Los Angeles sometimes wakes up to discover that not enforcing the law somehow becomes self-fulfilling.
If you allow anyone to sleep anywhere, if you permit trailers to park on the street and become permanent housing, if you think it’s OK, tolerant, liberal, open-minded, sympathetic, empathetic to turn parks, bus benches, 7Eleven, parking lots, cars, river banks, every square inch of public space, into a homeless encampment, then you will turn every square inch of public space into a homeless encampment.
You get on a Red Line train to ride it downtown, and you see five or six people and their belongings sleeping on board. Nobody does anything to stop it. Some kids get on the train, turn up a radio, start dancing and go around asking for donations. Nobody stops it. You are living in a loony bin. But it’s all cool….
If you think its Ok to see women defecate on Hollywood Boulevard, if you have to walk to the other side of LaBrea because a man is urinating on the sidewalk in front of you, it’s just the way it is. At least you are not homeless! So have some regard for everyone who is!
Those ten people with shopping baskets who moved in next door. Just ignore it. Let it be. Those twenty people living in tents on Bessemer and Cedros? Just use the 311 App. The city will clean it up. Mayor Garrett and the LAPD and Ms. Nury Martinez know about the situation. There is nothing law enforcement, city government, or the military can do.
Sometimes the city becomes alarmed. The LA Times writes profound editorials that nobody reads. It is March 2, 2018. The problem, the crisis, the war on affordable housing, all of it must be a priority!
An emergency is called. The government asks citizens to pay a tax to solve a problem which the government created by not enforcing the law.
And suddenly it becomes normal to live in a filthy garbage dump of a city, Los Angeles, and nothing can be done about it.
In neighborhoods all over the city: break-ins, thefts, assaults, burglaries, stolen bikes, panhandling, illegal drugs, drinking in public, all of it is cool man, it’s OK dude. No worries…..
Through the virtual sheet of postage stamps on my smartphone, I learned of an event, with music and men’s fashion, held last night at Rogue Collective at 305 S. Hewitt St. in the Arts District.
Due to the constraints of my domestic relationship, I drove down alone around 5pm, the most beautiful part of the day in late winter.
I sped down the 2, crawled on Glendale, accelerated on Sunset, turned onto Alameda and found a parking spot on E. 2nd St., now built fine with dark brick loftettes where children under 30 live in $3,000 rooms and rent zip cars.
It was a cold night, a gorgeous night, and I had dressed up in wool plaid pants, a black turtleneck, a new wool zip cardigan sweater, and a gray wool beanie from 1995, along with suede lace up boots. I mention all this because I thought about how I would look at an event where every gesture and style would end up on the virtual sheet of postage stamps.
As I walked alone down S. Garey St. and E. 3rd St., past people eating ice cream in the cold, past the bright artworks and candlelit tables where people dined, it was like 30 years ago in New York City’s Soho.
Inside the Rogue Collective, site of the Gooch Collective, I saw the people from the virtual postage stamps.
I knew many. Nobody knew me.
@ethanmwong in beret
Credit: @ethanmwong
@ethanmwong was there, a stylish photographer who favors retro clothing from the early 1940s and reminded me of those Margaret Bourke White images of evacuated Japanese-Americans from the West Coast who wore high-waisted khakis, fedoras, cinched leather bomber jackets and double breasted suits on their way to prison camps.
I told him about “Out of the Past” (1947) and how his jacket reminded me of one worn by the sheriff. He didn’t know the movie, but he looked as if he came from that time.
@goochybaby
The host: limber, loose, effusive @goochybaby a tall, thin, bearded and handsome man who looks good in flood length trousers and anything else. He recently moved from San Francisco to Studio City.
The star performer was @goochybaby brother @joshuaraygooch another natty dresser, seemingly talented, who plays guitar and has great riffs and swinging, blunt cut hair. I wondered if the Gooch Brothers were related to writer Brad Gooch.
There was the guy who makes the fancy shoes @2120handcrafted. He lives in Lincoln Heights and some of his shoes are upholstered with cow-hair. He recently wrote about his ventures on Facebook:
“The last few months have been amazing for 2120. Garret and I [me]. [We] have been selling at both the Rose Bowl Flea Market and Melrose Trading Post where we have connected with some amazing new customers. It’s simply just us enjoying our Sunday speaking to people about our shoes. Thank you all so much for the support and as always, feel free to join us today at Melrose.”
@bradleyjcalder
Tall, blond, long-haired photographer @bradleyjcalder was there in bell-bottoms and I asked him to try on a strangely gorgeous salmon colored jacket from @clutchgolf. I wondered if he was related to artist Alexander Calder.
In the virtual postage stamp rollout of friends, people who knew one another, people whom I just met, everyone was a friend, all had been inducted into a club where creatives supported creatives and all ventures were destined for success.
There was a link online, a chain of love, holding everyone together, every hashtag and heart was a gesture of affection and support.
To paraphrase Pharoah: “So it was posted. So it will be done.”
The cow-hair shoe man told me that the long-haired photographer, “an expert studio shooter” would be creating visuals for a new 2120 catalog. @goochybaby told me @ethanmwong was amazing and @ethanmwong told me we had to grab coffee.
I don’t think anybody that attended the event last night bought anything, such as the $200 shirts, $250 trousers or $80 candles or the exquisite, unconstructed salmon colored sportcoat. Or perhaps they did. I’m making assumptions…
One of the characteristics of young artsy life is that everything is a promotion, but nobody gets paid, so nobody can afford anything, but the virtual postage stamp rollout convinces the world you are dazzlingly successful.
In the end, I left, shaking hands, not hugging, retaining the vestiges of my generation where you only hugged people you knew and loved, mostly in private.
I walked back, alone, and passed an outdoor, black and white sign at Inko Nito restaurant which read:
The architectural blog Dezeen has a cornucopia of outstanding designs from around the world.
They have many projects from Japan, including small homes, which the Japanese have constructed all around the densely populated country.
The Gap House, by MUU Store Design Studio, (shown above) only covers a total area of 200 square feet, yet it embodies an inventive, imaginative and practical way to live, with its light-filled interior and clean, modern layout.
It is sandwiched between two other buildings, yet it does not feel claustrophobic. The house is located in a residential area near Sagami Bay in Kanagawa Prefecture,Japan.
Alleys are where these small homes are constructed. In Japan, most alleys are fastidiously neat. Nobody desecrates their environment in Japan.
Here in Van Nuys our alleys tell our stories of how we value ourselves, our city and our nation:
Van Nuys
Van Nuys
Around Van Nuys there are numerous places where this type of housing could be erected, and the benefits of building this type are many.
They are more affordable, they could provide walkable, new, community oriented housing near Van Nuys Boulevard, and they would help in the revitalization of our community.
Right now, Van Nuys is zoned to deny imaginative solutions to our housing crisis. We need to free up zoning to allow, encourage and incentivize developers, architects, investors and small-home builders to build more with less restrictions.
The alternative is the bleak, expensive, dirty, dilapidated slum of current day downtown and vicinity Van Nuys. It is appalling but it must not be our future. We must step up and change it for the better.
Last week, I walked down N. Windsor Ave., a street just south of Paramount Studios, a few blocks east of Larchmont, in Hancock Park.
Windsor Ave. is full of artful, old, well-maintained housing, in a variety of styles and forms. There are 1920s and 30s Spanish, Bungalow, Art Deco, Colonial and blessedly few Canoga Park-like stucco uglies with iron fences and cinderblock walls. But the main layout is a small building, one or two stories high, with parking in the back.
The mixture of single and multi-family provides an eclecticism and rhythm to the tree-lined, quiet street.
This was an area that probably provided housing for people of modest incomes who worked in the studios. They lived within walking distance of work, and they spent a modest part of their income on rent. Some had cars, some did not, but they could shop, work and live without driving.
An area like N. Windsor Ave. simply could not spring up organically today. Zoning laws would separate multi-family from single-family and there would be onerous parking requirements. A building with six attached units would probably require 12 parking spaces.
I looked with envy on this street and wondered why it could not be emulated in my reviving neighborhood in Van Nuys?
Then I imagined the bitching on Next Door if a developer proposed six attached units next to a single-family neighborhood. “Where the hell are they going to park?” “Who’s going to live there?” “This place is turning into a ghetto!” “Those developers are so greedy!” “I don’t want no weirdo looking down on my backyard from his bedroom!”
Los Angeles used to be so much simpler back in the 1920s.
“Sheila James Kuehl (born February 9, 1941) is an Americanpolitician and former child actor, currently the member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for the 3rd District. In 1994, she became the first openly gay California legislator and in 1997, she was the first woman to be named Speaker pro Tempore in California.[2] Kuehl most recently served as a Democratic member of the CaliforniaState Senate, representing the 23rd district in Los Angeles County and parts of southern Ventura County. A former member of the California State Assembly, she was elected to the Senate in 2000 and served until December 2008. She was elected to her supervisorial post in 2014. In her capacity as Supervisor, she also sits on the Metro Board, First 5 LA, and is the County appointee to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.” – Wikipedia
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Metro Los Angeles Board
Re. Metro “Option A” Plan for Light Rail Yard in Van Nuys
Dear Board Members:
As you are aware, Metro Los Angeles is planning to erect a light rail service yard in Van Nuys. “Option A” is one of four sites proposed by the agency.
“Option A” would seize land NE of Kester and Oxnard, along four blocks, covering 33 acres, and demolish 186 buildings straddling the Orange Line Busway. For the purpose of this letter the area will be called “Kesterville.”
We are vehemently opposed to this plan. Here is why:
186 small, family run businesses, employing an estimated 1,500 workers, occupying affordable, mostly rented space would be destroyed.
It would leave a gaping hole of emptiness blocks from downtown Van Nuys, obliterating plans for a denser, walkable area.
Option A will take out yet another engine of well-paying, highly skilled jobs and products, made in America, employing many immigrants and local residents.
It needlessly destroys a successful, close-knit pocket of creativity and commerce, manufacturing, and makers of unique goods and services found nowhere else in Los Angeles.
It will reduce fair priced, rentable industrial space in a city starved for it, in an area that is already served by public transport and contains more affordable housing.
Option A will subtract from the city what it is seeking to promote region wide: affordability, mobility, economic innovation, small business, local industry, ethnic diversity, and community cohesiveness.
The Van Nuys Neighborhood Council opposes Option A.
Within this dense, vital district are found a historic music recording studio, a maker of top quality metal hardware utilizing 3-D printers and advanced machinery, several fine custom cabinet builders and their craftsmen, an expert stained glass artisan whose work embellishes homes, churches and historic buildings, a restorer of Vespa motorbikes whose facility is the only one of its kind east of Pennsylvania, and a 20,000 SF shop where vintage Mustangs are serviced and restored. There are painters, carpenters, builders, and experts repairing racing boats, and several professional recording studios for musicians.
MacLeod Ale, a craft brewer of UK style ales, opened in 2014 and has become a highly successful and respected beer maker. They are located on Calvert St. adjacent to the Option A area.
Kesterville is a place of creativity, productivity, sustainability and viability. Organically, without government coercion or corporate ownership, it is an incubator of ideas and products. It has been alive for decades, growing more prosperous and doing well in the heart of the oldest part of the San Fernando Valley.
If Kesterville is destroyed, it will recall the most heartless obliterations in Los Angeles history: the razing of Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium, the flattening of historic Bunker Hill for corporate behemoths, and the bulldozing of West Adams for the Santa Monica Freeway.
Dodger Stadium, 1961. On land formerly housing poor Mexican families at Chavez Ravine.1959:Evictions from Chavez Ravine.1959: Families are Forcibly Evicted from Chavez Ravine to Make Way for Dodger Stadium.1935: Boys in Chavez Ravine
Van Nuys has already suffered social, economic and environmental neglect. Why compound the injury by robbing it of yet another burgeoning and blossoming area that could become a new district of small businesses, restaurants, cafes, and even urban, in-fill small housing?
We urge you to respond to this civic emergency by opposing “Option A” and the demolition and eviction of sound businesses that support many thousands of families struggling to survive in a brutal time of economic insecurity.
We are in favor of light rail, and public transportation in general, but ask that it be constructed with greater sensitivity to the community so that it is compatible within the urban landscape and causes the least amount of damage to communities within our city.
After WWII, Italy was poor, the roads were torn up by war, and the new democratically elected government was prohibited to build military hardware. Industrial revitalization was a must. So innovative militarists turned to consumer products to employ workers and restart the economy.
The Vespa (“Wasp” in Italian) grew out of this era.
It was designed and built by aerospace engineers to satisfy postwar transportation needs economically. They created a scooter, with all the mechanical parts enclosed, and a tall frontal splashguard, features which appealed to Italian men in suits and women in dresses. There was no grease to splatter on well-tailored woolens, and the versatile, small, well-engineered bike travelled well on narrow, pockmarked streets.
Piaggio & Co. introduced it and still owns and manufactures Vespa.
After its debut in 1946, it sold slowly, if solidly.
Then “Roman Holiday” (1952) starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, filmed on location in Rome, skyrocketed the Vespa’s popularity. Suddenly 100,000 a year were selling. The popularity of films such as “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and the neo-realist Italian cinema of the 50s and 60s made all things Italian seem fast, young and glamorous. The mid 1960s Mod Subculture in Britain, dudes in Ben Sherman shirts and skinny ties and tapered trousers, furthered pushed the Vespa into pop culture.
The Mods, Britain, mid-1960sIn the US, even Sears imported Vespas and renamed them Cruiseaires. By 1981, the bike had lost popularity due to environmental laws. Yet again, in the early 2000s, Vespa restarted its American sales effort, opening its first boutique on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, CA hoping to capitalize on our four CA freedoms: sunshine, mobility, novelty, and fun.
According to Wikipedia, there have been 34 different versions of the Vespa. Today, five series are in production: the classic manual transmission PX and the modern CVT transmission S, LX, GT, and GTS.
About 4 miles north of the Vespa retail store, at an unmarked building at 14819 Aetna St. in Van Nuys, Kristian Storli, 39 is quietly, diligently and artfully restoring Vespas, at his company, Bar Italia Classics, established 2006. According to Mr. Storli, it is the only shop of its type from here to Pennsylvania.
You pass through a gate into a courtyard packed with tools and bikes, all under some sort of repair, but then you enter a stylish, air-cooled, gray-painted, 3600 SF shop, unlike any you’ve ever been to, with vintage illustrations, glass shelves filled with awards and medals, antique framed advertising for Vespas, and a very large movie poster of Angie Dickinson atop a Vespa in “Jessica” (1962) directed by Jean Negulesco.
“Sicilian women plan to rid their village of a sexy American midwife (Angie Dickinson) by making her job obsolete.”
Angie Dickinson, 1962.
Obsolete is what haunts Mr. Storli, a stocky, blue-eyed, mechanical minded man of Norwegian descent who went to school to study musical composition, and ended up investing his life savings into his Vespa passion. He has had three shops in the last ten years: first on Calvert, then Bessemer, and now Aetna.
C, B, A….. Ominously for him there is no letter preceding A.
Each time, rents and leases ended. And this time, he fears, he may become redundant by Option A, if his shop, and 185 others are demolished by Metro Los Angeles for a 33-acre rail service yard.
Nevertheless, there is a rhythmic beat and output of bikes at the shop. Many restorations take 12-18 months and require each machine:
To be disassembled and inspected,
Stripped of old paint on engine and body parts,
Hardware sent out for plating,
Reassembling the machine to peak condition in both function and appearance.
Full payments are dependent upon delivery of the finished product to its owner.
It is a painstaking job, only undertaken by devotees and acolytes in the cult of Vespa, but the result, as one can see in a finished product, is the absolutely breathtaking beauty of the timeless and completely Italian product. The smooth and shiny gracefulness of a finished bike exudes sensuality and speed.
One day a few weeks back, working inside his dream factory, Mr. Storli was jolted with a bomb of an announcement: He might have to move to make way for a 33-acre demolition project bulldozing 186 businesses for a future light rail maintenance yard operated by Metro Los Angeles.
He had only moved into his third, and presumably final shop, this year, 2017. He lost over a year of income when he had to move the second time. Now he was threatened with new economic ruin, not by a downturn in business, but by an aggressive action of a government agency using Eminent Domain powers to evict lawful enterprises.
He told me that he is deflated, worried, and panicked. He has started, grudgingly, to look for other affordable space in Los Angeles. But the rental vacancy rate for industrial property is only one percent. And the competition is marijuana growers paying three times the asking rate to landlords.
To lose so many businesses is sad.
But it is doubly tragic to see a completely original and unique craftsman, Mr. Storli, thrown out of his space. It is one more step in the homogenization of Los Angeles, where shortsighted bureaucrats fail to protect unique and skillfully constructed products and services when they are operated by small businesses. But every corner store is CVS or Starbucks.
We need excellent public transport.
But grotesquely destructive and obliterating plans to build a light rail yard through viable and productive industrial tracts only harms Los Angeles -by destroying the real and the good -by promising the imaginary and the perfect.
Here in Van Nuys 
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