Anne Clark Seidel (1936-2018) was born in Ft. Smith, AR and moved with her parents to Los Angeles in 1942. The family owned a house at 14936 Camarillo in Sherman Oaks where Anne grew up.
Her son, Dave Cox, is a vintage dealer of antiques, cameras, and thrift store items and now lives in Maine and Florida. He graduated from Valley College. He has a Flickr page which I found years ago and in it he has archived thousands of photos, including his mom’s scrapbooks from her days as a teenager in 1950s Van Nuys and greater Los Angeles.
There is a lot to look at in the sentimental and wonderful notes, photographs and souvenirs she saved from that time.
These include: a 1955 Van Nuys High School Graduation Commencement, a 1950 award for “Am I My Brother’s Keeper” from B’nai Brith, her 1954 interim California Driver’s License, a “Grease Monkey’s” membership card from Van Nuys High School, a ticket from “Crew Cut and Curls” a musical comedy performed at VNHS, a typed up sheet of rah-rah yells from that school, and a May 27, 1953 poster from “The Man Who Came to Dinner” also performed by the Van Nuys High School Drama Department.
Anne had nicknames too: Butch, Clark, Corkey and Muggsy. Her 9/15/52 book cover is emblazoned with them.
It was a corny time of ridiculous humor, intentionally juvenile, feather-brained, nitwit, amusingly dumb and G-rated, naughty jokes that would pass the test of censors.
“They do say,” John said, “that kisses are the language of love.”
“Well speak up!”
There were heartfelt, self-correcting mottos Anne wanted to embody:
When I have lost my temper, I have lost my reason too. I’m never proud of anything that angrily I do.
It was an era of apologies, given by children to adults, students to teachers. There was morality in movies and songs, and wrongdoing and scandal were wrong and scandalous.
She had a crush on hazel-eyed, curly-haired Richard Walter Peck, 6’2, whose favorite foods included ham and eggs and minced meat pie and whose hobby was model airplanes. He drove a ’41 Buick and worked at Hammond Electronics in Studio City, CA.
There are clippings from newspapers with advertisements for stores in Van Nuys such as Ceil Miller at 15243 Victory Bl.(STate 0–7921) which sold dresses, suits and gifts; and the Ru-Mae Shoppe at 14511 Sylvan St. with plaid, print or plain short, long or sleeveless dresses.
There was Easter at Central Christian Church on April 2, 1953 with cut out photos of Minister RL Pryor and Youth Director Daniel M. Immel. There is the 1956 Van Nuys Mirror paper with presidential candidates Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E Stevenson as headliners, and another story explaining plans for the upcoming conversion of Birmingham Hospital into a Junior High School.
There was Johnson’s Ice Cream Store, newly located at 6127 Sepulveda Bl. in Valley Market Town which was next to the Sepulveda Drive-In Theater. All of this was on the site of our present day LA Fitness and Orange Line Metro (Keyes Storage) Parking Lot.
Those days are full of colorful events: sports, theater, holidays, miniature golf, friends, clubs, work, and crushes. The times were rambunctious and goofy, young and exciting.
And Van Nuys was its epicenter, it contained everything needed for a happy and fulfilling life, its promises were delivered in productivity, positivity, and personalities.
I will let the visuals speak for themselves. And show more of Anne Clark Seidel’s life in future posts.
My gratitude and appreciation to Dave Cox for his permission to use these images from his mom’s life in this blog.
Earlier in the year, the Salvation Army store at 6300 Sepulveda went out of business. The lot it occupied, building and parking lot, is some 45,000 square feet.
It sits along a row of Sepulveda that is seemingly zoned for only commercial use, even though it runs along a heavily traveled bus route and is but minutes from the Orange Line.
Salvation Army, former location, now closed.
Here is an example of a critical issue that somehow escapes the gaze of Councilwoman Nury Martinez, Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne, and Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Why are there unused or underused vast parcels of land in a place which is starved for housing, where homeless people roam without help, and people cannot find affordable housing?
The Mayor recently wrote an open letter to President Trump asking for more help on a variety of issues, including veterans who are without shelter:
“If you and your Administration would like to help Los Angeles and other American cities confront our homelessness crisis, I urge you to take the following actions immediately and work with America’s communities to bring all Americans home:
Support the bipartisan Fighting Homelessness Through Services & Housing Act, S. 923 and the End Homelessness Act, H.R. 1856 which further expand the housing safety net with new grants and mental health programs to help cities combat homelessness over the next five years;
Uphold the Veteran Administration’s vision to build at least 1,200 units of housing for homeless veterans on the West LA VA Campus by providing capital funding for new housing development and addressing the severe infrastructure needs of this federal land;
In your FY2021 Budget Request, build up the nation’s housing safety net and support higher appropriations for the programs that have been proven to solve homelessness and create economic opportunities for hard-working Americans. Some of those critical programs are: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Homeless Assistance Grants, HUD’s block grant programs (HOME, CDBG, HOPWA, and ESG), HUD’s project-based and tenant-based rental assistance programs (including HUD-VASH), capital and operating funds for the nation’s dwindling supply of public housing, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and the VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program;
Rescind HUD’s proposed rules to evict mixed-status immigrant families from assisted housing and prevent transgender homeless people from accessing federally funded shelters; and
Protect critical fair housing laws by upholding the previous administration’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” and “Disparate Impact” rules.”
Yet nobody in this city or nation imagines that anything will come from President Trump to “end homelessness.” Asking President Trump to accept funding “mixed-status immigrant” families with Federal money? Is it possible Mayor Garcetti actually believes that undocumented immigrants will also find federal housing money from the Trump administration? And transgender persons?
The second largest city in the United States has an extreme shortage of housing and the the Mayor puts the needs of “undocumented” residents and transgenders at the top of his list of federal funding requests?
The tragedy of Los Angeles is that it has no leadership and no courage, and it only pays lip service to trendy, lefty, wacky pleas rather than mounting the Herculean task of building massive amounts of housing through free market methods. We don’t need to house every person from other countries who end up in Los Angeles by using federal money. Is that wrong to say? Does it make sense that American taxpayers are asked to fund the disastrous policies and ideologies of this city and state?
We need, as a city and a state, to get moving to build on land which is badly underused, which sits along public transit lines, which could be remade as many thousand units of housing. It’s called re-zoning, and we need to open up and liberate land so that more development can come in and we can build denser, taller, higher apartments to flood the market in California with cheaper housing.
6500 Sepulveda Bl., a 160-unit rental apartment complex, built and managed by IMT Residential, is nearing completion.
Located about a block north of Victory Bl. it’s right next to the 99 Ranch Market.
This one-acre lot once held the notorious Voyager Motel (1965-2016), a working laboratory of prostitution. It also, incongruously, was where we went to vote.
The Voyager, abandoned and empty, was destroyed in a massive fire on February 13, 2016. Inexplicably, it caught fire just as it became hugely desirable for a large development. “Fire Party”, a post in this blog, captured the gleeful moment it burned.
The Voyager in 2015.
New construction of the IMT building began in 2017 and computer renderings were stamped out soon after.
There are some joyous and glorious illustrations of the new apartment building, at dusk, illuminated against the violet sky. Eight black blocks are set against a white background with a butterfly angled top. Palm trees are planted to provide shade for mosquitos.
Sepulveda has just been hosed down and glistens. And some eleven people are out strolling along the boulevard, including a woman, across the street, holding a purse stylishly embossed with the word “Paris.” Other pedestrians are walking, jogging, or pushing a baby carriage. A person unfamiliar with this location might think they are viewing an exclusive section of Stockholm, Sweden.
Rendering
I walked past the near completed apartment yesterday afternoon, and shot some photos of the hot, bright, Sunday afternoon, daylight reality of the surroundings.
In person, you pass numerous homeless men and women who reside all around, setting up sofas and tables to make rooms which can be dismantled and carted around in minutes. The environment is beyond redemption: billboards, overhead power lines, muffler shops, car washes, trash, debris, illegal dumping, speeding cars, massage parlors, Carls Jr., El Pollo Loco, and that ever present sewage smell from the water treatment plant in Balboa Park.
Homeless Room: Signature Plaza, Victory near Sepulveda.
A few hundred feet to the west is Midvale Estates, with spacious ranch houses, designer kitchens, hot tubs, lush swimming pools, gated properties, guest houses, circular driveways, landscaped herb gardens, and media rooms. This is their village, their Larchmont, their Mayberry. How and why the finest and grossest co-exist, is perhaps a topic for psychiatrists who study the psychology of cognitive dissonance.
Back on Sepulveda, across from 6500 , there are more discarded beer bottles on the median than people on the street. An upturned coffee table with four legs in the air looks like it is ready for a good time. This dried up dump runs alongside many apartments, where owners, managers and residents either don’t care or don’t act to clean up the blight.
All is not gloom.
One cannot deny that the food offerings are many and varied and include an Asian market, several Vietnamese restaurants. And on many nights, taco stands, like streetwalkers, materialize along the street.
Costco, Wendy’s, Sam Woo, Perfect Donuts, Subway, Lido Pizza, and Fatburger are within minutes of waddling distance, or accessible by scooter, Uber or bike. Just across Sepulveda, a chiropractor, a nail salon, laser hair removal, tax preparation, foot massage, hair salon, boba drinks, medical clinic and Fred Loya Insurance ensure that every critical need of life, death, or snack will be answered. And perhaps the best car wash ever, Bellagio, offers free vacuuming for all post-hydrated vehicles.
Estimated rents on the new apartments will start at perhaps $2,500 for the smallest apartment and quickly go up to $3,000 or even $4,000 a month. (I base these numbers on another IMT building in Van Nuys at 14500 Sherman Circle.)
If you are 23 and moving here from Kansas and want to get into production, and you find a PA job that pays $650 a week, your entire monthly gross income, before taxes, could pay for a tiny 1-bedroom apartment.
But things could improve. You might be 40, divorced, with two children, 7 and 11, and work as a nurse at Valley Pres., and earn $75,000 a year. And then you could afford a 1 bedroom apartment for you and your two kids.
Erwin at Sepulveda, Metro Orange Line Parking Lot.
When the Metro Orange Line opened in October 2005, it was a stunningly different type of transport system which combined a bus only road with a landscaped bike path that ran alongside. It cost about $325 million.
It connected North Hollywood with Woodland Hills, and eventually carried over 30,000 riders a day. Since 2015, due to Uber and Lyft, ridership has fallen to about 22,000 a day.
Hundreds of homeless encampments have sprung up on the bike trail.
But Metro forges ahead!
There are plans to create gated crossings at intersections to speed up bus travel. There are long-term ideas to convert the entire system to light rail and also build elevated bridges over Van Nuys Boulevard and Sepulveda.
In Van Nuys, at Sepulveda and Erwin (north of Oxnard), there is a car parking lot for the Orange Line Metro riders. It is over 526,000 square feet, paved in asphalt, planted with trees and shrubs, and comprises over 12 acres.
Today, over 2/3 of it is used as an outdoor storage lot for Keyes Auto.
Red area is the parking lot of the Orange Line. It is now used predominately to store autos from Keyes Audi. (Source: ZIMAS)
The Sepuvleda/Erwin site is “Exhibit A” in the DNA of Los Angeles, because the right thing to do would be constructing 10-20 story apartments along the public transit route and creating incentives for residents to ride buses, take trains and use bikes for daily commuting.
Singapore Housing Estate with parks and nearby public transportation.
If LA were Singapore, Tokyo or Toronto we would do that.
Instead our city languishes and fights and wishes to preserve a 1950s idea of everyone going somewhere by car.
And thousands of new cars are lovingly housed on land paid for by public taxes which should be used as housing and parks for the greater good of this city.
Nothing beneficial for Los Angeles ever happens overnight. It takes years of planning and legal battles, for example, to build assisted or low cost housing, or parks.
One can imagine the fury and fear that might arise if a 12- acre park and housing development were planned on this parking lot ranch.
Imaginery view from Sepulveda and Erwin looking west. In reality, Singapore.
What, by miracle of God, might be possible here in terms of a park or high-rise group of apartments, placed near the bus line, with a buffer of trees, water features, and gardens between the new residential city and the single-family houses to the north of the site?
Yet here, alongside a public transit route, taxpayer funded Metro Los Angeles chooses to rent its land for an auto dealership. How does that benefit the surrounding residents?
For people who are obsessed with traffic, imagine that thousands of vehicles are parked here ready to be turned on and put onto the roads. How does that feel Van Nuys?
If the new planned housing estate were policed, regulated, secure, and it also provided a new park wouldn’t that be an improvement?
Automobiles travel in both directions on Sepulveda Boulevard where it crosses Saticoy Street in Van Nuys; direction shown is unknown. A billboard advertises Signal Gas, pumped next door at the service station (left).
Six decades or more along Sepulveda Bl in Van Nuys, life was very different than today.
People conducted all their daily activities, from work to shopping, in automobiles. They were frustrated by traffic, and there were many accidents. This started early in the morning, before sunrise, and continued long after dark, in a slow, honking, and impatient parade of tens of thousands of trucks, cars and buses.
Photograph caption dated January 5, 1961 reads, “This modern supermarket at the corner of Sepulveda and Victory boulevards in Van Nuys is the latest addition to the expanding Dale’s Market chain which now operates 10 stores in the Valley.” (LAPL)
The buildings along Sepulveda were a motley, junky collection of fast food, auto repair, filling stations, car washes, cheap motels, hardware, liquor and supermarket businesses dropped down between billboards and wooden power poles.
There was nowhere that was pleasant, in the sense of a community, with proper landscaping, trees, amenities, or aesthetic zoning regulating signs or advertising.
There was no trace of grace, of history, of the old Spanish missions, the orange and walnut groves, the spectacular trees, flowers, and natural beauty that characterized California. Everything was garish, commercial, toxic, selling everything that polluted and sickened human beings in a circus of raucous, blind, aggressive hucksterism.
Photograph caption dated March 9, 1959 reads, “Hub Furniture Stores newest location on Sepulveda and Nordhoff in Van Nuys marks the 14th Hub Store in the greater Los Angeles area. March 14 is the opening day.”Photograph caption dated March 3, 1961 reads, “Sherman Way and Sepulveda.” This intersection tied with Century and Airport boulevards for fifth worst intersection, each with 20 accidents in 1959.;
Even with many new, lovely ranch homes, built after the war, on the residential blocks nearby, the general appearance of Sepulveda was ratty, unappealing, low class and frightening.
Mr. and Mrs. Audie Murphy and son, 6233 Orion Ave. Van Nuys, CA, 1953
Holdups at liquor stores, kidnappings, harassment of women by men driving past, littering, dumping, intoxicated drivers; in every respect related to civilized life, mid-20thCentury Sepulveda Bl. was so very different than today.
The only thing that remains the same is the presence of openly gay events, something that was even advertised on a sign in 1954.
Photograph caption dated October 20, 1954 reads “‘Gay Ninety Days’ at Builders Emporium, Van Nuys, is opened by Victor M. Carter, at driver’s seat of early-day Cadillac, firm’s president. Featuring month-long event is ‘good old fashioned prices,’ bearded salesmen, and 5,000 derbies to be given customers. In picture, left to right, are Jay Delia, Mel Goodman, Carter, Margaret Porth, Marthie Ferderer, Helen Ireland, George Blum and Lou Johnson.”
Here in Van Nuys 
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