Nury Martinez – Page 2 – Here in Van Nuys

Blight Walk.

June 19, 2015June 19, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "6522 Columbus Avenue", "Alex Barker", "Kathy Jo Reiterman", "Marinel C Agbunag", "Marty Azoulay", "Real Estate", Abandonment, Absentee, Guillermo Marquez., Homes, LAPD, Neglect, Nury Martinez, Re-Max Grand Central, San Fernando ValleyLeave a comment

DSCF0031 — 6552 Columbus Avenue; owner: Marinel C Agbunag

DSCF0016 — 6522 Columbus Avenue, Van Nuys, CA 91411 Alex Barker, owner.

The houses are unoccupied, neglected. The parched grass grows high, bottles and cans are everywhere, and their owners are seemingly oblivious to their blighted properties.

This is not a slum. This is Columbus Avenue between Hamlin and Kittridge, where some absentee owners have allowed large parcels of land to fall into abuse, or permitted and set up illegal businesses towing and storing cars.

For many years, complaints from residences about the eyesores have flooded into Former Councilman Tony Cardenas’s offices and are now on the desk of Nury Martinez, whose Field Deputy, Guillermo Marquez, joined LAPD Lead Officer Erica Kirk for a walking tour of the shabby, un-chic area.

Both Officer Kirk and Field Deputy Guillermo Marquez are consummate professionals: responsive, articulate, hard-working and complete attributes to our area. They spent hours yesterday listening to the gripes and the stories of crime and neglect.

DSCF0038 — 6522 Columbus Avenue, Van Nuys, CA 91411 Alex Barker, owner.

Yet responsibility for the empty houses goes back to the owners who created, selfishly and without logic, properties that do not produce income and bring down the value of other homes around them.

In Los Angeles, it seems impossible to find affordable houses for purchase for people who make less than $100,000 a year. And others sleep in their cars, or in RVs, or on park benches. Rents are over $1500 a month, for two bedrooms, even in Van Nuys.

And the law says you cannot clear homeless people and their belongings off public sidewalks.

And the law also says you cannot compel errant property owners to fix up their private homes and rent them out or sell them.

So all around our neighborhood, where the average house sells for over a half million, some have decided that just letting their houses sit empty and open for crime and vandalism is the best policy.

And that is why we went on a walk yesterday, a walk that went around in a circle along Columbus, Haynes and Hamlin and ended up in the bright, hot sun with promises and handshakes.

“Better Call Marty” Re/Max Grand Central Marty Azoulay 818-424-5045

DSCF0052 — 15102 Haynes/ 15105 Hamlin; owner Kathy J. Bauer.

Future Gardens of Van Nuys?

June 15, 2015June 17, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "London Permaculture", City Council District #6, Gardening, Mayor Eric Garcetti, NCJW, Nury Martinez, organic, Parks, Pockets, urban, Van Nuys and the Valley5 Comments

One of the continuing themes of this blog is to look at what we are and imagine what we might be.

I think about that as I walk around Van Nuys, a misbegotten and deformed district.

But also an oddly lucky place where land is abundant and cheaper, yet frequently and usually, neglected and wasted.

At 14550 Sylvan St., between Van Nuys Blvd. and Vesper, there is now an empty courtyard surrounded by buildings on three sides. They once fixed cars here. This is a street full of fine old buildings, including the former Van Nuys Library (now a law office) and the former post office. There are also small stores: a tailor, a barber, a school, and a storefront church.

This is where a garden belongs. Buildings are small scale and human, within walking distance of every important building in downtown Van Nuys.

I took photos (with permission) from England. The ‘London Permaculture’ Flickr page shows urban gardens transforming bleak and hostile spaces into fertile and green growing areas.

Brown brick, beer guzzling, working-class England can be drab, but these gardens are a morale booster for their users.

Our alleys, behind Van Nuys Boulevard, can be fixed up with cafes, bars, trees, plants and lights. Eating, drinking and socializing can replace public urination, rats, tagging and trash.

At 14526 Victory Boulevard, the NCJW (National Council of Jewish Women) has a donation center which again, is a North facing forecourt that would also do nicely as an outdoor beer garden, pocket herb garden, etc.

At Friar and Van Nuys Boulevard there is a large parking lot, which is across the street from another large parking structure, in an area with too much parking. Why does Van Nuys, in this ramshackle location, with its empty storefronts and dead buildings, need 2,000 parking spaces?

There are wasted opportunities of land and development all over Van Nuys.

We live in an environment built for the lowest common denominator of mediocrity and exploitation.

DSCF0009 — West of Van Nuys Blvd. near Hamlin St.

Who can marshall the resources to bring money and planning into Van Nuys?

A Quiet Enclave

May 22, 2015Posted in Architecture, Culture, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Mary Cardea", "Mayor Garcetti", Adirondack, Architecture, burbank, Charlie Beck, Chevelle, Equestrian, glendale, Griffith Park, LAPD, LosAngeles, Nury Martinez1 Comment

There’s a little area of Glendale or east Burbank or whatever you want to call it, a quiet neighborhood nestled into the confluence of Griffith Park, Victory Blvd, and Riverside Drive.

Old, snug, shaded, smelling of horse and hay, hit with the low, dull roar of the nearby 134, its winding houses and cottages are silent, eccentric, redolent of the old Western town, and completely out of tune with the flash, bang and sprawl city of Los Angeles.

I’m drawn back here. Especially on days like yesterday when the skies were dark, and gray clouds spread over the San Gabriels in a convincing display of more ominous meteorological conditions.

It was cool and autumnal when I turned up Winchester Avenue and parked near Riverside.

Hidden in the crook, under large trees, I found a sprawling, two-story high, hacienda apartment with a red tiled roof, white painted brick and a lush green lawn obliviously and joyfully unworried by drought. Adirondack chairs, twig chairs, plastic chairs, and a barbecue threw off an impression of eternal leisure and life without worry. A 1965 Turquoise Chevy Chevelle sat on the driveway: as if yesterday was still today and what was old was still young.

California, up until about 1960, built apartments that looked like well-to-do homes. You might live here poor, work as a waiter, scrape by on next-to-nothing, but you were surrounded and intoxicated with hope and dreams and a stage set of domestic happiness. Your aspirations were given to you the moment you arrived at Union Station. Only later did you realize they would be taken away.

The streets are clean in Burbank and Glendale, often spotless.

Coming from Van Nuys, which gives a social excuse to every ill around us, it is remarkable that Burbank and Glendale are run so seemingly well, with a presentable public face that is simultaneously progressive and traditional.

Streets are swept. Windows are washed. Alleys are paved. Walls have no tags or markings. There are no shopping carts of clothes tied to trees. There are no tent cities of the dispossessed under the overhangs of buildings.

And there are many small motels here. But I didn’t see prostitutes and pimps and hookers and johns and the sex community walking along Victory in Glendale.

Maybe the laws are tougher here. Maybe the police and the courts and the residents work together. Whatever they are doing here they are not doing on Sepulveda Boulevard.

At a public safety meeting last week in Van Nuys, held jointly by Councilwoman Nury Martinez and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, the issue of homelessness came up. Ms. Martinez spoke to a resident complaining that public sidewalks are now taken up with the private possessions of individuals. The Councilwoman said the courts had sided with the people who tie their shopping carts to trees and put up tents in the alley. “You can’t haul away their belongings.”

Legally, the illegal is legal.

And that is the way the new world works. What would have been unimaginable in 1945, 1955 or 1965 is tolerable today because everyone knows that toleration—not the law—is the highest principle liberalism can aspire to.

The inhumanity and injustice of allowing people to live on sidewalks and eat trash and set up tents anywhere, that must be tolerated because “we are understanding.”

Maybe it would be inconvenient for him, but Mayor Garcetti should allot some time in his schedule to drive way out to Glendale from LA City Hall and contemplate what they are doing that provides some space for civilization and contemplation that is missing in much of the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles.

Van Nuys, Tijuana.

May 20, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Councilwoman Nury Martinez", City Council District #6, Debris, Neglect, Nury Martinez, trash, Van Nuys and the Valley12 Comments

North of Victory, along such streets as Langdon and Orion, there are beautiful homes, lovingly maintained, with lush plantings and comely architecture.

But out on Sepulveda, between Lemay and Haynes, the meridian that breaks along the west side is like a hellish scene out of Tijuana. There are discarded toilets, papers and plastics, cans and bottles, televisions, even a picture of a holy saint thrown down like so much garbage.

What civilized place would permit the public areas to look this deplorable? Have we no pride or self-respect at all?

Changing Kester

May 5, 2015May 6, 2015Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Ori B Fogel", "Part of Sherman Oaks", 14851 Victory, Architecture, Barry Pyle, Best Tires, Califa, City Council District #6, decay, Development, Elbar, Elbar Investments, John P Webster, Kester, Nury Martinez, Oxnard, VanNuys, William Mellenthin5 Comments

Kester Avenue, a narrow North/South artery between Sepulveda and Van Nuys Boulevards, is, north of Oxnard St., an industrial and immigrant arrival point, a place of car repair shops, small apartment buildings, bodegas and liquor stores.

Long neglected, like the rest of Van Nuys, it has undergone some positive change, small but not insignificant: apartment construction, remodeled houses, some cleaned up properties.

At 14801 Califa, (near Kester and Oxnard) a property investor has taken a large industrial park and transformed it into a modern post-industrial building. It has been landscaped with trees and plants, painted gray, adorned with metal doors and windows in a style best described as Culver City North. Envisioned as a rental property for media companies, it is within walking distance of the Orange Line.

Walls are untouched by taggers, possibly due to discreet security cameras ringing the property.

Remnants of old Van Nuys before and during WWII are also in evidence around the area. Steel buildings, used as citrus packing houses, and Quonset Huts with their arched rooflines, still exist near Oxnard and Kester.

Walk on Kester north of Oxnard and you are in a man’s world of marijuana, liquor, used tires, transmissions, clutches, sand, gravel, cement, cheap beer, lottery tickets, tow trucks and dogs on chains. This is un-distilled and un-filtered Van Nuys, where hard-working immigrants take flat tires off cars and put bald ones back on.

At sunset, the meanness is softened by orange and pink hues. Piles of tires turn into melted chocolates next to green boxes. Long hot days are ended and extinguished in icy lager Coronas.

At Kester and Delano there long stood an old wooden house, a broken down slum place with discarded tires and trash. It has since been cleaned up and stuccoed up, as hygienic and impersonal as any Burbank tract house. But it is clean, which is notable, in a place where slumlords from Encino and Bel Air could care less.

Mr. Pancho’s Market, long a fixture in the area, in now called “Los 3 Potrillos” (The Three Colts) and has been painted bright orange and I don’t know if they sell horse meat.

A four-story apartment building has been under construction for some time near at Erwin and Kester. It stands in uncompleted modernity behind scaffolding and plywood.

On the west side of Kester, one walks past the last seven decades of architecture and development.

6315 Kester is a two-story courtyard apartment building built in 1961. A bizarre (or unique) frieze of Roman soldiers on horses decorates the exterior. Starved for ornamentation, post-war architects in the late 1950s and early 60s borrowed from epic movies like “Ben Hur” (1959) or “Cleopatra” (1963) to cinematically embellish properties.

6321-6323 is a 1949 multi-family dwelling decorated with developer William Mellenthin’s (1896-1979) characteristic “birdhouse” designs over the garage. Mellenthin brought a rustic, Northern California feeling to this structure with board and batten siding, red brick, double hung windows and exposed beamed roof.

Sadly, this subtle, historically Californian style has little appreciation to The Vulgarians who now build in the San Fernando Valley. But in1949, it must have been a fine place to live, at a time when one could leave a window open at night, for ventilation without fear, and fall asleep to Tommy Dorsey on the radio.

And the 2015 tour wraps up at 14851 Victory, the slum mini-mall whose most notable feature is the trash on the side of the building that the tenants and the owner never clean up.