About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
Last night, around 8:30 PM, Erica picked up her Avocado Spread and two drinks from a Starbucks Drive-Thru (6833 Van Nuys Blvd, Van Nuys, CA 91405). Store #23369.
Then she (or they, meaning two persons in the traditional sense of the word) drove to the 15000 Block of Hamlin Street, parked her vehicle, and devoured (her/their) meal.
When (she/they) were done (she/they) threw everything out of (her/their) car, and left (her/their) mess on the street where (she/they) had parked under the exquisite oak trees and had enjoyed a quiet dinner in the peaceful shade of dusk.
(She/they) are, unfortunately, typical of Van Nuys.
These are also the people who speed through red lights, who play their music at full blast in their car, who also steal packages from front porches, and for many people these are our friends, families and neighbors.
Do I care if these people are any particular ethnic group or wounded victim group? Does their identity matter?
Not in the least. Because identity is not a matter of character. You are born with identity but you learn character. I just care that people I live near destroy my surroundings with their ignorant selfishness.
There is no elected leader, no parent, no law enforcement person who can police this kind of selfish behavior.
It is purely a matter of individual conscience and character.
This is a 1948 colorized video, most likely filmed by a movie studio for projection background footage “process shots” in automobile scenes.
It was shot in Toluca Lake and Sherman Oaks.
Toluca Lake was the most comely, gracious and affluent neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, handily nearby Warner Brothers, Universal and Disney studios.
Driving along Valley Spring Lane, Navajo and Forman, near the Lakeside Golf Club, the viewer sees an endless procession of estates, tree lined streets, gardeners, people on bikes, thin women in below the knee skirts. There is some open land, still undeveloped.
The architecture was eclectic, freely borrowing from Spain, France, England into a hybrid Southern California style set along enormous lawns, with flowers, trellises, window boxes, picket or ranch fencing. Cars are few and parked in driveways, occasionally on the street.
No house is gruesome, ostentatious, unbalanced, grotesque, hostile or ugly. They fit into their surroundings. And even when a Tudor house is next to a Spanish casita both houses seem proper and well-mannered. There are no steel gates, no concrete front yards, no Home Depot vinyl windows sliced into stucco.
The Sherman Oaks section of the video begins at 4:45 at the corner of Hazeltine and Greenleaf. The footage proceeds west through Beverly Glen, Van Nuys Bl. and Cedros.
Greenleaf St. in 1948 was a street of small houses, some older Spanish or Mission, some newer ranches. They were embellished with shutters, trellises, neat lawns, shade trees, classical street lights on concrete posts.
I used Google Maps Street View to try and pick out the homes which were there in 1948. Sadly, most of the houses have been torn down or obliterated with the fads of 60s and 70s, and the gigantism and massiveness that characterize modern Los Angeles.
Here is my timeline to watch the video:
Toluca Lake:
2:27 Valley Spring Ln and Navajo St.
West on Navajo St.
Turn left on Forman
3:30 Valley Spring Ln and Forman
Turn right, head west on Valley Spring Ln.
3:54 Ledge Av at Valley Spring Ln.
4:31 10451 Valley Spring Ln. Spanish house with second floor balcony and rounded tower.
4:33 Strohm Av at Valley Spring Ln. Corner house is still there but Tudor style wood on facade is gone.
4:39 10515 Valley Spring Ln. Spanish house with arched front window and arched entrance.
Sherman Oaks:
4:45 14100 Greenleaf St. at Hazeltine, 4204 Hazeltine background house with shutters and window box.
4:51 4203 Hazeltine. Back of house and wooden garage, both still existing in 2022.
4:58 14101 Greenleaf St. Newly built home. (2/24/48 building permit taken out.)
5:04. 14115 Greenleaf St.
5:12 Stansbury Av and Greenleaf St. heading west.
5:15 4205 Stansbury Av.
5:32 14223 Greenleaf St
5:39. 14244 Greenleaf St.
5:52 14273 Greenleaf St. heading west
5:55 14279 Greenleaf St.
6:16 14345 Greenleaf St at Beverly Glen
6:20 14403 Greenleaf St. at Beverly Glen old mission style house with wide overhangs and trellis.
6:48 14479 Greenleaf St. corner of Van Nuys Bl.
6:58 14507 Greenleaf St
7:02 14519 Greenleaf St
7:04 14525 Greenleaf St.
7:05 14529 Greenleaf St trellis over driveway
7:20. 14567 Greenleaf St
7:26. 14579 Greenleaf St cor Cedros Av.
For a while I’ve had a photographer’s love affair with Reseda Boulevard.
It’s bright, toxic, saturated, crowded.
There are signs in every language on Earth:
Thai, Farsi, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic.
There’s shit food every five feet: Domino’s, donuts, Arby’s, KFC.
You can buy anything a car or human might consume.
Everything looks unlicensed, illegal or poisonous, like it just slipped past the eyes and hands of the law.
Smoke shops, ramen, foot massage, dentists, orthodontists, auto body shops, tire repair, Chinese seafood, Pep Boys Auto, liquor, paint, car wash, 7Eleven, pizza, Korean soup, check cashing, smoke shops, eyebrow threading, and eyeglasses.
Every sign combined is guaranteed to induce vomiting.
Oil changes and scrambled eggs and kim chi, chocolate milk shakes and boiled dumplings and hookah. Bagels and tampons, cigars and french fries.
All of it is stretched out and burns in the sun for miles.
Yet I have a love affair with Reseda Boulevard.
It rekindled again last week.
I started a class at CSUN that meets Thursday afternoons from 4-6:45pm.
When I left the school after the first class we were in the second night of our 108 degree heat wave.
I walked up the stairs in the B5 concrete parking garage, N95 still affixed to my face, water bottle hooked to my belt, gasping for air and thirsting for iced drink.
I drove south, down Reseda Boulevard, as the sun was setting, past the stores with burning oranges and vibrant greens and deep reds written in the languages of many different nations.
The air was brown with fire smoke, and it was like a filter over my eyes, intensifying everything, driving and stopping, braking and accelerating in a rush hour jam of cars, trucks, pedestrians, bikes, motorbikes and the soundtrack of Franz Waxman playing “Agony” in “Beloved Infidel.”
I was watching a movie at every stop light. “Paris, Texas” in the smog. Billboards and signs and on and on and on.
It was so vile but I could not take my eyes off it.
The only hope for me, for our city, is to look at it like a film, a story we are starring in, set in an urban hellscape, temporary and eternal.
In the January 1929 Architectural Record are these photos of a retail/residential development in Evanston, IL on the corner of Chicago and Grove.
This is exactly what they should be building on the corner of Vanowen and Van Nuys Blvd.
Actor Dovid K. was raised in Los Angeles, and he came over to our neighborhood last week for some agency photos.
The houses in our area (Victory/Kester/Columbus/Vanowen) were built in the 1950s, and due to the modesty of the neighborhood, many look roughly the same. There are the criss-crossed windows, the board and batten siding, the pastiche of architectural decorations that mid-century developers affixed to facades to make them warmer and more appealing.
The vintage styles have weathered six or seven decades and endured as archetypes of the San Fernando Valley. This section of Van Nuys was ideal because it was walkable, just across the road from the high school, near the shopping centers along Sepulveda. Those were the days when children rode bikes and walked to school and there was always someone home to greet them at 3pm.
Times change. Children don’t walk, they are driven.
Behind the house on the right someone is building an ADU out of an old garage. They installed solar panels like many of their neighbors.
This sign belongs in the archival collections of Valley Relics.
This totem statue was erected by a previous owner and still stands.
This house will have a new ADU in front, an adaptive revitalization of a classic Valley ranch house from the early 1950s.
There is something about the middle 1950s that endures in many of the houses, a cozy casualness of not so big houses with big lawns, semi-circular driveways, trees, hedges, and decorative lampposts. A lot of it is not so up-to-date. If this were Studio City or Brentwood these houses would have been long gone, demolished and replaced with white faced behemoths and tall gates and enormous SUVs on every property.
Sadly, many of these houses sell for over a million and are not quite starter homes. But they are home for many who inherited them from parents, with low property taxes and little or no mortgage payments. For the lucky ones who got lucky, this is kind of a paradise, guarded by NextDoor and patrolled by helicopter, seemingly an American paradise on the ground.
And it makes a good backdrop for a young man who channels the 1960s.
Here in Van Nuys 
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