walk street was created as a central spine through the site, providing pedestrians with a connection from Main Street to Ocean Avenue through landscaped plazas lined with retail, restaurants and outdoor dining, and public art.”
I went into the walk street yesterday and explored part of the new development.
At 6pm I was the only one.
I walked through angles and shadows past empty balconies shaded in darkness. Trapezoids and bands of glass, rectangles and vertical piers jutted out and sliced in, a silent symphony of architecture performing to an empty house. On Main Street, near a guard station, a sign ominously informed:
THIS AREA UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE
A little while later, I wandered back into an old neighborhood of crummy and cute houses south of Pico, and stopped at the corner of Third at Bicknell.
Atop the hilly street stood a strange, red-domed apartment, The Baron’s Castle. Piled above blocky stucco boxes, the exotic building of unknown origins held my eye. Its finial pointed up: leading, concluding, summarizing.
No great architect built this mess. But it felt honest, uncontrived, alive, accidental, human and organic.
With its cars parked under the first floor overhang, its ridiculously flimsy arched balconies, it was a reminder of how good bad architecture sometimes feels.
I was glad to end my walk here, staring up into spiritually redolent kitsch, irreverent and improvised. It reminded me of the people who live here, in exile, in rented costume, temporarily young, broken-hearted, dreaming, intoxicated, high, sober, scraping by, entertained; seduced by sea and sun.
How many tanned generations fucked and broke up and got together inside the many boxes under the red-tiled dome? What accidents of existence brought people here? And how fitting that they settled into a place imperfect and incomplete.
The great architects who did not build The Baron’s Castle were employed on other places where perfection of form never quite ignited human passion.
Yesterday, I had walked through one perfection of form, a lavishly funded and now completed architectural plan, vetted by the government of Santa Monica, tended to by teams of architects, engineers, landscapers, designers and lawyers.
Here in Van Nuys 
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