Tag: Erwin

A Twelve-Acre Parking Lot

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Erwin at Sepulveda, Metro Orange Line Parking Lot.

When the Metro Orange Line opened in October 2005, it was a stunningly different type of transport system which combined a bus only road with a landscaped bike path that ran alongside. It cost about $325 million.

It connected North Hollywood with Woodland Hills, and eventually carried over 30,000 riders a day. Since 2015, due to Uber and Lyft, ridership has fallen to about 22,000 a day.

Hundreds of homeless encampments have sprung up on the bike trail.

But Metro forges ahead!

There are plans to create gated crossings at intersections to speed up bus travel. There are long-term ideas to convert the entire system to light rail and also build elevated bridges over Van Nuys Boulevard and Sepulveda.

In Van Nuys, at Sepulveda and Erwin (north of Oxnard), there is a car parking lot for the Orange Line Metro riders. It is over 526,000 square feet, paved in asphalt, planted with trees and shrubs, and comprises over 12 acres.

Today, over 2/3 of it is used as an outdoor storage lot for Keyes Auto.

Red area is the parking lot of the Orange Line. It is now used predominately to store autos from Keyes Audi. (Source: ZIMAS)

The Sepuvleda/Erwin site is “Exhibit A” in the DNA of Los Angeles, because the right thing to do would be constructing 10-20 story apartments along the public transit route and creating incentives for residents to ride buses, take trains and use bikes for daily commuting.

Singapore Housing Estate with parks and nearby public transportation.

If LA were Singapore, Tokyo or Toronto we would do that.

Instead our city languishes and fights and wishes to preserve a 1950s idea of everyone going somewhere by car. 

And thousands of new cars are lovingly housed on land paid for by public taxes which should be used as housing and parks for the greater good of this city.

Nothing beneficial for Los Angeles ever happens overnight. It takes years of planning and legal battles, for example, to build assisted or low cost housing, or parks. 

One can imagine the fury and fear that might arise if a 12- acre park and housing development were planned on this parking lot ranch.

Imaginery view from Sepulveda and Erwin looking west. In reality, Singapore.

What, by miracle of God, might be possible here in terms of a park or high-rise group of apartments, placed near the bus line, with a buffer of trees, water features, and gardens between the new residential city and the single-family houses to the north of the site?

Yet here, alongside a public transit route, taxpayer funded Metro Los Angeles chooses to rent its land for an auto dealership. How does that benefit the surrounding residents?

For people who are obsessed with traffic, imagine that thousands of vehicles are parked here ready to be turned on and put onto the roads. How does that feel Van Nuys?

If the new planned housing estate were policed, regulated, secure, and it also provided a new park wouldn’t that be an improvement?

Orange Line Metro Parking Lot at Sepulveda/Erwin

Squandered Opportunities

Posted in EnvironmentTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Nearing completion, now, is a one-story mini-mall on the north end of the LA Fitness parking lot near Sepulveda and Erwin.

Pleasantly innocuous, in a beige/brown way, the mall (with circa 1999 cornice) is being landscaped, pretty extensively, all around, with various trees and shrubs to decorate the sea of asphalt.

Zoned commercial,  this is also next door to a Wendy’s, also recently naturalized, with new water saving plants and a modernistic, horizontally striped renovation. Customers who feast on industrial meat, sugary soda, and frozen French Fries, all trucked in from Iowa, will do so surrounded by native California succulents.

This is all bordering the Metro Orange Line Parking Lot, 50% of which is occupied as a storage center for not-yet-sold new Keyes Automobiles. This scientifically zoned area is irrationally sited along an efficient, pleasant bus line that runs on schedule and connects Van Nuys to Hollywood and Downtown Los Angeles.

Left over in the new mini-mall layout is a rectangular island of land that, in my imagination, I envision as a small apartment building or even a white, wooden Colonial house, a residential arrangement that provides living space for people who can walk next door to the gym, stop for milk at CVS, ride their bikes on the bike path, and most importantly, are there to populate, energize and humanize a sea of parking spaces.

I picked “Colonial” to lovingly pander to the nearby residents of privileged, filmed upon Orion Ave. hoping they might not object to an 18th Century House with a garden in front, housing a nice coffee place or a fort-monthly locale for filming Target and Walmart commercials.

Why not build something on this open spot like these below:

But, for now, the neat, empty rectangle of land is unoccupied with forms either natural or man-made.

This waste of land, and the time-wasting, perpetual, irritating and circular question, “Where will they park?” dominates the beginning and end of any discussion of new apartments, housing or commercial building in Los Angeles.

If there is no room for 1,000 New Hummers in that New 200 Unit Apartment…then I say, to hell with it, let people sleep on the street in tents!

What exists, when it’s built, is a battleground of short-tempered drivers circling parking lots, looking for parking, even when there are 2,000 or 3,000 spaces provided for their temporary storage!

So the opportunity for a new, innovative, and imaginative kind of development, one that integrates the commercial and the residential, is again squandered.

Why?

What have we got to lose?

We are already losing.

SaveSave

A Stark Place.

Posted in Architecture, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

The center of Van Nuys is the Civic Center. The raison d’etre of this pedestrian mall: nobody comes here unless they are forced to.

Here is where you come to file small claims, to appear before a judge, to file plans for a room addition, to borrow a book, to speak to your Councilwoman, to talk to a cop, to ask for an extension of probation.

You can also push your shopping cart full of belongings here, plop on a bench, open a bottle of vodka and drink yourself silly without interference. There are guards, guns, and security cameras, but they are aimed at the general public, not intoxicated people covered in four weeks of dirt.

There is one glorious structure, built in 1933, the Valley Municipal Building. And then there is everything around it, including the “new” library (1964), the “new” LAPD (1965), the Marvin Braude Center (1994), the Van Nuys Courthouse East (1965), the Van Nuys Courthouse West (1990), the James C Corman Federal Building (1973) and the double decker County Parking Facility at 6170 Sylmar Ave. an $850,000 symphony of concrete opened in 1968. Also vast and comprehensive: the LAPD Motor Transport Facility at 6170 Tyrone Ave. where cop cars are prettied up behind fences.

If you want to register a new business you can come to the Los Angeles County Registrar at 14340 Sylvan St. and make your way past half a dozen aggressive hucksters passing out business cards in which they offer, for a fee, to transact your business for you.

If Van Nuys were a 1962 film by Michaelangelo Antonioni, its stark, barren, nuclear winter surroundings would make for an immensely powerful setting showing the alienation of man from urban environment.

There is so much concrete here, the place is awash in it. It is sculptured, sliced, stacked, plated, affixed, drilled, and molded into so many walls, sidewalks, plazas, and decorative designs. Never before and not since 1964-70, has concrete been so worshipped, so valued, so esteemed, not just for freeways but for art itself.

Come here if you can, just to see the concrete.

The empty post office.

The Empty Spaces

Posted in Architecture, Economy, Environment, Links, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Large expanses of asphalt and black tar bake in sun day after day. These are the parking lots behind retail stores, many untenanted, forgotten and forlorn on the west side of Halbrent,north of Erwin, east of Sepulveda.

This area is chiefly known for two businesses: The Barn, a six-decade-old, red-sided furniture store and Star Restaurant Equipment & Supply advertised for 12 hours every weekend on KNX-1070 by radio fillibusteress Melinda Lee.

The Barn uses its parking lot to store trucks. But next door to the north, lot after lot is empty.

I came here this morning with a camera, lens cap off, a provocative act in the bracero’s hood. In the shadows, undocumented workers hide behind doorways and look away when I aim my digital weapon at asphalt.  I mean the Mexicans no harm or ill will.

Blithely walking and lightly thinking, daydreaming, I forgot that I have no business here amidst the enormity of emptiness and unproductivity.

I’m looking for a story, for an angle, for a job.

So many are out of work and so much can be done to employ mind and muscle and money.

There is such a wealth and a waste of land in Los Angeles, and America in general. Imagine what Tokyo or Bangkok would do with all these unused acres!

These empty spaces are within a five-minute walk from public transportation, Costco, LA Fitness, CVS and Staples as well as two grammar schools, three banks and an Asian supermarket.

This is a walkable place.

A well-financed visionary could build a low-rise, dense, green, urban farm upon these entombed soils, plant Oak trees, create a little garden with fresh fruits and vegetables, oranges, lemons, and asparagus.

This is a place of potential.

An architect could design some functional and modern attached houses, artfully shading them with native trees.

But for now, the parking lots suffer in silence; waiting for the day that California fires up its economy, wakes up from its long slumber and pushes progress.