It is only mid-June but already the extreme heat has landed in Southern California.
Every week there is another “record breaking” temperature in thousands of places, not only here but around the world.
To an older Angeleno, June once meant days of haze, overcast and cloudy.
The Pacific Ocean was cooler, even cold. The truly hot times did not start until late August.
Now the ocean is warmer, semi-tropical, and the clouds that emanate from the sea are the clouds we see in the sky, and they are the clouds one sees in places like Miami and Houston. There is “monsoonal moisture” and the air is thick, even in the morning, making the heat more intense.
I’m not a meteorologist but something is very strange in the skies these days.
This is what the “Kester Ridge” neighborhood looked like around 6:30 am today.
Since the pandemic began, in earnest, last March, one of our routines is the morning walk around our neighborhood.
The fact that most of us live and work at home, self-incarcerated by choice or duty, has produced a strange life. Beside the societal disasters that befell our nation in 2020, the ordinary existence of the citizen is to wander out and wander back in.
Wandering out, in the morning, or when the light is beautiful in the late afternoon, I captured some images of our area with my mobile and edited these on VSCO.
Kester Ridge is basically a 1950s creation of good, solid ranch houses between Victory and Vanowen, Sepulveda and Kester. On Saloma, Lemona, Norwich, Noble, Burnett, Lemay and Archwood the houses have endured, and only a few have been completely demolished or aggrandized.
But the persistent trend is the ADU, the conversion of garages and backyards to multi-family dwellings. Many of these houses are rentals, and the ones that are owned also rent to others who may live beside the owners.
A few years ago this seemed problematic, and the idea that our backyard behind would sprout a second house four feet from our property line was unimaginable. But now we also have a gray box 4 feet behind us, 30 feet long and 15 feet high and we are OK with it, as long as the dogs, the noise, and the marijuana don’t also move in.
Meanwhile, the ranch houses, the sidewalks, and the garages without cars stand silently and passively, unaware of their portraits.
Even at the darkest time of the year, when the light echoes the mood, Van Nuys soldiers on.
Along unpaved Columbus Avenue, where old large properties await their transformation into many boxed houses, the blithe disregard for the larger good, for neighborly niceties, is evident.
For isn’t this the representation of freedom at its finest, to do what you want, to behave as you feel, to self-destructively ruin you and your surroundings as you sit on vacant land waiting for its value to increase?
Somebody is landlord here, and somebody is absent, and in his place the trash, the overgrown weeds, the toxic cans and poisons leak out, and it is all thought normal, just the way it’s done and has always been done.
For nothing really matters except how you can exploit, make profit, take for yourself, and destroy while you can.
“As the country waited for ballots to be counted, it was Biden — not the occupant of the Oval Office — who was reassuring people that this democracy was intact, that the system was working and that the center would hold. He was the voice of calm optimism in the midst of tumultuous times.
When he became president-elect late Saturday morning, he did something far more herculean than accepting responsibility for a worsening pandemic and a struggling economy. He removed a terrible, suffocating weight from the back of this nation. For the more than 74 million Americans who voted for him — and surely even for some of those who did not — Biden’s election allowed this country to laugh, to dance and to breathe. He cracked open a space where the light could shine through. Indeed, his victory caused people to weep in joyful relief as they became aware of the heaviness that had afflicted their hearts, after they’d suddenly been relieved of it.”-Robin Givhan, Washington Post, Nov. 7, 2020
Today, on our morning walk, around 6:30am, we passed an old RV that had pulled up near Kittridge. A tall, gaunt, middle-aged man came out with a cigarette and a big can of Colt 45. He walked up Noble, beer and smoke in hand. And, like so many of us these days, seemed headed to nowhere in particular.
Facebook must have known I had that RV and that lost man on my mind.
For, inexplicably, on my feed today, a glossy spread advertised a $190,000 Bowlus Road Chief RV, an exact replica of the 1930s with 2020 features. They start at $190K and go up in price from there.
26 feet long, six and a half wide, 3,200 pounds, the aluminum skinned, aircraft riveted trailer sleeps four. The all-wood interior features anodized galley, five silent gravity ceiling vents, LED Lighting, luxury commercial grade flooring, hotel bathroom with privacy doors, Italian Marine shower head, vanity, and toilet with a hygienic, “easy emptying cassette system.” There is also a stainless steel bathroom sink, teak shower seating and flooring, and yours and mine large wardrobes with hanging bars.
You can park, off-grid, in any desert and still enjoy a powerful, lithium iron, phosphate power system that runs for seven days. Even the A/C blows for up to four hours a day without current. Control it all on your smart phone. If it gets cold at night, don’t worry, the floors are heated and there is continuous hot water.
A “Wyoming” décor option features “natural brown seating that is incredibly soft with an unrivaled comfort. It pairs perfectly with luxury bedding in flax and oyster. The awning has stripes of flax and beige.” It would suit one of Ralph Lauren’s mistresses.
Margarita Mixers
Hand crafted in Oxnard, California, the tale of this exquisite trailer goes back 90 years to designer, engineer and aircraft builder Hawley Bowlus who built the famed “Spirit of St. Louis” airplane which Charles Lindbergh flew to Europe in 1927, the first time a man crossed the ocean by plane.
Mr. Bowlus built some 80 Road Chiefs in the 1930s before ending his project in 1937 and returning to aircraft production. Many are still in operation today and fetch a premium.
The new CEO of Bowlus Road Chief is Ms. Geneva Long who conceived of this while in Wharton Business School. She and her company have quite a few accolades:
• The first female-founded RV company
• The first [RV] with heated floors and life-work solutions that include the first charging stations/router/wifi amplifier for personal technology
• The first direct to consumer model in the RV market with sales generated online
• An ultra-luxury market for travel trailers
• The first lithium-powered travel trailer with sophisticated power management systems
• The first truly sustainable RV
The Bowlus Road Chief is a glorious toy for any person wealthy enough to afford one for their unique and privileged leisure.
Imagine Gwyenth Kate Paltrow in Pioneertown, CA alighting from hers after lovemaking, the scent of This Smells Like My Orgasmcandle wafting out into the desert as she rubs a soothing and aromatic nutritive Tammy Fender Bulgarian Lavender Body Oil ($65) over her moistened, tanned, bony arms and hands.
RVs: An Ethical Question
My question, as always: why can’t all the innovation, design, capital, industry, and technology be applied to housing those who are desperately in need of a place to live? Are we blind and deaf to the tens of thousands camped out in tents along our streets? Do we not smell the fires that burn every single day in these drug and alcohol saturated encampments?
Why can’t Mr. Garcetti employ Ms. Long or someone from her team to build ten RV cities with lower cost versions of this? Perhaps the City of Los Angeles could have ten factories around the city to employ workers turning these out for our current housing emergency and put up ten villages around the city to house homeless. Am I insane for proposing this?
In 2016, voters passed Proposition HHH which allocated $1.2 billion to build homeless housing.
“The city estimated in 2016 that it would cost between $350,000 to $414,000 to build a unit of supportive housing (in other words, one apartment), depending on the number of bedrooms. Now, more than three years after that estimate, the median cost per unit of housing in the Prop HHH pipeline is $531,373, according to the audit.” In 2019, three years after passage, not ONE UNIT HAD BEEN BUILT.
Imagine if during WWII we were attacked in 1941 and never built one aircraft until 1944? We would be saluting Hitler today.
You could have two, nearly three luxury Bowlus Road Chiefs for the price of one unit of supportive housing.
Something is terribly wrong in our city. And his name is Eric Garcetti.
So, let us appreciate the qualities and accomplishments of the Bowlus Road Chief. And let us not forget this jewel box of an RV will travel past the freezing, the hungry and the forgotten, a misbegotten luxury which could be a template for saving many, but instead is a frivolity for the very few.
One of the fastest growing categories of business in 1950s Van Nuys, CA, was the modest priced furniture retailer.
The opening of a store on Van Nuys Boulevard was an event for the whole family. Mom, Dad, Janet, Billy and Sally would come down to see dinette sets, bunk beds, and wall-to-wall carpet that would soon cover the San Fernando Valley from Burbank to Hidden Hills.
Van Nuys was prosperous, white, middle-class, with excellent schools, clean streets, strictly policed, and full of new families in new houses. All these ranch houses and young families needed furniture. And here it was!
The widening of Van Nuys Boulevard in 1954 to a six-lane wide highway offered builders of furniture stores the opportunity to erect big signs atop big box stores fronting the street.
In the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library are these photographs taken from the pages of the Valley Times from 1955-61.
Photograph caption dated March 21, 1956 reads “Large Gold’s Valley furniture and appliance store will open at the corner of Roscoe and Van Nuys boulevards, Panorama City, with an all-day celebration tomorrow. Gifts, entertainment and free rides for children will be part of festivities.”
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 December 2, 1955 reads “Sign features Taylor’s Furniture Mart, new name selected for store formerly known as Van Nuys Furniture Mart. Company recently opened Reseda branch, known as Taylor’s Grand Central Warehouse.”
Photograph caption dated April 7, 1958 reads, “Above shows new Barker Bros. Van Nuys store which formally opened today at 6505 Van Nuys Blvd. Store provides nearly three times the space of the former Barker store across the street at 6502 Van Nuys Blvd. The old store closed Saturday. Barker Bros. has operated a branch in Van Nuys since 1948.”
Photograph caption dated April 28, 1961 reads “Special grand opening celebration continues through the weekend at the new Douglas Furniture Mart, 6180 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys. The store features a medium priced line of furniture and appliances.”
The 1958 Barker Brothers store still stands at 6505 Van Nuys Bl. It appears to be empty, along sidewalks where only the saddest and most desperate wander.
Here in Van Nuys 
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