The center of Van Nuys is the Civic Center. The raison d’etre of this pedestrian mall: nobody comes here unless they are forced to.
Here is where you come to file small claims, to appear before a judge, to file plans for a room addition, to borrow a book, to speak to your Councilwoman, to talk to a cop, to ask for an extension of probation.
You can also push your shopping cart full of belongings here, plop on a bench, open a bottle of vodka and drink yourself silly without interference. There are guards, guns, and security cameras, but they are aimed at the general public, not intoxicated people covered in four weeks of dirt.
There is one glorious structure, built in 1933, the Valley Municipal Building. And then there is everything around it, including the “new” library (1964), the “new” LAPD (1965), the Marvin Braude Center (1994), the Van Nuys Courthouse East (1965), the Van Nuys Courthouse West (1990), the James C Corman Federal Building (1973) and the double decker County Parking Facility at 6170 Sylmar Ave. an $850,000 symphony of concrete opened in 1968. Also vast and comprehensive: the LAPD Motor Transport Facility at 6170 Tyrone Ave. where cop cars are prettied up behind fences.
If you want to register a new business you can come to the Los Angeles County Registrar at 14340 Sylvan St. and make your way past half a dozen aggressive hucksters passing out business cards in which they offer, for a fee, to transact your business for you.
If Van Nuys were a 1962 film by Michaelangelo Antonioni, its stark, barren, nuclear winter surroundings would make for an immensely powerful setting showing the alienation of man from urban environment.
There is so much concrete here, the place is awash in it. It is sculptured, sliced, stacked, plated, affixed, drilled, and molded into so many walls, sidewalks, plazas, and decorative designs. Never before and not since 1964-70, has concrete been so worshipped, so valued, so esteemed, not just for freeways but for art itself.
Last Friday Night Van Nuys was young, joyous and celebratory.
It gathered, under the spire of the Valley Municipal Building, to drink beer, watch live music, eat, and walk amidst motor vehicle works of art.
Police and fire personnel mingled with guests, in a display of civic pride.
The homeless were there too, seemingly taken care of, fed on their benches beside their belongings.
For one night, the pedestrian mall where nobody walks at night, a lost dystopia, was dressed up for a party. And Van Nuys, at its very heart, seemed to regain its footing as a good, decent, well-regarded town.
Van Nuys (b. 1911) began as a town, centered around a main street, connected to Los Angeles by streetcar and rail.
It built its fire station, library, city hall, police station, and its churches, schools, shops and post office steps apart. On foot, a person could buy a suit, take out a library book, mail a letter, and walk to school.
Come to think of it they still can. But it was all there in downtown Van Nuys.
Today you might stand outside the LAPD Van Nuys Station and smoke a joint, drink a can of beer, pee against a wall and nobody would raise an eyebrow.
The librarian, the cop, the priest, the attorney, they would walk past you and shrug their shoulders and mutter, “What can I do?”
We are so tolerant these days. Everything degrading is welcomed, while everything worthwhile is rare, expensive or extinct.
Posture Contest, Van Nuys, 1958. Impossible to imagine these days with all the cell phone spines.
Surrounded by orange and walnut groves, the growing town nonetheless managed to provide safe, civilized and opportune situations for its newly arrived residents with affordable housing, subsidized by low interest government backed loans after WWII.
And plentiful, well-paying jobs. Imagine that!
Van Nuys, circa 1938.Widening of Victory Boulevard: 1954.Van Nuys Blvd. at Friar (circa 1950). Notice diagonal parking and streetcar wiring.Van Nuys Bl. 2013
Somehow it was lost after 1945. The enormous shopping centers robbed Van Nuys of its clientele. The street widenings turned boulevards into raceways and the village feel was destroyed. Factories closed, banks shrunk, stores fled, and crime settled here to afflict, rob, disable and kill.
Why does Van Nuys flounder, while all around it other cities like Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and sections of Los Angeles, like North Hollywood, Studio City, Mid-City and Highland Park flourish?
Delano St. July 2017Delano St. July 2017
Raymer St. March 2017
A journalist from Curbed LA called me yesterday. He is writing an article about Van Nuys and wanted to talk.
I mentioned many things that I wish were changed here, from road diets to better housing, from cleaner streets to more law enforcement for illegal dumping.
But I also told him that so much of our political leadership is devoted to working on problems like prostitution, rather than building a coalition of architects, designers, investors, and planners who could build up Van Nuys and make it, once again, a coherent, safe, stimulating, and pleasant place to live and work.
I know what’s bad here. But what about making it good? Where are our dreams? Why can’t we be as artistic as our studios, as wild in our imaginations as our writers, directors, cinematographers, animators, and designers?
Why isn’t the whole energy of creative Los Angeles devoted to overcoming our civic afflictions?
Near Cedros and Delano.
Van Nuys Bl. Nov. 2016
The deadest and more depressing areas of Van Nuys are closest to the Orange Line, which is also a good thing. Because this is where Van Nuys should work to build new, experimental, and innovative housing and commercial buildings.
Van Nuys Bl. Oct 2016 A dead place for street life.The Empty Post Office/ Van Nuys Bl. Oct. 2016Dystopian Van Nuys Oct. 2016. No people, no chairs, no trees. Just concrete.Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
From Kester to Hazeltine, north of Oxnard, the “Civic Center” district contains an empty post office, vacated stores, underutilized buildings, and dystopian spaces of concrete, homelessness, garbage, and withering neglect.
The pedestrian mall on Erwin, south of the Valley Municipal Building and surrounded by the Superior Court, the library and police station, is a civic disgrace.
Ironically, all the law enforcement, all the government agencies, all the power that resides in Van Nuys….. presides over the ruins of it.
Meanwhile up in Portland, OR.
Holst Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)Works Progress Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)Works Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)Fujiwaramuro Architects, Kobe, Japan (Dezeen)Van Nuys Alley near Delano and VNB
On Dezeen, there are posts about new, infill buildings in Portland, OR and Japan where the general level of architecture and design far outpaces Van Nuys. These are sophisticated, modern, but humble structures with ideas for living.
Look at these and imagine how, perhaps 25 new ones, could transform Van Nuys.
In the midst of our wasteland, we need to go back to working to demanding the best for Van Nuys, rather than accepting squalor and mediocrity.
Most photographs of the Valley Municipal Building show the 1933 building after its completion, but here are some, by Dick Whittington Studio as the hole was being dug in 1932.
Statistics and specifications for the completed structure exist and have been cited many times, so I won’t do it here.
Instead, one might look at these photographs and imagine the small town of Van Nuys, self-sufficient and walkable, safe and sunny, sitting in the middle of the largely agricultural San Fernando Valley in the depths of the Great Depression.
Surrounding the t-shaped dig, is a Richfield gas station and The Erwin Hotel, criss-crossed in a vaguely Tudor style.
In contrast to today’s heavily regulated construction, the men are all in civilian clothing-no hardhats, no vast walls around the site, no safety signs. The humble trucks are pulled right up to dirt and a two strips of lumber comprise a fence surrounding the digging.
Laborers, architects, drivers, engineers, photographer; everyone was lucky to work.
With such opening modesty the end product was magnificent, distinguished and proud.
And became that symbol of Van Nuys everlasting.
Here in Van Nuys 
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