East of Vineland Avenue, along or near Burbank Blvd, North Hollywood has a collection of small businesses, creatives, prop houses, and studio related companies that turn out goods and services, real and virtual.
On a windy, clear, cool Saturday we came to walk around. We explored Satsuma, Chandler, Cumpston and Riverton Avenues.
At 5453 Satsuma, a small, white, mission style stucco church was transitioning to secular renovation for a company called Spacecraft. The site was an otherworldly juxtaposition of architectural divinity and outer space travel.
In the 1946 North Hollywood Street guide, it seems that Santa Susana Catholic Church was the center of a Spanish speaking community along Satsuma that was strictly encased (segregated) between Chandler and Burbank, but not one house north of Burbank, or one house south of Chandler. All the old houses were knocked down and replaced by industrial concerns in the 1950s. Only the church survived but not as a church.
At 5416 Satsuma, a black and pink cinderblock building stood behind a chain link fence laced with reeds. A decapitated palm tree and wooden power pole completed the scene.
We walked along the Chandler bike path, next to a Robert Spiewak mural painted on a building in 2000, during the reign of Mayor Richard Riordan (1993-2001).This Angeleno themed artwork is a dystopian, militaristic vision of power poles, mountains, sky, missiles, and skyscrapers entangled in traffic or the internet.
My masked, hand sanitized friend Danny stood in front of the mural, marking our own pandemic time as we are poised on the brink of a potential world war and nuclear holocaust.
On the north side of Chandler, a half-completed structure (for USPS?) is going up with lots of steel and diagonals, in an aggressive, edgy, industrial style that looks like what they were building in West Los Angeles twenty-five years ago.
At 10747 Chandler, one story buildings from the 1950s, for lease, are neighbors with a homeless tent. And adjoining the block is a clay-colored stucco, streamline modern building, with mean little windows guarded by frilly iron bars, also for lease.
Praxis Custom Frame & Upholstery is housed, anonymously, in a deep teal and decoratively topped structure with brown awnings at 10717 Chandler.
This was once the location of Triple C Polishing and Plating Company according to a 1946 North Hollywood Phone Directory.
A matte finish, gray, Toyota Tacoma 4 x 4, pumped up and preening, was parked in front.
Steel Lighting is a new design on an old building, crisp and clean, black and white, with a cornice of black barn lights extending across the facade.
Martin Iron Design (est. 1990) is hidden away at 10750 Cumpston. An American flag droops over a wall like a sad, lonely dog. HOLLYWOOD is crafted in metal over a steel walled security gate.
Curving Riverton Avenue is half industrial, half little houses from the 1940s, a street like a small town, with tiny (million-dollar) residences that face west, into the sun and the new sidewalk, the parking lots and the shadow emitting steel plates that protect VFX Video Services at 5543.
Arxis Design Studio is at 10800 Burbank Blvd. corner of Riverton.
WE ARE ARCHITECTS!
They shout.
Their firm is housed in a torturously proportioned building punctured with a whacko assemblage of exaggerated, protruding windows with monstrous, robotic, tinted glass eyes that scan a parking lot.
All who look up at the misshapen, off-kilter windows know they are entering a hallowed kingdom of architecture.
That concludes a sampling of North Hollywood, High and Low.
Here in Van Nuys 
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