On a brief walk, after dropping off a package at the UPS on Van Nuys Bl. I walked west on Sylvan, south on Vesper, ending this set of photos at the new fire station on Oxnard.
There is a small but significant amount of new apartments going up. They are pleasant additions to the neighborhood and are all in the currently popular white style, blindingly white, with dark windows. They add some upgraded cleanliness to an area which has long been the sad kingdom of slumlords.
On Sylvan, the former post office, built during the 1930s by the WPA, in a classical style, was later a home for Children of the Night, a non-profit created to fight childhood sexual exploitation. They have since moved out, so the sidewalk outside the gracious building is now a trash camp.
Old Post Office
The new fire station (2019) is a great asset for the neighborhood and has significant architectural beauty that recalls the 1930s Streamline Era, and is also conversant with the first fire station on Sylvan (1939) as well as the former DWP building on Aetna and Vesper (1938) just behind the new edifice.
Just to the east of the fire station, Aetna is closed, with a high fence, between Vesper and Van Nuys Boulevard, most likely due to the trash campers who took over the area. They are banished to fly somewhere else, probably to the bird sanctuary in Woodley Park.
Fire Station on Oxnard at Vesper
Councilwoman Nury Martinez has jurisdiction over this area, and her office is nearby in the Valley Municipal Building. She is now the head of the city council, and the first Latina to hold that position in city history.
We can applaud the justice of diversity, the idea that anyone from any background can ascend the ladder of politics and achieve leadership.
We cannot applaud the failures of Ms. Martinez, and her predecessor Tony Cardenas (who is now a congressman in Washington, DC) for they have had over 20 combined years of allowing Van Nuys to fall into utter disintegration, filth, homelessness and blight.
Their ethnicity has pushed them up into the spotlight even as their academic records in elected office should be graded D- or F.
The idea that one’s identity deserves praise rather than one’s achievements is a new chapter in our American conversation. If Van Nuys should fall further into the gutter, which seems unimaginable, we will think of the paucity of Ms. Martinez’s and Mr. Cardenas’ accomplishments and recall this verse from Matthew 7:16 “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
Someone recently was very excited because there is a new slate of young, female, diverse people who are running for the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. She is one of the contestants and wanted some input on what I thought about the VNNC.
I rolled my eyes. Nothing good has ever, ever come out of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, and if you don’t believe me, take a walk up Van Nuys Boulevard today and see the boarded up shops, the homeless, the filth and the neglect.
Maybe I should expand that to the office of Nury Martinez, a city councilwoman who has been in that job for some five years and has presided over the further decline and frightening expansion of homelessness that plagues our city and our district in particular.
Often young aspirants seeking election will roll out first, those labels which they think matter. You are queer, you are a woman, you came from Honduras. And you are under 30. That last designation is the most important because you have “fresh ideas”, ideas which only those people born after 1989 have thought of. And you care, you really care about this community because you are queer, you are woman and you came from Honduras.
And you are also against: exploitation, triggering, cruelty, bigotry, and policies that discriminate against homelessness, against the undocumented, and against those who have been convicted of crimes and are unjustly punished.
Fine. All fine. All open for debate, though you may not ever agree to debate these issues because you are right and I should know you are right.
But I have one thing to say to you, candidate for political office: I don’t care about your identity.
I know you are angry because growing up you wanted role models and when you looked on TV or in the movies you were given maids and gang-bangers instead of entrepreneurs and philosophers. Pity. You didn’t model yourself after Marsha Brady or Samantha Stephens so you went into a tailspin.
Your identity is your fortress, your crowing achievement, because, after all, you’ve worked hard to acquire that DNA.
But running on a platform of DNA, gender, or preference labels doesn’t stop crime, bad schools, illegal dumping, trash camping, random violence.
Woodley Park.3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.
The Cuban-American dad who lives with his daughter near Burbank and Kester takes his Sunday morning off to ride bikes with his daughter through a trash-filled bike path along the Orange Line. Does he care if the representative who neglects this park is Latina? No, he cares if the park is clean and safe.
The Guatemalan born, American history professor who takes the bus from Van Nuys to teach at CSUN stands at a bus shelter where a homeless person has placed six shopping carts and has made a home there for three months.
The lesbian mom from Mexico who lives on Vanowen with three school age children still has to drive them from her bad school district to a better one five miles away and she helps, unwittingly, to contribute to traffic and school segregation. Would it matter if she were Irish-American, born in Indianapolis and married to a man?
Illegally parked cars on Victory during rush hour.Empty, weed-filled parking lot within walking distance of mass transit and downtown VN.Homeless.
The broadcasting of identities is like a theater of the absurd because it presents a chimera, an illusion of a person who comes into the public realm advertising her external labels instead of presenting her internal ideas.
I’m reminded me of Jussie Smollet’s words after creating his hoax, he used his “gay, black” identities to hide the true nature of his fabrications. By trotting out the ingredients on his label he sought the mantle of believability and righteousness. But the content of his true character remains.
I don’t care about your identity. I care about facts, about telling the truth, about pursuing equal justice under the law. And that applies to aspirants for political office as well.
The two little boys, Diego, 5, and Eddie, 7, who live on Delano, whose grandparents emigrated from El Salvador, cannot ride their bikes down to Bessemer, two blocks away, because 20 homeless people, some drug addicts, some mentally ill, live on the street there.
If Diego and Eddie were named Diego and Eddie Moskowitz and they couldn’t ride their bikes in their own neighborhood would their ethnic identities matter more?
Bus Bench: Sepulveda at Victory.Sepulveda Bl.Along Sepulveda at LA Fitness.
I don’t care about your identity. Nury Martinez has a great duo of identities: female and Latina and really, truly, what does that matter for the well-being of Van Nuys?
Being a Latina, doesn’t make you a more effective thinker, leader, community organizer any more than being a Canadian from Haiti does.
Your identity won’t bring in new investment, it won’t appeal to developers, it won’t clean up the streets, it won’t lessen traffic, it won’t purify the air, it won’t make food healthier.
Van Nuys needs a dose of old fashioned law and order and political and police muscle to let the law-abiding citizens of this district know that we will not fall apart and disintegrate into factions of identities who then will be unable to come together to work as a community to fight our common problems.
Van Nuys 2030?Van Nuys 2030?Small Homes, Not Homelessness.Small Homes, Not Homelessness.JapanJapan
It is probable and likely and arguable that Los Angeles is perhaps the dirtiest large city in the United States.
Gilmore near Columbus, Van Nuys, CA.
Near LA Fitness, Sepulveda Bl. Van Nuys, CA.
New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, Miami: they do not have the amount of illegal dumping, trash, shopping carts of garbage, furniture, mountains of debris and litter in every park, street, and parking lot.
A morning walk to the gym, encompassing half a mile along Columbus, Victory and Sepulveda in Van Nuys brings one past neglect on a large and small scale, from the homeless taking over bus benches, to the non-homeless indifference to sanitation which is a hallmark of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles does not present a picture of a civilized city to anyone. Besides our nightly news of shootings and car chases, we have transformed our environment into a city where it is embarrassing to show visitors around, where the infrastructure, from pollution to transportation to parks, is sub-standard.
Put aside the yellow air, and the starter homes for $1.2 million next to a freeway. Put aside the sprawl of mini-malls and billboards and car washes and marijuana clinics and muffler shops and junk food. Put aside the speeding cars running red lights, the people, one to a car, driving to work at 5 MPH. And, of course, little spoken of…. the morning rush hour of white parents taking their kids to a school 25 miles away from home because the local school is too darkly complexioned for many liberals to bear.
The Bus Bench Near Victory at Sepulveda
Normality in Modern Los Angeles.
Yes, dismiss all that and just focus on the trash, the trash everywhere, the trash that is all around us.
Are you listening Mayor Garbageciti? Or are you on a flight to somewhere to lay the groundwork for your presidential run?
The early March air smelled quite frequently of jasmine yesterday.
The skies were cloudier, anticipating and foreshadowing the slowest, rarest event that mercurial, moody nature ever delivers to Los Angeles: rain. We want it so badly that when it comes we regret it, like so much else in life.
I walked east along Victory and stopped at 14619, where a two-story building, housing VIP Printing, caught my eye.
Built in 1960, it’s a box with a second floor of louvered windows and panels, alternating. The first floor has shops under a protruding horizontal overhang. Except for the ugly signs marring the façade, it has a plain purity and deserves better treatment.
On the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Victory, the symbol of Van Nuys: an overflowing trashcan.
Also at that intersection: decrepit one-story buildings.
In a finer city, these prominent parcels might be five, six, seven, or eight stories tall and contain many apartments on each corner. This is Van Nuys, stuck in 1966, perpetuating wasteful land use, wasted because housing is desperately needed. We need one less pawnshop and 500,000 more apartments.
The Q Bargain Store at 6351 Van Nuys Bl. was built as Sontag Drugstore in the 1940s. It still has the streamlined look of its youth. Like all of Van Nuys Boulevard north of Oxnard, it got old, it got poor, and we all got fucked.
Norvald Bldg, 1940, 1953, 2018.
Deformed beyond belief is the decapitated 6314 Van Nuys Boulevard, which in its decorative heyday was called the Norvald Building. Prominent people and institutions: realtor/developer Harry Bevis, Bank of America and DWP were tenants in the 1940s and 50s. A 1953 photograph shows Van Nuys Stationery store, Whelan Drugs and Bill Kemp Sportswear for Men.
Van Nuys, it is not fiction to say, once had businesses supported by letter writers and men who wore well-tailored sportswear. They used the word “amazing” a few times a year to describe space travel, or volcanic eruptions, never as an adjective for avocado toast or their little dog Zoe.
Diagonal parking was available along with a streetcar running down Van Nuys Boulevard. Imagine that!
The Country General Store at 6279 Van Nuys Blvd is a very fine country/western clothing store with a large selection of boots, ornate belts, and men’s Western hats, jeans, and sport shirts.
Unfortunately, the façade is cheap vinyl and fakery, obscuring a neo-classical California Bank that once anchored this corner with respectable, solid architectural forms and operable windows. A decorative clock and a traffic light with moving Stop/Go arms embellished and celebrated an urbane, safe, and tidy young town.
The future, seen through the past, is waiting for its revival. We send our thoughts and prayers to Van Nuys, a critically ill patient wounded by fatal liberalism and self-destructive policies.
For anyone who lives in Van Nuys, and has not lately visited Raymer St. between Kester and Van Nuys Bl., the Festival of Garbage is now in full display.
Dumped along the median from the bridge to the boulevard are tons of trash. It is perhaps the filthiest, most appalling and most wretched scene of degradation in the entire city of Los Angeles.
Calcutta looks like Beverly Hills compared to this.
Across from the sanitation crisis is a large recycling center, an irony that one might analogize to having an indifferent fire department next door to a burning building. If you are in the business of collecting refuse, how can you refuse to clean up the area around your business?
Adding to the criminality of the area, dozens of unhitched trucking trailers are parked along the road, taking up space, and attached to no moving vehicles.
The bridge over the railroad tracks has been, naturally, taken over by the homeless who live under, in and on top of the structure. They cross on foot over the tracks where Metrolink speeds by a few times an hour.
Does Los Angeles have any measure of pride? How does the city allow this tsunami of trash?
Who is responsible for this mess?
I vote for Councilwoman Nury Martinez and Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Cleaning out the median, north of Victory, on Sepulveda last Saturday, I stopped to shoot a scene that spoke to me.
Here were all the blights that plague Van Nuys in one photograph.
An RV parked along the road, a home for the homeless. These improvised residences are everywhere in Los Angeles these days. Unaffordable housing and the societal acceptance of allowing our fellow humans to sleep on the street or in unlicensed housing is shocking. Or maybe we are no longer shocked. Which is itself shocking.
As teenaged girls rake and clean the median, they are attacking a problem that is essentially caused by illegal dumping. No authorities, no residents, no politicians have found a way to stop old sofas, mattresses, bottles, televisions, furniture, and every type of fast food from being dropped on our streets.
A billboard from Spearmint/Rhino advertises adult film star Veronica Vain . The advertisement looms over a family neighborhood, one with many children, and features a woman who performs public sex acts on camera and in person. Here is a NSFW link.
And then there is Carl’s Jr. whose offerings are a great contributor to rampant obesity. The ½ Pound Mile High Bacon Thickburger is 1230 calories. Ordered with Onion Rings (530 calories) and a Vanilla Shake (700 calories) a person could consume 2,460 calories, or about 1000 more calories than a sedentary human needs in an entire day. That would be in just one meal. The nutritional information is taken directly from Carl’s Jr.
Through all this detritus is the six-lane speedway Sepulveda. When it is full of traffic it is impossible. When it moves, many drivers speed and run through red lights. People risk their lives crossing this asphalt hell.
This is our environment, this is our city, this is our reality.
Here in Van Nuys 
You must be logged in to post a comment.