Tag: Parking Lot

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

The Big, Empty Foreground

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

On Flickr, where I sometimes spend my time, there is a group of photographs called “The Big Empty Foreground.” These are urban places, usually wide-open spaces, without people.

Many of the contributors come from Europe, a place one does not often think of as empty. Soccer fields, parking lots, office plazas, old factories, these are some of the unpopulated places.

 

Sepulveda Cleaners 2In Van Nuys, we have a lot of wide, empty foreground. Expansive asphalt pavements, empty shopping centers, abandoned houses on large lots.

Reynoso's

Near Vanowen, between Archwood and Sepulveda, there is a collection of one-story businesses: a cleaners, a phone store, a fishing tackle store and an odd place called Reynoso’s Lapidary and Supply which specializes in rocks, gems, stones and agate slabs.

These are in a building put up when land was cheap, sometime in the 1950s. And they are plain and homely and functional, but also practical, because the cars are put in back and the sidewalk is in front. Signs are small and discreet.

What intrigued me, on a day when dark clouds enclosed the sky and transformed the light of Los Angeles into something moody and cool, was how casually open space was made in the back, without gates or fences, or trees. That’s the way we parked in the 1950s at a suburban place. There was no thought given to landscape, only to laying down asphalt.

A walnut or orange grove, on many acres, probably occupied this land before the building was built.

This landscape back here will probably be developed someday and covered completely in a banal apartment, approved by city zoning.

But for now there is light, and space, and sky.

 

DSCF2510

 

Incident at Wendy’s

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

This morning, as I drove through Wendy’s parking lot on my way to LA Fitness, I saw a man lying face down on the parking lot asphalt.

I stopped my car and asked him if he was all right. He barely responded.

Not knowing whether he had overdosed, been stabbed, shot, or merely collapsed, I called 9-1-1.

Within minutes the LAPD showed up, followed by the LAFD.

What follows is, in my opinion, a fine example of professionalism demonstrated by law and safety officers.

 

LA Fitness Van Nuys.

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

DSC_3000 DSC_3001 DSC_3002 DSC_3003 DSC_3004 DSC_3005 DSC_3006

 

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.

 

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.