Tag: LA Fitness

Squandered Opportunities

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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.

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Repavement and Regret

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , 4 Comments

 

For those whose intimate, internal bodily movements and outer mobility are regulated by motor vehicle, this was a weekend of challenge and frustration.

Without official warning, or public service announcement, Victory Boulevard, all eight lanes of it, were repaved between Kester and Sepulveda. It was possibly the first time it had been improved since all the pepper trees were ripped out in 1955 for its first widening.

In the historical traditions of Van Nuys, the new Victory Boulevard project will come without any amenities: no bike lanes, no center median of trees, no decorative lighting, no plantings and no safe crosswalks.

In our neighborhood, just north of Victory, between Kester and Sepulveda, the repaving anger was palpable, the pain deep, the suffering great.

For there is a large colony of culinarily disabled people on our street.

Large house payments prevent ownership of non-essentials, like coffee makers, so many of our neighbors, on weekends, get out of bed, slip into their SUVs in their pajamas, and drive three minutes to McDonalds, on Kester and Victory, to get scalding, industrial, assembly line coffee in Styrofoam and bring it back home. For them, the inability to drive to the drive-in was cruel.

At LA Fitness, on Sepulveda near Erwin, a new mall is under construction on the north side, and there are also orange pylons blocking the parking lot entrance, which affects members at the gym by consuming valuable parking spaces.

Yesterday, I saw an angry, old, black-haired woman driving around the parking lot of the gym in her prune purple,’71 Chevy Nova, unable to find a spot. Her mouth was spitting out a torrent of obscenities, her hands were like death grips around the neck of the steering wheel, she braked and accelerated in fits and jerks. She simply could not find a place for her car.

Minutes earlier, a convoy of young moms met up for dance class and took up six handicapped parking spaces at the gym but the  Angry Old Woman in the Nova knew nothing.

A normal weekend on Victory Boulevard is full of nocturnal sirens, from ambulances, police and fire. Usually at least one person is shot by gun or run over by car, or a speeding, intoxicated driver flips over and is either gravely injured or killed. Bank robbers, who usually arrive by car, found no work these past two days at Chase or Wells Fargo on Sepulveda at Victory.

All the workaday business of the boulevard terminated.

This past weekend was eerily quiet. The lack of danger, the absence of tragedy, upset many who live along the eight-lane speedway. There was only a thick scrim of dust, on Saturday, to remind people that Victory exists to pollute and desecrate.

When Victory Boulevard does not move with motorists, the people are alarmed, and demand a return to normality, which the repaved roadway promises to bring back tomorrow.

One Story Town

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

One Story Town is Sepulveda Bl., from Oxnard St. north to Victory Bl.

It is 2,569 feet long, almost a half a mile. It encompasses the Orange Line Metro Busway, LA Fitness, Costco, Wendy’s, Chef’s Table, The Barn, CVS, Dunn Edwards, Bellagio Car Wash, Wells Fargo Bank, Enterprise, Jiffy Lube and other small businesses selling used cars, folding doors, RV rentals, Chinese food, hair cutting, and ceramic tile.

The Southern Pacific freight trains once ran through the present day Orange Line, and they fashioned the district into a lumber- oriented, light industrial area. Such behemoths as Builder’s Emporium were located here, and the stretch of Oxnard that borders the old rail line has retained an industrial use.

The zoning designations for almost all the parcels along Sepulveda are commercial. They prohibit residential within walking distance of the Orange Line, and they prohibit it even though buses run up and down Sepulveda!

A beautifully maintained bus stop perfectly sited for long waits in 110 degree heat.

Available online for public research, is the Los Angeles’ ZIMAS, a website run by the Department of City Planning. Here one can select a parcel, for example, 6206 Sepulveda Blvd., where The Barn furniture store is located, and see that it occupies two parcels totaling 44,250 SF. It is not, according to ZIMAS, in a transit-oriented area, nor is it designated as a pedestrian oriented one, nor is it part of a community redevelopment one.

Someday the owners of The Barn, which has sold, since 1945, brown stained furniture in heavy wood to seemingly nobody, may choose to sell their business. And here there is enormous potential to develop a first-class residential and commercial building just steps from the Orange Line.

Residents of Halbrent St. just east of The Barn and other businesses, are on the ass-end of parking lots, illegally parked homeless RVs, and are subject to the use of their street as a speedway for cars entering and exiting Costco. Maybe, just for once, Halbrent St. might see a better development on its west side.

Every single one of the businesses, up and down Sepulveda, between Oxnard and Victory, is located, by observation, in a transit- oriented area. Yet ZIMAS states they are not.

Perhaps that will change as Los Angeles reviews its zoning, and permits taller, denser, more walkable development within a 5-minute walk from public transit.

At dusk, with the early October sun hitting the one-story buildings, there is a homely, lowbrow, neat banality to the structures along this stretch.

This is not the worst of Van Nuys. It is generally tidy. But nobody living nearby, some residing in million-dollar homes, would come here to mingle, to socialize, to sit and drink coffee, eat cake, shop or walk with their kids after dark.

Studio City has Tujunga Village.

Tujunga Village, Studio City, CA. Photo by John Sequiera.

And we, in Van Nuys, have, this:

The One Story Town: what is it and what could it be? Might this district, one day, contain vibrant restaurants, outdoor cafes, beer gardens, garden apartments, parks, trees, flowers, fountains? Why not?

In planning for 2027, 2037, 2047 and beyond why would we keep the preferences of car-oriented, suburban dreaming, 1975 Van Nuys, in place? Why are thousands of parking spaces at the Orange Line Busway used to store cars for Keyes Van Nuys? Is this the best we can do?

Could not a group of architects, developers, urban planners, government leaders and vocal citizens devise a Sepulveda Plan to transform this wasted opportunity into something better, or even ennobling?

Where is our vision? And why are we so starved for it when we live inside Los Angeles, the greatest factory of imagination, illusion and improvisation the world has ever seen?

 

Decline Press, a new short story

Posted in Short Stories, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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Those of you who follow me on this blog may also know I write short stories.

“Decline Press” is my latest.

It is a work of fiction based upon some of the most ominpresent issues of our time: economic hardship, race relations and law enforcement, and the struggle of an Iraq War vet, Derek Moss, who builds his life anew only to see everything pulled out from under him. Whether Mr. Moss is self-destructive or merely the author of his own self-destruction is up for interpretation.  As his world unravels he is pursued by an admirer, Conner Loh, who is also the narrator of this story.

It all takes place right here in Van Nuys and is set in such glamorous locations as Lido Pizza, MacLeod Ale, LA Fitness, Fatburger, Bevmo and Galpin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LA Fitness Van Nuys.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

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Fast-food wrappers and soda containers litter the parking lot of the LA Fitness on Sepulveda in Van Nuys.

For at least five months, discarded lumber, illegally dumped, has lain scattered.  Members on their way to step class or leaving the gym scarf down burgers, fries and dump their refuse right on the pavement.

The culture of Van Nuys.

 

Advancing North: The Treadmill of Civilization

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

Photo by Hector Sanchez
Photo by Hector Sanchez

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Civilization, as it is known to exist in Van Nuys, marched north on Sepulveda, and has now crossed Oxnard.

LA Fitness opened yesterday, many many square feet of ellipticals, treadmills, racquetball courts and indecipherable machines aimed at every body part on human bones.

Occupying the very spot where couch potatoes worshipped, Wickes Furniture, the new gym promises to bring an active lifestyle to an area where the Gluteus Maximus is almost extinct, and 16-year-old girls are considered anorexic at 300 pounds.

Bow-fronted, brown, low, and wide, the corporate architecture echoes its clientele. Doors open graciously, in the LA way, onto a wide parking lot, around which spin the orbiting stars of Wendy’s, Costco, Fatburger, CVS and Star Kitchen.

The new building turns its back away from the Metro Orange Line Busway. The Bus Rider and The Pedestrian will have to take the long walk around the north side of the building and enter through the parking lot side. Clearly this structure was designed somewhere in Texas, possibly by someone unfamiliar with Google Maps.

This morning I took an unguided tour of the interior which begins with a pool, an iconic symbol of sunny Southern California, placed indoors at the shady and dark NW corner, near the check-in, with many windows open to viewing for arriving and departing members. The wet old man in the Speedo will be the first image implanted on future arrivals.

But the equipment is, to use a reality TV word, amazing. There are dozens of aerobic machines, now equipped with iphone ready TV screens, so that sweat and heavy breathing can keep an eye and ear on Bill Reilly and Anderson Cooper.

Assembled like a marching army regiment are treadmills, bikes, weight machines, free weights, racquetball courts, and the most important feature of all: walls of mirrors.

Rusted stall doors, pee on toilet seats, un-flushed shit, the smoldering smell of cum in the men’s sauna, 400 lb weights left on leg presses, arguments, indifferent and constantly quitting trainers, torn shower curtains and clogged sinks, stolen wallets and broken-in windows in nighttime parked cars; all these future events have yet to happen here.

For now the glory is in the opening.

The carpeting is new, the paint is fresh, we are older but our gym is newer, and if we go here everyday, and eat healthy, we may live out the rest of our lives here in Van Nuys.