Van Nuys Boulevard – Page 2

The Van Nuys State Office Building

July 11, 2018September 9, 2019Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged 1980s, Architecture, Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian, Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, Essay, Homeless, Photos, Senator Robert M Hertzberg, Tents, Van Nuys and the Valley, Van Nuys Boulevard, Van Nuys State Office BuildingLeave a comment

The Van Nuys State Office Building is that 4-story, yellow and green building on the east side of Van Nuys Boulevard right on the corner of Calvert.

It has strips of windows, and a long, blank wall that fronts Van Nuys Boulevard, ensuring that no retail activity will ever enliven its frontage.

What is the State of Van Nuys you may ask? Is that not a ridiculous name? Was it named that to confound and confuse and further alienate us from government?

How about: “The State of California Building in Van Nuys”?

It cost $15 million dollars 34 years ago and was dedicated on February 8, 1985. It was considered a marvelous way to save taxpayer money because it consolidated all state agencies under one, open-air, courtyard roof.

I walked, for the first time, inside the courtyard today, and was surprised to feel a cool, calming, restful place, shielded from the harsh sun and torrid humidity exhausting our city in recent days.

A directory lists such agencies as the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, The Department of General Services, The Department of Industrial Relations, and The Division of Occupational Safety and Health. Senator Robert M. Hertzberg has an office here as does Assemblyman of the 45^thDistrict, Democrat Jesse Gabriel of Encino who is not to be confused with the Assemblyman of the 46^thDistrict, Adrin Nazarian who also has an office here but is not listed on the directory.

The architecture is of the 1980s with lots of diagonal lines, a virtue signaler from that era of advancement beyond the Bauhaus Box.

Walk up the diagonal stairs and look down on a paved brick courtyard planted with Ficus trees and rectangular streetlights a year or two away from hipster respect and admiration.

Most striking in this building complex is the steel and canvas roof with its stadium like effect, a trellis covering that keeps out rain and direct light, but provides, from upper floors, views out to the Valley in every direction.

At the top of the building, one can survey all the grandiose emptiness of civic Van Nuys with its vacant post office, its courthouse buildings and its enormous presence of government that seems to blanket and stifle the old town under a bureaucratic dead weight of concrete, windows and open plazas.

Never have so much accomplished so little for so few.

From 40 feet in the air Van Nuys still wears a costume of respectable commerce and responsive government.

But back down on the street, the crazies are in control: homeless, addicted, angry and desperate. We are expected to always step aside and allow schizophrenic, unwashed, lost and marginal people to camp out everywhere, to doze off at Starbucks, to sleep outside of the LAPD, to vomit and defecate on bus benches. They live on the sidewalk and then if you photograph them on public property they scream, “You don’t have my fuckin’ permission to take pictures ass hole!”

Road rage is also in evidence, as seen in this video where an angry driver followed my neighbor home from this area in Van Nuys and threw a rock at her car.

Homeless Tents Near Busway and Van Nuys Bl.

This is an emergency that requires a military like mobilization to set up tent cities and wood houses and barracks on land to house people who cannot house themselves. Who does not understand this?

Nobody, not one person, should be allowed to live on the street. At all.

A registry of homeless people should be set up. 12,000 spaces for homeless who will receive housing, food and sanitation and in return will clean garbage, paint houses, sweep sidewalks and be paid $12 an hour and work six hours a day with one hour for lunch. It is humane and reasonable.

We live in a topsy-turvy city that prioritizes the rights of the insane, the criminal, and the alien over all. It is a sanctuary state where July 4^thfelt like the middle of Syria during a bombing. We come here, liberal and open-minded, and then we are asked to excuse everything that is wrong and against the law and understand that the dysfunction of the city is merely an expression of the highest humanitarian values of compassion and tolerance.

Van Nuys is failing because it exemplifies everything in the preceding paragraph.

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The Return of Light Rail

June 29, 2018June 29, 2018Posted in Transportation, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Councilwoman Nury Martinez", City Council District #6, light rail, Metro, Transportation, Van Nuys BoulevardLeave a comment

For the future we now return to the past.

The black and white photos all show how Van Nuys Bl. looked in the period from 1911-1957.

Yesterday there was announcement from Metro.

Metro will build a 9-mile-long light rail down the center of Van Nuys Boulevard, stretching from Sylmar to the Orange Line Van Nuys station near Oxnard St.

The light rail service yard for train maintenance will be built near Raymer St along the Metrolink tracks in the “Option B” area. “Option A” near Oxnard and Kester, that would have destroyed 58 buildings, 186 businesses and 1,000 jobs will not happen.

From the inception of Van Nuys in 1911 until the late 1950s, an electric rail car connected Van Nuys, North Hollywood and Hollywood and provided a means of public transportation from this part of the San Fernando Valley to the rest of Los Angeles.

The modernization of Los Angeles, which always put the car before anything else, led to the ripping out of the rail and its replacement with an enormously wide boulevard of ten lanes of asphalt.

Van Nuys Boulevard today is probably in its worst state of economic and social decline in its history. With its empty stores, shabby buildings, homeless men and women and neglected properties it stands as a civic disgrace.

Hopefully, the light rail will lead to a change in the betterment of Van Nuys, though local leaders, such as Councilwoman Nury Martinez are often lukewarm about public transportation, painting it in fearful terms of criminality and danger, or still characterizing it as a cattle car for maids and dishwashers to get to work, rather than as a means of transportation for every single citizen of Los Angeles to use.

Any incident of crime is unacceptable on a Metro train.

But how many private cars break the law every single day by speeding, running over pedestrians, going through red lights, and taking part in car chases, drive-by-shootings, hold-ups and child kidnappings?

Here is an article from Curbed LA describing the new project:

“Metro is moving forward with plans for a new rail line in the eastern San Fernando Valley.

One of the 28 projects that the agency plans to have up-and-running in time for the 2028 Olympics, the East San Fernando Valley Transit Corridor would run from the Orange Line station in Van Nuys to the Sylmar/San Fernando Metrolink station, about 9 miles to the north.

Metro had considered building the line as a rapid bus route, rather than rail, but on Thursday the agency’s board of directors approved plans that would advance the project as a light rail route similar to the existing Gold, Blue, and Green lines.

“I have long dreamed of a day when we would have more than two Metro train stops,” Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, told the Metro board.

He called the line the “largest economic development project in the San Fernando Valley this millennium.”

Most of the line would travel along Van Nuys Boulevard, with trains traveling on tracks built in the center of the road. For the final 2.5 miles of the route, trains would travel on San Fernando Road to the northernmost stop.

Metro expects a trip from end-to-end would take about 29 minutes, and that the train could carry close to 50,000 riders per day by 2040. Eventually, the line could connect with a future transit project through the Sepulveda Pass.

That would give Valley residents significantly more options when navigating the city.

Since the line will be served by light rail, Metro will need to add a service station for trains that travel along the route. The agency had considered putting that facility on a parcel of land close to the Van Nuys station, but local property owners complained that the plan would displace hundreds of businesses.

Now, Metro plans to put that maintenance yard closer to the Van Nuys Metrolink station, where it would have to acquire fewer properties. Some businesses would still be displaced, and several business owners expressed concern Thursday that they could be forced to close up shop.

These businesses would be eligible for relocation fees, and on Thursday Metro Boardmember Sheila Kuehl also asked staffers to look into creating a fund to compensate business owners for disruptions caused by construction of the line.

The light rail tracks would serve 14 stations running through the communities of Van Nuys, Panorama City, Arleta, Pacoima, and the city of San Fernando. The entire project would cost about $1.3 billion to construct. Metro previously considered running a short leg of the line underground, but found that would more than double the project cost.

Now that Metro has settled on a design for the project, the agency will complete a final environmental review before preparing to begin construction.

Under the Measure M funding timeline—approved by LA County voters in 2016—the project would break ground in 2021. Construction is expected to wrap up by 2027.”

One Day, Soon.

June 6, 2018June 6, 2018Posted in Architecture, Links, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Councilwoman Nury Martinez", Architecture, Architizer, Chief Design Officer, Christopher Hawthorne, Futurism, Graham Baba Architects, Imagination, Kester, Links, Mayor Eric Garcetti, Orange Line, Planning, Public Transportation, sepulveda, Sherman Way, Van Nuys and the Valley, Van Nuys Boulevard, Vanowen, victory4 Comments

One day, soon, there will be a revitalization of Van Nuys Boulevard.

Gone forever will be the hopeless days when people laughed to mock it, or ran away in revulsion.

All the central gathering places that should be occupied by civilized things, all the lots that hold parking, all the empty buildings along Van Nuys Boulevard, will be replaced with vibrant, happy, upbeat, successful businesses and residents.

It will take nothing more than $5 billion dollars to invest in new transit, new apartments, new multi-family housing, new police officers, a new police station, an army of street cleaners, and law enforcement people who will ticket illegally parked cars, handicap placard abusers, unregulated street sellers, unlicensed signs, and unpermitted businesses.

The narrowing of Victory Boulevard, the planting of 200 oak trees from Kester to Van Nuys Boulevard, will bring about a revitalization of the formerly crappy strip of low rent mini-malls, slum apartments and empty stores. The LAPD Victory Precinct at the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Victory, and its drop-in center there will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

150 new LAPD officers, out of a police force of some 10,000 will be specifially assigned to the area.

Some 50 new apartment buildings, from Sherman Way to Oxnard, with 10,000 new apartments, will be built and 20% of them will rent for under market value.

Security cameras will enforce the law to prevent speeding, red light running, assault, vandalism, burglaries of properties and hold-ups on the street.

There will be decorative streetlights, three new parks, new benches, and thousands of shade trees planted along the boulevard to protect against temperatures that get hotter every year.

Bike lanes, light rail, automobiles and pedestrians will share a new Van Nuys Boulevard divided between all types of transport, from foot to motor to public.

And the architecture will be inventive, modern, and integrate environmentally such necessities as solar energy and district wide free wi-fi.

In a nod to the old Van Nuys, the first orange grove planted in the Valley in 90 years will be manned by formerly homeless men and women who will guard the orchards as they would their own children. There will be 10 houses planted around the grove to ensure the safety and security of the new urban agriculturalists.

The low industrial buildings in the neighborhood around Kester and Oxnard, all 33 acres, were preserved in 2018, and later became an incubator for creatives who settled in the area and built narrow houses near the Orange Line, and worked and lived next to artisans, musicians, brewers, car restorers and craftspeople of every skill.

All of this is possible.

The people who will decide whether this is fantasy or reality are reading this post.

All photos courtesy of Architizer.

Architecture by Graham Baba.

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Random Observations.

March 8, 2018Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged 6351 Van Nuys Bl., apartments, Norvald Bldg., Q Bargain, real estate, Sontag Drugs, The Country General Store, trash, Van Nuys, Van Nuys Boulevard, VIP PrintingLeave a comment

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.

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.

Populating Van Nuys with Fine Architecture

August 3, 2017Posted in ArchitectureTagged "Civic Center", "Councilwoman Nury Martinez", "Curbed LA", Architecture, CD6, design, Dezeen, history, Housing Solutions, Ideas, Infill, San Fernando Valley, urban, Valley Municipal Building, Van Nuys, Van Nuys Boulevard, Van Nuys Civic Center1 Comment

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 Blvd. at Friar (circa 1950). Notice diagonal parking and streetcar wiring.

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?

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?

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. 2016

Dystopian Van Nuys Oct. 2016. No people, no chairs, no trees. Just concrete.

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)

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.

Fox Market, Van Nuys Bl. Circa 1960

July 22, 2016July 22, 2016Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged "Carl Maston", "Julius Shulman" "The Birth of a New Metropolis", "USC Digital Archives", Fox Market, history, San Fernando Valley, Supermarket, Van Nuys Boulevard1 Comment

It is always fun to come across yet another old photograph of Van Nuys. (Courtesy of USC Digital Archives)

This time it’s the Fox Market, a chain, which once had an outpost at 7425 Van Nuys Bl. at the corner of Van Nuys and Valerio, north of Sherman Way .

Legendary photographer Julius Schulman shot the Carl Maston designed structure sometime in the early 1960s. Maston was a noted Mid- 20th Century architect whose work is described as “stark and no frills” in his USC research repository.

A flat roof, floor to ceiling glass, and acres of asphalt mixed convenience and modernism.

The neat, spare, boxy building is gone, and in its place is a riot of ugliness typical of that stretch of Van Nuys where architecture has gone to die. And all who pass through here glimpse a hot Hell built by indifference, corruption and “The Free Market”.

The May 5, 1960 Los Angeles Times carried a display ad from the Fox Market, which also had many other locations throughout the Southland.

There was a pound of peanut butter for 39 cents, lamb roast for 39 cents a pound, cans of Libby Peaches for 29 cents, along with a 59 cent cream pie and 4 buttered steaks for 69 cents.

Nobody seems to drink grapefruit juice these days, but in 1960 you could have had a 46 ounce can for 29 cents to wash down your 4 pounds of red potatoes for 25 cents.

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