Tag: Poppy Days

Poppy Days and other festivities.

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Today, I came across this colorful poster advertising Poppy Day at Van Nuys, Saturday, April 12, 1913.

For fifty cents, round trip, you could board a Pacific Electric streetcar and ride from downtown to the new community of Van Nuys, where developer  and sales manager, WP Whitsett, promised frolicking amongst the thousands of beautiful, golden poppies, a free barbecue by the famous chef Jose Romero (“served promptly at six o’clock”), free auto tours in and around the “wonder city of the valley,” music by the Long Beach Municipal Band, and athletic sports “for the amusement of young and old alike.”

Wholesome, exciting, festive, and an occasion for visitors to buy many buildable lots for $350 each.

For a few years this was an annual event, and WP Whitsett, with the assistance of the entire apparatus of government and media (LA Times) was devoted to the promotion and development of Van Nuys, not only for housing, but agriculture: beets, walnuts, oranges, lemons, limes, sugar beets, and many chicken farms.  All these products would be profitably and efficiently shipped to locations around the United States on the Southern Pacific.

Schools and churches sprouted up and a very diverse population of lean and hard-working, starched and sin-free, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians moved in.

Everyone was a winner in the new town watered by the Owens Valley Aqueduct. 

In time, the idea of selling off every square inch of Van Nuys, paving over all the orchards, widening all the roads and cutting down all the magnificent trees, to build ever more housing; the destruction of walkable, safe and pleasant streets, all of it was actually a plan from the beginning, for Van Nuys only existed as a product for its promoters. 

Photograph of palms along Sherman Way (Chandler Bl.) near Van Nuys, July 1928. The road can be seen running from the right foreground into the left background. Palms and other trees line the right side of the road, while what appear to be train tracks can be seen to the left of the road. A field is visible in the right background.
Photograph of the one-acre farm of J.A. Inlaw, Kester Street and Sherman Way, Van Nuys, August 10, 1927.A street lies in the foreground while two palm trees and an evergreen stand along the far side of the street at center. Rows of crops sit in the yard behind the trees while a small home stands on the left. Trees stand behind the home in the left background.
Photograph of a Model T Ford on Sherman Way (Chandler Bl.) with Deodar Trees in the background, July 13, 1928. The automobile drives along the smooth road at center. The road extends from the center foreground to the right distance. Deodar trees form wall along the left side of the road. A mailbox stands at the end of a driveway next to the automobile. The driveway leads through the trees to a house which is barely visible at left. Photoprint reads “Western Air Express”.

In 2022, living in the reality of a melting, dying Earth, we are still hostage to vehicles that kill, roads that swallow us up, backyards paved over for ADUs, front yards cemented over to conserve water and to park yet more vehicles who cannot fit into garages crammed with junk.

Woodley Park along Victory is a trash camp of tents and boxes and shopping carts, homeless encampments that seemingly procreate faster than the building plans of WP Whitsett. But you can’t carry your groceries home in plastic or drink from a plastic straw. You can’t burn garbage in an incinerator and haven’t been able to since 1946. Maybe we need to bring back the incinerators and clean up our parks?

How clean Chandler Bl. was in 1928! How sparkling it was before catalytic converters and filtered cigarettes. How ever did people survive when their meals came from their backyard chicken coops and fruit trees?

In 2022, the evening news celebrates the tragedy of a famous actress of multiple sexualities who drove 90 MPH into a house, nearly killing the tenant, burning it down, and we must “pray” for her to recover, just as we “pray” that the nurse who murdered 6 people in her 90 MPH adventure down LaBrea is sentenced to life in prison.

Fame, money, luck, blonde hair or black skin: Los Angeles always gives everyone an equal chance. 

If you, like Whitsett, had the gumption to get water to the San Fernando Valley and divide it up into buildable lots, you have a place in time and legend that nobody will equal again. He lived well, but if he were resurrected upon this location, say Victory at Sepulveda, he would probably die on the spot from the horror of our gruesome Frankenstein of a community.

Sepulveda Near Haynes
7101 Sepulveda Bl.
6811 Sepulveda

As for Van Nuys, like the rest of Los Angeles, those who end up living here have to make do with whatever negligent government or avaricious investors sought for their own personal ambitions. 

The public good has always been the advertisement without the result.