Tag: Urbanism

Before it Changes…….

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Curbed LA recently published a photo essay by Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin, “An Ode to the Valley Before it Changes” featuring images of grass growing through concrete and defunct gas stations in parts of the San Fernando Valley. It’s a type of setting I have long adored and sought out.

Photo by Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin.
Photo by Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin.

Mr. Boyd-Bouldin writes, “The Valley neighborhoods I encounter still vibrate with an authenticity that I took for granted in the past and that have all but disappeared from the rest of the city I love. I am doubtful the Valley will always look this way as the pace of redevelopment picks up around it.”

Here are some my photographs of Van Nuys, taken with a different eye and intent.

14640-victory
14640 Victory Bl.

Should one yearn for authenticity and places that have not changed or improved in 50 years, a person might travel down Victory Boulevard between Kester and Hazeltine, where the buildings are 1950s shops and 1960s office buildings converted to vacancy, pot shop, and bail bonds. The Coalition to Preserve LA would no doubt approve of the frozen in 1966 retardation of Van Nuys where “greedy developers” have not come in and built anything on the scale of The Grove. Here preservation, in the form of economic impoverishment has worked wonders.

van-nuys-branch-library

Should one desire a great example of failed urban planning from the 1960s, one might walk amongst the sleeping homeless gathered in front of the police station, next to the library, behind the Valley Municipal Building, on that mall of nothingness surrounded by the Superior Court and the small statues sitting in pools of pee.

Van Nuys is full of the real, the urban, the forgotten, the abandoned, the neglected and the ugly. We have blocks and blocks of empty buildings, empty parking lots, and shuttered retail stores awaiting tenants, investment, customers, renters and buyers.

14547 Gilmore
14547 Gilmore-why not a beer garden or a garden?

There are no parking problems along Van Nuys Boulevard because nobody shops here. There are plenty of parking spaces in big asphalt spaces on Gilmore west of the “downtown” where Matthews Shoe Repair shut down, and other buildings, with tens of thousands of square feet of space, awaiting the next boom.

Matthews Shoe Repair-CLOSED
Matthews Shoe Repair-CLOSED

This is Van Nuys. I’ve been writing and photographing it for over ten years. I show it as it is. Or I try to.

Van Nuys, CA 90401 Built: 1929 Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
Van Nuys, CA 90401-a slum property owned by a wealthy Encino businessman.
Built: 1929
Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
Van Nuys, CA
Van Nuys, CA-why not a cool burger spot? Why not?

And I welcome change, provided it’s done with some architectural integrity and it’s not just the result of shlock hucksters and con-men throwing up the next slum.

But I would live with change, I’d welcome it, if it made my neighborhood safer, more prosperous and livelier.

 

The Incarcerated City.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

 

_ABH2013 On these winter days, when the streets are emptied of cars, and the skies are filling with rain clouds, our neighborhood of Van Nuys cools down and empties out, revealing a strange amalgam of enormous parking lots; as well as businesses and homes surrounded by iron gates and fences.

In its entirety, these fortifications evoke prison: a high security, patrolled, guarded, and fearsome place where criminals and children are kept back by a fortress of steel and iron.

_ABH2050 _ABH2047 _ABH2032 _ABH2042

For sixteen years I’ve lived here, always imagining that every New Year will bring an imaginative, humane and socially comprehensive new architecture into Van Nuys.

I fantasize that the parking lots will be torn up and rows of orange trees replanted in the soil. I think someone will see the enormous plots of land, now taken up with blight and decay, and see this as the new place to construct walkable communities with native plants and organic gardens surrounding little residential communes.

That is the dream, shared by some of my neighbors.

Reality is something else.

_ABH2029 _ABH2030

On Sepulveda, between Archwood and Lemay, the hellish Ridge Motel is on Death Row, surrounded by fencing and covered with graffiti and garbage. It had long outlived its usefulness and functioned only as a prostitution and drug outlet, blighting its surroundings and neighbors.

Across Sepulveda, Fresh and Easy has closed, taking with it moldy produce and difficult checkouts. But sometimes I’d come here, and liked its convenience, its weird combination of English, Indian, Spanish and Asian foods, its overpriced milk, eggs and breads. And I miss that friendly manager who always smiled and helped me.

One Thanksgiving, about 2012, we bought our entire meal here and ate it back home with my mother, a pre-made, plastic topped collection of containers with sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberries and turkey. My father had recently died, and my mother was to die two years later, and the holiday meal had a morose sadness intensified by the microwaved artificiality of our victuals.

Fresh and Easy is gone, but what remains are those walls and gates around it, and that big parking lot in front, and a reminder that even when there is no business, or no people, we will still live in an incarcerated city, a place where entrances and exits are controlled, and guarded from either imagined or real, chaos and crime.

_ABH2016 _ABH2018 _ABH2022 _ABH2023

And those vast spaces of nothingness that are spread all over, those too are outdoor jail yards of lifelessness, neither urban or rural, human or natural.

These are the prisons that keep us captive and hold our imaginations and our existence hostage.

_ABH2037 _ABH2036

 

 

Glassland: A Photo Essay.

Posted in Architecture, Environment, LinksTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I rode the bus and the train to downtown Los Angeles today. And later sat, with feigned enthusiasm, for a job interview inside a concrete-floored, high-ceilinged art gallery.

The subway exit was 7th and Hope. The weather was violently windy, blindingly sunny. White fluffy clouds tore fast across the sky. I walked into a shimmering, sparkling, glassy, washed and Windexed world of brand-new, spotless, sleek, shiny and radiant glass towers.

I was in an area east of Staples Center, south of Olympic. Yet its structural newness and callow glibness felt like jejune, milk-fed, blond-haired, salty-breezed San Diego.

Amidst the asphalt, glass, steel and aluminum, I discovered a fair-sized green-park surrounded by tall, right-angled, balcony faced skyscrapers.

Inside the grassy park: an estrogen feast.

Women students from a nearby fashion college, FIDM, smoked cigarettes as they sat along benches and on top of concrete walls. Brimming with energy and youth. A parade of citrus perfumes, vanilla scented shiny hair, shaved and polished slender legs owned by naïve young faces.

Laughing, running, hurrying.

At an empty retail space, intended for future yoga use, I stopped to talk with a workman, renovating and cleaning. He told me he stood on the sidewalk everyday and watched these gorgeous girls walk by.

“90% of them are hot,” he said.

The strong winds continued as I reached the gusty corner where the art gallery stood. Next door, I discovered a Danish bakery where the smell of butter, fruit pastries, chocolate-topped cookies and hot coffee blew out onto the sidewalk.

I arrived at the appointment an hour early, so I continued walking around the neighborhood and found more newness.

Epic spic and span newness.

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It was Noon, here in downtown Los Angeles, and there were few cars and almost nobody on foot.

Buildings reflective, orderly, tidy: landscaped with fabulously colored flowers, prickly succulents, willowy grasses and rows of upright young trees, water fountains, and little pocket parks unpopulated with humans. Amidst this constructed urban paradise were rows of empty benches.

A wine bar, with outdoor seating, was open on a corner. And not a single person occupied any seat.

A great concept, a superb image, a winking nod to richness, that’s what they built around here.

Those great hypes, of 2004 and 2005: the unlimited prosperity, the exploding stock market, the cheap money, the hustle and con of the hucksters who sold America real estate, stocks, derivatives, credit. These empty, fresh, unfilled, immaculate, twinkling edifices of glass, these are tactile creations and hard monuments of a false and corrupt national binge. Blessed by tax breaks and corporate lies. Unpunished by Washington. Unconscionable billions for bail outs.

Now these resplendent, lustrous buildings sit here, underused and unfulfilled, their once loud voices and enthusiastic promises of urban excitement, muted.

This is just one district of downtown Los Angeles: a great glassy area of spacious, broad streets and tall, unspoiled, spotless, reflective vertical condominiums.

Like everything in this city, it starts out young and full-of-promise.