The continuing obliteration and destruction of the Sepulveda Basin area, with daily encampment fires, the hundreds of addicts camping out in garbage dumps of trash;with dogs, vehicles, bicycles, and shopping carts; is still ongoing.
Does anyone remember that this is a bird sanctuary, a watershed area, a lost jewel for the preservation of the ecology of the San Fernando Valley, and a park created for the recreational enjoyment of the community?
The sainted mayor with the dulcet voice, Karen Bass, had shown up last month for one of her photo ops, as the other trash camp on the east side of the 405 near Oxnard was cleared after five years.
50-75 people had been living there in Burning Man style until the orders came from City Hall that the news media was making a story out of it. This being LA, a problem that couldn’t be solved for five years, was magically disappeared in one bulldozing day.
The mayor spoke intellectually and philosophically, articulating something that perhaps nobody had noticed before:
“This is a notorious encampment,” Bass said. “This is such a dangerous location. I saw propane canisters all over the place. This has been a place of fires. This is dangerous.”
Yet she did nothing about it until it hit Instagram, KCAL and provided yet more catnip for her political enemies.
To live in Los Angeles right now is to inhabit a mental asylum where all officials, from the police, courts, and local government, all deny that they have any legal control over the removal of lethally destructive vagrants from public property. They are powerless, simply without any authority, to stop what any cop on the beat would have jailed in 1962.
Of course, the dark cloud over all this, is the spector of Trump sending in some army to “clean up the city.” The tanks and the soldiers will arrive, and then they’ll be stationed around federal buildings, and the trash camp parties of the Sepulveda Basin will continue. People will launch protests, and the mayor will say, “How dare he [Trump] send in federal troops to patrol LA when we are doing just fine without them!”
The obese ones of the City Council standing behind her will nod in agreement, proclaiming their legal and constitutional rights to run Los Angeles the way they have always run it, with liberty for anyone, all the time, no matter who they are, what they’ve done, or if they even have the legal right to stand on American soil.
Liberty to burn parks! Freedom to destroy public property! Let our glorious experiment in city government live for eternity!
I recently spent a few days in Cleveland, OH on an exploratory trip, visiting a city I’ve never been to before to see how I liked it.
Cleveland has had a long, slow, drain of population, and it is now about 270,000. Less than the size of Glendale (200,000) and Pasadena (142,000) put together.
I stayed in Cleveland Heights, outside of the city, in an AIRBNB run by two guys who bought a half acre estate for $146,000 four years ago, and make some extra income hospitably renting out rooms in their home.
For me, I relished the time away from Los Angeles in an environment of lush greenery, green lawns, deer, and clean streets.
Overlook Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH.
$599,000 asking price for home in Cleveland Heights, OH.
Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH.
Sign in window on Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH.
Homes in the Mayfield Heights section of Cleveland Heights.
Mayfield Heights section of Cleveland Heights.
Cleveland Heights is also a historic city, full of blocks of homes from the 1880s to the 1940s, a rich, well-maintained, lovingly cared for collection of architecture, punctuated by churches, parkways, and museums. Case Western University and Cleveland Clinic are just outside its borders, to the south is Shaker Heights, an elegant town developed in the 1920s, laid out with nature preserves, winding streets, gracious mansions and a languid Midwestern grace.
There are many homes for sale in Cleveland Heights and you can buy one for as little as $79,000 with most in the $140,000-$250,000 range. If you are starved for a Hancock Park type mansion there is one I liked for $599,000.
Many miles of interior Cleveland are empty. They were abandoned, bulldozed and cleared away. And what’s left are vast green spaces where the grasses and woods are reclaiming the land.
Even in the poorest neighborhoods, I did not see garbage dumps, shopping carts full of trash, littered streets, graffiti, or dumped furniture.
Lakewood Park, Lakewood, OH.
Lakewood, OH.
Wedding in Lakewood.
In Lakewood, OH, just west of Cleveland, a little town on Lake Erie has rows of neat bungalows, leading up to a gorgeous park on the lake where a wedding (between a man and a woman) was taking place in the sunshine overlooking a bluff. I walked around the park, full of bicyclists, walkers, joggers, tennis players and people sitting on benches socializing. Nobody was intoxicated, high, homeless, destructive, or neglectful. And if someone were, I have no doubt they would be arrested.
Lakewood is also “gay friendly” with rainbow flags, anti-Trump posters, tolerance banners, welcoming immigrant signs. I saw liberalism all over Cleveland, but it did not need to co-exist with uncared for mentally ill camping out on bus benches, mountains of debris, urinating and defecating and injecting.
You can hate Trump and still have a clean park system.
Anti-Trump demonstration in Market Square, Cleveland, OH.
Tremont section of Cleveland.
Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
You can champion diversity and still enjoy people who say hello to you on the street and sweep their sidewalks every single morning.
In Cleveland, they still prohibit using the sidewalks and parks to sell old underwear and moldy shoes and sweat stained t-shirts and rancid socks on blankets. Nobody calls it discrimination to adhere to a standard of sanitation and order completely absent in cities such as Calcutta and the MacArthur Park district of Los Angeles.
I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I ate cannoli in Little Italy. I visited the historic West Side Market with its food sellers and ethnic hawker stands. I went to Ohio City, a restored section of Cleveland with brick houses, and Victorian mansions, loft buildings and yoga studios.
I didn’t step over feces, walk down alleys that smelled like toilets, stare at intoxicated men on the ground. And nobody asked me for money.
How cruel to enjoy such freedoms away from the rot of Mayor Garbageciti’s Los Angeles.
West Side Market, Cleveland, OH.
“The Black Pig” pub and restaurant in Ohio City.
Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
6/22/69- Fire on the Cuyahoga River.
Cuyahoga River
Ohio City.
Spotless streets in Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
Bridges and Parks and Skyline: Cleveland, OH.
I walked down to the Cuyahoga River, a body of water that infamously caught fire on June 22, 1969, spurring a cleanup.
In September 2018, I watched a race of college rowers in the now sparkling waters.
Crossing the river are many bridges, a spectacular symphony of rail and road, steel and concrete, which once provided Cleveland with efficient delivery systems of raw materials and finished goods.
Today the industries are gone. One might expect decay, litter, neglect, and illegal dumping to move in.
Yet the parks were pristine. They were clean. There were no visible homeless. There were no mattresses, sofas, or piles of garbage as one sees in every single neighborhood of Los Angeles. I did not see tent cities of despondency in Cleveland.
I was impressed with the civic pride of the city. I was taken with the normalcy of expecting that parks, streets and neighborhoods would be well kept and looked after.
In Panorama City near Roscoe and Tobias, a once bustling shopping center, housing a Montgomery Ward and Electric Avenue, sits in desolation and decay.
Acres of asphalt, decorated with some tree islands, surround windowless buildings paint washed in blues, pinks, grays, and greens.
A bustling, prosperous, crowded shopping center closed down and emerged as a 21st Century ghost town. The stores died but the ghosts are alive.
Los Angeles is like that. A wagon train of commercial banality moves around the city, setting up camp every decade and replacing what came before it. Melrose and Westwood were hot in the 80s and now it’s Santa Monica. Downtown LA was dead for so long. Now it is ascendant, and should stay that way until about 2030. Culver City is competing against Century City. Pasadena is jogging to keep in place, and upstart Glendale is emulating Beverly Hills.
And Reseda, Panorama City, Van Nuys, and Northridge are on life support.
Up there at Roscoe and Tobias something so vast and so important, a place that hundreds worked in, and thousands shopped at is gone, and waiting for a new huckster and a new plan.
What follows is purely imaginary but may contain some grains of truth.
No doubt, when the powers that be ordain it, it will be “mixed use” and appear gentle and green and village like. There will be fountains and benches and lounges and 14 movie theaters and 2 Costcos interspersed between senior living, child friendly, family welcoming, diversity hiring, green-certified and wifi-enabled promises.
The LA Times and the Daily News will write about it. But nobody will read it. An uninformed citizenry is the best choice for a nation hoping to remain powerless or for a community uninterested, unprepared and unlearned in its own future.
There will be a groundbreaking event with Mayor Eric Garcetti, Councilwoman Nury Martinez, LA Philharmonic Conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the St. Genevieve Catholic Church Choir, the Kaiser Permanente/Westfield Mall Hospital Executive Board, along with LAFD red fire trucks, LAPD black and white police cars and actors Eric Estrada, Mario Lopez, Eva Longoria and Jennifer Lopez. KCAL will interrupt regular broadcasting to cover “breaking news” here.
Today’s event marks the revitalization of Panorama City!
This is a new day for Panorama City with walkable, urban living 20 miles north of the city center.
This will be the finest shopping center between Van Nuys and Pacoima!
When civilization comes to Los Angeles it has to be underwritten by banks, the Chinese Government and the Westfield Corporation.
I imagine it will be centered around walking. But no buses will stop here.
There will be 100 affordable income apartments renting for $2800 a month, and 4,000 market priced units starting at $800,000.
There will be an 8-story tall parking structure for 5,000 cars, and 10 bikes and high-security cameras surrounding it all.
In the 110-degree heat, black spandex clad people will drive here in their air-conditioned SUVs. They’ll eat organic ice cream, climb artificial rock walls, work out at the new 24 Hour Fitness and emerge to drink ice coffee. They will eat Unami Burgers, drink Golden Road beer, and shop at Crate and Barrel. Every weekend, three new blockbuster films will screen here, and thousands of tattooed fatties in flip-flops will pay $16 a ticket to watch computer generated toys destroy the Earth.
President Donald Trump will send congratulatory messages to the community where nobody voted for him and promise “amazing and unbelievable things” for Panorama City. Forgotten was his promise to deport which would have brought the population of the area to less than 100 people.
Or maybe none of the above will happen, and the big frontier will go on a little longer, a reminder of what shopping center life was like in 1975.
Here in Van Nuys 
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