Tag: San Fernando Valley

Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967)

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Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967)

I previously wrote about this topic in 2014, but bring it up again as Los Angeles, and the State of California, are now in a furious debate about housing, cars, homelessness and how best to build.

All B&W photographs below are by Ed Ruscha. 

Ed Ruscha’s “Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles” was published 51 years ago.

The artist, born in Nebraska in 1937, came to this city in 1956 to study at the Chouinard Art Institute. He also had an apprenticeship in typesetting.

Graduating in 1960, only 23 years old, he started working at an advertising agency doing graphic design. Influenced by the works of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Ruscha was featured in a 1962 survey called “New Painting of Common Objects.”

That year he published “Twentysix gasoline stations” and later “Every Building on the Sunset Strip.” (1966)

He was the first, or perhaps the most notable artist, to create a deadpan, earnest, unesthetic photography of built Los Angeles. He looked, without pretense, at the sprawling, cheap, roadside city of billboards, car washes, instant apartments and filling stations and wrapped up his black and white photographs into little, smart, best-sellers.

Ruscha was talented and knew how to sell things, always a winning combination in the city of angles. (intentional)

The 1960s was a dirty flood of bitter reckoning that hit America and threw cold water on its made-up, powdered face.

Assassinations, sexual relations, racial issues, drugs, protests, music, environmental desecration, Vietnam: the entire decade blew up a contented self-image.

A nation, which thought itself a beacon of light onto the world, was forced to reconsider its own grotesque violence and misunderstand it.

Confronting Los Angeles, Ruscha presented a homely city with a picture book full of raw honesty.

State Board of Equalization 14601 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, CA.
May Co. 6150 Laurel Cyn NH

Inside “Thirty Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles” are some aerial shots of ordinary Van Nuys, North Hollywood and LA in 1967, with those enormous oceans of parking lots floating boat-like buildings.

Up in an airplane, looking down, Ruscha captured lines and boxes transposed upon the land, asphalt which looked, on its surface, much like the curtain-walled office buildings of that era.

Goodyear Tires 6630 Laurel Cyn NH

Good Year Tires at 6610 Laurel Canyon in North Hollywood occupies only a dot atop a long “I” shaped land-mass of parking.

Dodger Stadium

Dodger Stadium is buried deep within the hot skins of asphalt, a vaginal shaped structure where men played ball.

7101 Sepulveda, Van Nuys, CA.

And 7101 Sepulveda, a now abandoned office tower near Sherman Way, has trailers and motels on its perimeter, as well as plenty of free parking. Today, this area often hosts large encampments of homeless people, so the peripatetic ways of Van Nuys have historical precedent it seems.

Eileen Feather Salon 14425 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, CA.

14425 Sherman Way was called the “Eileen Feather Salon” and has but one long building fronting Sherman Way with parking in back.

Today, that corner is a cacophony of grossness and visual pollution including donuts and Denny’s. Signs are everywhere. And the weary eye becomes nostalgic for the simple joy of a lone building and its parking lot set down on arid land in the once less populated San Fernando Valley.

 

 

7128 Van Nuys Bl. 8/5/14

We are now engaged in a great civic debate about housing, and public transportation, and some voices hope (mine included) that denser buildings along bus and train lines will help alleviate high rents and homelessness.

Yet we never quite escape the trap set by the automobile: where to drive it, where to park it, how to best accommodate its needs.

Every single debate about new buildings always begins and ends with parking. Tens of thousands sleep on the street, families cannot afford rents or mortgages, developers are hamstrung providing parking for everyone and their guests, and Los Angeles dies a little each day from auto related illnesses.

Every time we think we are biking or busing more, something sinister comes onto the scene, and we now have 100,000 Ubers and Lyfts clogging the roads, and making our lives more hellish even as we praise their conveniences.

We plan a light rail down Van Nuys Boulevard and the auto dealers like Keyes stop it at Oxnard. They still run things. They destroy the city, and they are congratulated and worshipped for it. Thousands of their new cars are stored at outdoor transit adjacent parking lots built by Metro with taxpayer funds. Ironic.

Every time we imagine we are free of the car, we are forced back into it to chauffeur little white kids to school in better neighborhoods, to commute to $10 an hour jobs, to spend three hours every day in our vehicle so we might live in a house that consumes 50% of our income. Madness.

Ed Ruscha’s simple aerial photographs of parking lots are still a fact-based statement of what this city is. And how we are all swallowed into it.

Goodyear Tires 6630 Laurel Cyn NH

Walkable Places You Drive By.

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On the east side of Van Nuys Boulevard, south of Oxnard, there is a conglomeration of small shops.

Signs advertise a Kirby Vacuum shop, Attorney Sandra Nutt, a Farmers Insurance office, PC Tech Computer Repair, Young Actors Space, and a Los Angeles Wedding Chapel. Angeleno Mortuary and Benjamin Moore Catalina Paint fill up the northern most two blocks.

Here you buy cleaning machines, you get legal counsel, you are taught acting, you are legally married, you are fixing your computer, you are buying paint, you are purchasing life insurance, and you are dead and interred.

All this small business activity takes place in little shops constructed in the 1940s when commercial Van Nuys barely stretched south of Oxnard.

 

To the east of this is a pleasant, shady neighborhood of single- family houses mixed together with multi-family properties, mostly well-kept. Tiara, Califa, Tyrone and Sylmar are interesting to walk down because they contain an ecosystem of housing that works well together, near public transportation, modest and neat.

And if you are wondering what to call this area, please address it properly as “Sherman Oaks” even thought it abuts downtown Van Nuys.

You get your smog check in Van Nuys. You rent or own in Sherman Oaks.

At Calhoun and Tiara, a three-story apartment is under construction. Humorously, I observe that the style recalls those jutting out, trapezoids on steroids style popular 15 years ago in Santa Monica. The Valley is always behind….. architecturally.

There are vividly painted buildings on Calhoun, including a bright red box unit, and a 1920s house in school bus yellow at 14300 Califa. People will do daring things only when they see their neighbors do them.

The eccentric hues cheer up the area, bringing energy to a place where the beiges and grays cover everything else.

At Califa and Sylmar there is a property with dark green dwarf palms growing in profusion along the walkway and the front yard. They are a bold alternative to grass and liven up the house, along with a muted green fence built of wood and wire. This arrangement of plants discourages parking, and provides a sharp, prickly security perimeter, a subliminal deterrent, but naturalistic.

 

On the west side of Sylmar, are newer (2014), two-story dense houses packed together, a chorus line of garagettes. The builder pastiched shutters, vinyl windows, tile roofs, and various desert colors to evoke a Californian aura, Montecito Mansion by Home Depot. The houses sold for about $800,000 each.

With a down payment of $157,000, a mortgage for a family of four would be about $3,100 a month.

This area, newly christened as Sherman Oaks, still within paint fume reach of the auto body shops along Oxnard, is a desirable place in a city starved for “affordable” housing.

At 14403 Tiara, townhouses with three bedrooms and three baths will soon be available for $659,000 each. With rows of garage doors, it is unlikely that any of the folks living here will hang out on the front porch drinking lemonade.

The tour ends BEHIND the shops on Van Nuys Boulevard where an old house stands marooned in a sea of asphalt and parking.

Forensically, curiously, I wonder what this was so many years ago? Was this building a little cottage in a sea of orange groves, set back from the road before they filled in the frontage with the commercial buildings? Someone was surviving, living, eking it out 80 or 90 years ago. Then the land, I guess, was subdivided and “improved”.

 

A clever, innovative city would allow this back area to be turned into a garden apartment area. The shops could be built with apartments above, and the windows could face in back around a central courtyard planted with lemon, orange and walnut trees. They might build a few more small houses here, and devise a protected, nurturing development on this site.

The cynic in me doubts it will happen. But the optimist in me knows it is possible.

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Option A: Still Waiting

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In September 2017, 180 small businesses, 58 properties and 1,000 workers in Van Nuys learned they might be in the way of a 33-acre demolition project, Option A, proposed by Metro Los Angeles for a light rail service yard. Oxnard, Aetna, Bessemer and part of Calvert St., from Kester east to Cedros might be condemned.

A total of four options: A, B, C, and D are under consideration.

B, C and D are centered on the areas adjacent to Metrolink North (which are existing train tracks) and all involve far less demolition and displacement than Option A.

The bright, lemon yellow banners one sees all over the Kester/Oxnard area come from opponents of Option A who include community leaders, business owners and also the Office of Councilwoman Nury Martinez, who is firmly against something that would wipe out thriving, small companies who repair cars, build cabinets, record music, clean up flooded properties, plumb, weld, design and innovate right near downtown Van Nuys.

Ms. Martinez knows that the loss of these small businesses: walkable, diverse, local and entrepreneurial; would be disastrous for Van Nuys which has already been gutted out by the departure of GM a generation ago.

After multiple meetings downtown, speaking in front of the Metro Board, as well as Mayor Eric Garcetti and Board Member Sheila Kuehl, the Option A community was assured that an official announcement was forthcoming in January 2018. Walt Davis, Metro Transportation Planning Manager, was almost sanguine and breezily casual about how quickly the decision would be made to NOT APPROVE OPTION A.

 But, as of March 1, 2018, there have been no Metro announcements.

Option A still sits on the table. And people are increasingly nervous about the delay.

Showcase Cabinets’ Peter Scholz speaks with Marilyn Balduff, property owner of 14807 Aetna St.

Anxious and alarmed includes Ms. Marilyn Balduff, 75ish, a widow who owns 14807 Aetna St., a 10,000 square foot building housing half a dozen businesses providing her rental income and retirement assurance.

For fifty years, her late husband Bill ran Little Willy’s garage here. Marilyn worked as a CPA upstairs and kept an eye on the factory floor below from her elevated perch.

She is a smart, numbers ordered woman who knows how to invest, balance books, and manage real estate. She is not a super wealthy person, but rather a working woman who used 14807 to leverage the purchase of other properties. She is still paying off the mortgage, and the prospect of losing her family’s building saddens and frightens her.

For 14807 cannot be sold or rented to new tenants while the uncertainty of Option A hangs in the air.

I spoke with her when she came to visit her property today, and was handed a rent check by one of her tenants, Tom Bolan, a plumber.

Marilyn Balduff and Tom Bolan, tenant.
Jeff Montag, Marilyn Balduff and Jim Tabolsky.

She was also greeted by her largest tenants, Jeff Montag and Jim Tabolsky, owners of Regent 24/7 Carpet Cleaning, a company that has ten employees who clean out flooded properties, and work with property owners and insurance companies to remediate water damage.

Jeff and Jim, best friends and business partners, grew up in Sharon, MA and came to Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Jeff has four kids and three grandchildren and Jim has five children. They are solid, hard-working, experienced, and well-respected.

14807 is perfect for Regent because trucks can drive right into the building and unload water logged cabinets, furniture, and rugs. And equipment to clean the carpets can be put right on the truck. The 405 is nearby, and the workers also come local. It is an ideal place to have a small business.

Marilyn Balduff may have a business head, but she also has a sentimental heart. She spoke of her life, born and raised in Los Angeles, marrying Bill at age 18, the days they spent at Little Willy’s garage, and their mutual interest in specialty cars, including a 1908 Thomas-Detroit Runabout that Marilyn bought from Harrah’s (the former Harrah’s Automobile Collection at Reno) in 1983 when she saw its picture in the auction brochure and fell in love with the car.

Marijuana growers, who are gobbling up space all over Los Angeles, and out-bidding legitimate enterprises, by offering all cash and higher rents to owners, have approached her.

“I don’t want them. The mold and the humidity will ruin the building. And it’s not only the moral issue, it’s a degradation of the place,” she said.

Over on Calvert Street, Israeli born car repair mechanic Doron Danisky, 53, runs a scrupulously clean, orderly shop, D Best Automotive. His topless red Jeep with Hebrew lettering is parked along the curb near MacLeod Ale. (The Luck of the Scottish brewery, on the north side of Calvert, is outside of the area threatened by demolition.)

Doron bought his 3200 square foot building in 2011, and he uses his mechanical know-how from the Kibbutz (Yagur) to fix large trucks, jeeps and any old school vehicle. He has three rotary lifts and two employees. The atmosphere is airy, friendly, and low key.

Doron Danisky, owner of D Best Automotive.

“I’m not worried,” he said, offering cold water, soda and chocolates to me as we sat in his office. “Eat chocolate, it’s good for you.” He seemed fatalistic about Option A.

Perhaps coming from tense, on-alert, survival conscious Israel makes other concerns seem smaller.

“It’s a dream location, and when I heard about Option A, I was quite upset. But now I am OK with whatever happens,” he said.

D Best

But most, who depend on this district to earn a living, are not OK, until they hear the decision from Metro.

Apprehension and dread hang in the air along with the acrid fumes of car paint and the sour smoke trails of cannabis.

If eminent domain comes to Van Nuys, as it did with the tragically failing ghost-slum Civic Center (1960), another viable, historic, community-oriented, and socially supportive area will be ripped out and replaced by a post-apocalyptic emptiness.

Will the bureaucrats and elected officials make the right decision?

The people of Van Nuys are waiting.

 

 

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The McKinley Home for Boys: 13840 Riverside Drive, Sherman Oaks, CA.

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Photograph caption dated November 12, 1948 reads, “Exterior view of the new $125,000 gymnasium, given McKinley Home for Boys by the Kiwanis Clubs of Greater Los Angeles, as youngsters pour out after practice. Some of them go to study, others to definite work chores and some to the football field. Jake Kehrer, one of the playground supervisors, is their friend and counsellor [sic] and also a firm coach in the sporting events. If two boys get into an argument that needs settling, they put on gloves and work it out under Marquis of Queensberry rules.”

The Reverend and Mrs. Uriah Gregory established the Industrial Home Society in 1900. Their mission: to look after orphaned, abused and homeless children at their 33-acre estate in Artesia, CA.

Later renamed The McKinley Home For Boys (after President William McKinley who was assassinated in 1901), the institution acquired, around 1920, some 200 acres of land in “Van Nuys” which is now covered by the expanse of the Fashion Square Mall in Sherman Oaks. (see photos above/below credit: LAPL)

From 1920 to 1960, the home operated out of its eclectic architectural barracks and main building, a mixture of Mission and Spanish architecture which housed 150-250 boys at any one time.

Vintage photographs show that the home was a focus point of many well-meaning, civic-minded men and women who funded athletic, work, and farming activities, as well as other character building exercises for children who were given a lousy start in life.

Photograph caption dated July 18, 1960 reads, “Approving transaction from precarious perch on monkey bar, Terry Fox, 13, resident of McKinley Home for Boys, watches as Encino Jaycee, Robert L. Levey, left, presents check to George T. Swartzott, McKinley superintendent. Jaycees raised funds through Concours D’ Elegance benefit. Donation will purchase play equipment for McKinley boys.”
Photograph caption dated October 27, 1955 reads, “McKinley boys draw steady bead during intramural marbles playoff. Intramurals are part of outdoor program which includes summer mountain camping in Wrightwood area of Big Pines. Boys spend three weeks each at camp. Los Angeles Kiwanis Club, which contributes 10 percent of McKinley’s total annual budget, pays full costs of camp. In addition to sports boys receive training in religion of their choice.”
Photograph caption dated October 27, 1955 reads, “James Ryan, left, and Bob Bickel tend poultry they are raising to earn spending money. As part of small animal project, McKinley boys are raising rabbits guinea pigs, calves for marketing. Boys acquire money to purchase animals by performing chores for homeowners and Valley businessmen. Another pocket money source is working at building and grounds maintenance at McKinley. Home officials feel boys learn to value money by running own enterprises.”

Mr. M.H. Whittier, the Kiwanis, and other bankers, oilmen, developers and anyone who wanted public do-gooding on their resume, heartily pitched in labor and dollars to keep the boys happy playing football, raising chickens, instructing swimming, boxing, gymnastics, football; all the activities that might steer them clear of trouble. And into a productive life of work, family, marriage, proper procreation and moral behavior.

Photograph caption dated May 30, 1961 reads, “McKinley Home for Boys honored community leaders and outstanding students at its Awards Banquet, presenting certificates for achievement. Among recipients were Harold McKee, front left, 6903 Rubio Ave., Van Nuys; Mrs. Ben F. Leach, 12156 Blix St., North Hollywood; Mrs. Gerald Hewitt, 13602 Valley Vista Blvd., Sherman Oaks; Nate Miller, 4817 Woodman Ave., Sherman Oaks, and Mrs. Robert Sweeney, 13015 Dickens St., North Hollywood. At rear are George T. Swartzott, superintendent of McKinley Home, 13840 Riverside Dr., Sherman Oaks, with some award-winning boys.”
Photograph caption dated September 10, 1959 reads, “Wedding Party At McKinley — Mr. and Mrs. Roy Widener, married last weekend at McKinley Home for Boys in Sherman Oaks, cut wedding cake with their sons. Boys are, from left, Roy Jr., 11, and Ralph Widener, 13, and Bob Corey, 12. Couple met at McKinley where boys have lived for three years.
Photograph caption dated April 29, 1957 reads “In shade of deodars and oaks at McKinley Home for Boys in Sherman Oaks families meet to discuss fall-out, roentgens, deterioration and other topics familiar to their calling as radiological monitors for civil defense. Meeting was attended mainly by squads from the Valley.”

Alas, the boys and their home were no match for the powerful Ventura Freeway which sliced through their grounds in 1958 and forced the home and its crew-cut youngsters to flee to San Dimas.

Photograph caption dated October 27, 1960 reads, “A scoopful of sidewalk superintendents watch as ground is broken at McKinley Home for Boys in Sherman Oaks to pave way for new 29-are shopping center at the site bounded by Woodman, Hazeltine and Riverside drive. The McKinley home moves to new quarters, now under construction in San Dimas. Digging the first hole for Bullock’s department store are Marty Becker, 8, and Tim Mitchell, 9, who are looking up to Mathew Frost, 10.”
Photograph caption dated June 21, 1961 reads, “There were more important things to do Tuesday than play ball at McKinley Home for Boys in Sherman Oaks. It was moving day. After 40 years, the Valley landmark moved from 13840 Riverside Dr. to the new, sprawling McKinley Home in San Dimas in San Gabriel Valley. But Tom Pearce, 12, and Melvin Conklin, 12, had to give the ball just one more pitch before they packed up and moved on. It’s easy to pack, center photo. You have boxes and things go in boxes. Orderly, of course. But it’s hard to leave the building, last photo, and climb onto the bus. A new home may be fun, but the old home has memories.”
Photograph caption dated August 8, 1960 reads, “Clay Johnson, 26, 16048 Celtic Ave., Granada Hills, alumnus of McKinley Home for Boys, 13840 Riverside Dr., Sherman Oaks, peers through chain-link fence with student Mike Chacon, 9, at Ventura Freeway, a major cause forcing move of home out of Valley early next year. Freeway rolls to within three feet of home. More than 200 alumni paid final respects to 40-year-old home Saturday.”

The Bullocks Company soon came in with its plan for a 29-acre mall and the last photos of the McKinley Home in Van Nuys (Sherman Oaks) show it next to the concrete structure that would soon house a shopping center.

The twin monsters of modern vapidity, the freeway and the shopping mall, would triumph here as they would everywhere else.

Lost in the destruction was a unique community artfully housed in exotic and historic buildings, a verdant expanse of a place where those without loving parents or family might come together under the careful, strict, instructive guidance of teachers, coaches, and philanthropists who were determined to set the boys straight.

60 years later, 100,000 men and women sleep on the sidewalks and live next to the garbage, and defecate in public, in “prosperous” Los Angeles, but once upon a time this city and its elite had a tough-hearted way of taking care of people who nobody else would.

Photograph caption dated July 4, 1961 reads, “The McKinley Home for Boys disappears from its site of 40 years, along Ventura Freeway in Sherman Oaks. More than 80 boys from the home are now in new quarters in San Dimas, paid for by sale of the valuable Valley property to Bullock’s for the newest Valley department store.”

Option A: Good News From Nury.

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Options B, C and D
Option A: Destruction of 186 companies and 58 buildings and 1500 jobs.

Over the past few weeks, this blog has been engaged in enlightening the community about a potentially lethal plan, proposed by Metro, to construct a light rail service yard over the graveyard of 33 acres of businesses radiating NE from Oxnard and Kester.

“Option A” would bulldoze four blocks of small, family run companies, employing over a thousand people, demolishing 58 buildings and as many as 186 companies. This walkable, affordable, diverse area would become a vast zone of silence, blocks from Van Nuys Boulevard, and diminish hopes for a revival of Van Nuys which light rail could bring.

I met a group of fascinating entrepreneurs who build fine cabinetry, record music, restore vintage Vespas, repair racing boats; and service, sell and refurbish antique Ford Mustangs. I toured impressive shops and interviewed artisans who make exquisite glass and fine decorative metals forged with advanced machinery and human hands.

These people are overwhelmingly locals, they own or rent homes nearby, many chose to live here to be close to work. And they are first or second generation immigrants from Mexico, Armenia, Lebanon, Germany, and Norway as well as Reseda, North Hollywood and Lake Balboa. They are all struggling to make a living, but many are doing very well, and some own their buildings. Others rent space, but pay reasonable prices and would be finished if they were forced out.

All along I wondered why their elected representative, Councilwoman Nury Martinez, was not acknowledging their plight.

Now it seems she has heard the cries from people who are in fear of seeing their livelihoods decimated.

Jim Dantona, Chief of Staff for Ms. Martinez, sent me an email today. Attached was an official letter from the Councilwoman’s office to Metro in which she lays out why she opposes “Option A” and thinks “Option B” is a better choice.

Written in political diplomatic politesse, it acknowledges that the most negative impacts will fall on the “Option A” neighborhood. The word “impact” is used often, to describe the ruins of businesses…..just as our federal government concocted the phrase “collateral damage” to describe non-combatants killed in war.

“Option B”, near the existing Metrolink train tracks and Van Nuys Boulevard, is a far more sensible place to construct an additional train yard. New train yards fit best next to old train tracks.Metro will not make an official decision until January 2018. But for now, Councilwoman Nury is no longer silent. She has voiced, in print, her opinion that Option A should not happen.

Option A: The Vespa Whisperer.

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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-1960s
In 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.