Tag: “Van Nuys Neighborhood Council”

Small Minds

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For 22 years I’ve had front row seats to the shit show that is Van Nuys.

I moved here in 2000 and started this blog in 2006. My purpose: to apply creative writing and photography to the realities around me. 

I walked around and photographed Van Nuys, from the alleys to the houses to the buildings. Vanowen, Victory, Kester, Sepulveda.

At times my blog gave some visibility and notoriety, and I was brought in to observe the workings of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. 

But I never cared to swim in sewers of public life. I saw how small minds functioned, the old fools who fought against housing, and always pushed for more parking lots and wider streets.

“Hey Andrew, what do you think about naming the Van Nuys Post Office the Marilyn Monroe Van Nuys Post Office?”

“Hey Andrew, can you help us fight to preserve that parking lot behind the going out of business furniture store? We want to make sure they don’t build apartments there!”

“Hey Andrew, they want to build a five-story apartment on Vanowen and Hazeltine. That’s too much!”

The VNNC was strangely absent with the modern representatives of Van Nuys, it seemed to be the preserve of old white people who fought to preserve in their imaginations a city that no longer existed.

“My parents bought my house for $11,000 in 1956 and I used to ride my bike to Tommy’s for a chili dog. Gosh, those days are gone forever. I still live there. Yeah I pay $312 a year in property taxes. Thank God I have a pension from the post office.”

There was Councilman Tony Cardenas. He wanted to tear down the Art Deco era fire station on Sylvan. Under his watch Van Nuys further disintegrated, a decade before this pandemic started, and from what I’ve read Van Nuys has been in decline since about 1975.

Nury Martinez replaced Cardenas in 2014, and I often communicated with her office, and met with her people, and got her help cleaning up the streets, picking up dumped sofas, pushing to get traffic lights installed, pedestrian crossings painted, or illegal cars towed.

She was a great ally in defending dozens of small businesses from the 2017 threat of demolition when Metro proposed a 33-acre bulldozing of hundreds of industrial buildings between Kester and Van Nuys Bl. North of Oxnard. This blog acted as an advocate for small business owners who employed locals serving as an economic incubator for new immigrants to prosper in Van Nuys. 

Officer Erika Kirk, 2015

We had a wonderful Senior Lead Officer, Erika Kirk, the kind of woman you would want to work as a police officer. She drove around here and involved herself in matters large and small, but you felt safer with her presence.

The councilwoman, the cop, the council people: everything impersonated order, law, safety, and well-being.

But the reality of Van Nuys, (and greater Los Angeles) is that nothing nice stays nice without the constant threat of law enforcement. 

You must fight every single day to keep homeless encampments out, marijuana farms from the houses down the street. You have to fear for your life from criminals robbing your house, from mentally ill people in the shopping mall parking lot, from the car speeding 80 miles an hour through the red light as you begin to make your left turn. 

Nothing unlocked is left untouched: bicycles, decorative lights, cactuses, cars, mail, pumpkins, packages are stolen around the clock, from every lawn and every stoop, by every type of criminal. Most every crime is recorded on camera and hardly anybody is arrested.

Is this the fault of Nury Martinez?

I don’t think so. 

She spoke her mind in private, in a cigar filled room with other hacks and dealmakers, and she is no worse than anybody else who criticizes her for blatant bigotry. 

Is she worse than Mike Bonin who allows hundreds of violent, destructive, drug abusing and criminal people to camp out in West Los Angeles while flying the flag of compassion, and egregiously ignoring his constituents because he is on a morally higher plane of governance? When the pandemic emptied the streets of legitimate commerce he made sure that vagrants took over the sidewalks.

But in all fairness to him nobody recorded him making bigoted remarks in a room.

Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020
Old Post Office

The truth is that Los Angeles is a primitive, ugly, violent, disorderly, hateful, self-centered, grotesque city of billboards, blight, traffic, fires, bad air, bad food and bad actors. It is a city that promotes promoters, celebrities, and fake makers of merriment in Hollywood. 

It’s a city where the Hollywood Walk of Fame is populated by people shitting on the sidewalk, fighting with knives and guns, or walking around stoned and drunk and looking for a reason to kill.

If you are rich or famous or the child of someone rich or famous both are considered markers of high achievement.

LA takes comfort in its privileged folk in the cozy and winding streets of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Westwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills.  People here must have been shocked that to the small minded leaders of Los Angeles the city is still divided into pieces of pie: South Central, Pacoima, Westside, White, Latino, Black, Armenian, Oaxacan, Korean, Jewish. 

“Why that little bitch got LAX?”

As they say on Yelp, in every single sentence, “How amazing!”

The loudest liberals who cry the loudest about injustice drive their kids ten miles away to the whitest schools.

All the broken hearts on Twitter who heard what Nury and the bad men said about the little boy, how sad they are to know that hatreds and provincialism and ethnic warfare are the foundation of the great leaders of Los Angeles. 

And why is it that we still are shocked when a Latina refers to Oaxacans as ugly and short and can call a little Black boy a monkey? Have we not heard, ad nauseum, that Nury was to be praised because she was our first Latina city council president?

“She grew up poor and her family is from Zacatecas!”

Don’t judge her.

She’s what the American Dream is all about.

And a woman too.

And a mom.

And a LATINA!

LATIN-X!

If you think it’s worthy of praise to cite someone’s accidental ethnicity as an accomplishment don’t be surprised if that same person speaks and acts as only a representative of that identity!

All the identities who regularly label themselves by their identities, divide this nation, this state and this city into even more identities, and victimized identities. All the ones who think it’s modern, progressive and praiseworthy to admire ethnicity (instead of character), they too share blame for tearing apart our city and our country.

“The first transgender fireperson! The first movie with an all-Asian cast! The first Pacific Islander marathon winner!”

“I go to that coffee stand, even though I hate their coffee, because it’s Black owned!” 

Hooray!

Is there anyone who looks at this city and wonders how it might be built to benefit all its inhabitants humanely and environmentally? 

If you were in power, like Nury, wouldn’t you burn with passion to rebuild, to clean, to beautify the ugliness of the San Fernando Valley? Would you arrive at work every day like Nury and walk down Van Nuys Boulevard and think that you had accomplished something?

The conversations we heard in that room were vile. 

But what we have seen with our own eyes on the streets of Los Angeles is worse. 

Filling in the Blanks

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As everyone doesn’t know, the Second Largest City in the United States, Los Angeles (pop. 3,972,000) has a lack of housing. Even people who own homes admit, privately, that not everyone should be forced to live on bus benches and sleep alongside the Orange Line Busway.

So at last night’s Planning and Land Use Meeting of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, several apartment projects were presented, which will, collectively, add some 250 apartments to an area, now occupied by 180,000 people, renting for an average of $2,000 a month.

Housing is coming to Van Nuys, again.

And the board was saying yes, every time.

For the millions starved for housing, some crumbs are being dropped from the sky.

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Giant apartment builder IMT plans to erect a 6-story-apartment at 6500 N. Sepulveda Bl. north of Victory Bl. 160-units will have 275 parking spaces on site. The building, architecturally, has a pleasing look of rhythmic, stripped down modernism. Renderings, of course, show it with spotlights, at sundown, without whores, discarded mattresses and homeless people pushing carts on the sidewalk.

On Thursday, April 27th, at 6pm there will be a community meeting with 6500 Sepulveda developer reps at the Van Nuys Library. So far, 3 people (out of 2,000) in our neighborhood, adjacent to the proposed apartment, have replied that they will attend.

At 14530 Erwin Street, west of Van Nuys Blvd, a 48-unit, 5-story apartment building is planned on the site of some auto repair shops. Again the proposed structure is attractive, with a modern look.

My first reaction was to applaud the addition of upgraded housing within walking distance of the Van Nuys government buildings. One could imagine future residents biking, walking, taking the bus, shopping for groceries. The effect of having new housing on a street now occupied by empty parking lots and gruesome auto shops was uplifting.

However, one of the board members (whom I like a lot) asked, “why would you build on such a crappy street?” I wanted to bang my head against the table. Self-sabotage is such a running theme within the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. Yes, why bring good development into a bad area? For that matter, why bring a shelter dog into a loving family?

The presenter, politely, replied that land is cheaper in Van Nuys than other areas of Los Angeles. That makes its development more feasible. Sometimes the economics lessons spoken here seem self-evident.

Other projects presented last night included AYCE Gogi, a Korean BBQ restaurant at 7128 Van Nuys Bl. They want to add 20 pinball machines to serve with the garlic beef, bulgogi, pork belly and brisket and beer.

At 14831 Burbank Bl. just east of Kester, a new “Brother’s Pizza” is proposed where Napoli Pizza Kitchen used to be. This strip building will have Crème Caramel LA, Brother’s Pizza, My Fish Stop and The Oaks Express Laundry, a very fine laundromat.

Finally, 7745 Sepulveda, (near Western Bagel) where AVIO Coach Craft asked for permission to add six spray painting booths expressly for Tesla automobiles. The fine automaker, and rigorously environmental company, will oversee the process of applying paint to its vehicles. And AVIO has the exclusive contract under Tesla, a business that will paint 300-400 cars a month.

Apartments, pinball machines and auto body painting. Van Nuys is making progress into the future.

The Snack Pit.

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Olivia DeHavilland in "The Snake Pit" (1948)
Olivia DeHavilland in “The Snake Pit” (1948)

There were plenty of pizzas and sodas at last night’s meeting of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council.

Exasperation was the theme of the meeting.

Ten tables long, the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council has now grown, along with waistlines, to encompass twenty people; and the length of the officials with made-up titles now almost pours out onto the sidewalk.

As usual, there were older white women bemoaning the appalling conditions of Van Nuys, including people sleeping on the streets and the poor condition of trash containers on Van Nuys Boulevard, where no humans shop, walk or eat unless they are forced to.

This being Los Angeles, the heartfelt sympathy and emotionality was in evidence for those problems related to the automobile. The situation for one resident was dire. This man lived in a one-car garaged house on a certain street with two hour parking. He had no driveway. His vehicle was being ticketed. Couldn’t someone help him he asked in a ten-minute exchange.

First I cried because I met a man with no eyesight, then I cried because I met a man with no garage….

A woman got up to talk about someone and something that had touched her heart. She was almost in tears, but I had trouble understanding what brought her to the brink.

Another man who runs the “LICK” Committee spoke about by-laws and promised to help the man who lived in the house with the garage on the street with two-hour parking.

An elderly man got up and said it was not right. And a half hour later his wife got up to speak and said it was wrong and should not be tolerated. What it was was anybody’s guess.

Outside the meeting, Van Nuys Boulevard, Heart of Van Nuys, was deserted, its eight lanes of traffic and empty shops somehow not appealing to hipsters, late-night dinners, and romantic couples out for a date.

Despite the utter evident failure of Van Nuys as a civic and commercial entity, the Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian spoke to the gathered on all the issues he was working to solve and his agenda seemed at times to be larger than the Planet Earth.

Transportation funding, cutting tobacco use, gun control legislation, minimum wage increases, climate change action, renewable energy, earned income tax credits, cap and trade issues, green spaces, affordable housing, earthquake warning systems, VA drug prices.

Assemblyman Nazarian checked off an impressive list of issues whose resolution, if that day comes, promises a heavenly San Fernando Valley free of expensive housing where green spaces and reliable public transport shuttle people around to health care; where affordable drugs and professional medical help is there for one and for all, legal and illegal, young and old, vet and non-vet.

Two hours into the meeting, a sour faced group of old men in tan, anxious to present their proposed hundreds of units of housing to the VNNC, had barely any time to talk of the truly huge changes that might be coming to Van Nuys Boulevard.

And the architect with the $20 million apartment and retail project was told to come back next month as time had run out.

I forgot to mention the board members arguing about plastic bags.

Priorities always at the VNNC Snack Pit.

 

 

 

Clean Up on Sepulveda.

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Through a multi-pronged alliance between City Councilwoman’s Nury Martinez’s Office (CD-6), the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, and neighbors who came together on Next Door, about 30 people gathered today between Haynes and Lemay on Sepulveda, and spent a good part of Saturday morning, raking, shoveling, pruning, digging, sweeping, and exhausting themselves to rid the dirt median of man made crap and improve a section of Van Nuys for at least a day.

Long an eyesore, the garbage strewn dusty, dry strip is a dumping ground of Carl’s Jr. burger bags, old condoms, half finished Styrofoam burrito plates, discarded diapers, tires, beer bottles, smashed soda cans, empty vodka bottles and anything else that might be dropped by an intoxicated prostitute at 3am.

Gloves, rakes, shovels, trash bags, water, all of it was brought along and given to the volunteers who included Field Deputy Guillermo Marquez, and Linda Levitan, both from Nury Martinez’s office; Penny Meyer, Howard Benjamin and Quirino De La Cuesta, all VNNC officers; and teenagers from Van Nuys. Families, older folks and an obscure blogger/photographer joined in to shovel and sweat.

Filled to the brim were garbage bags lined up along the curb and waiting to be picked up by the Department of Sanitation on Monday. Palm fronds, cut off from trees to reveal litter below, were themselves placed along the trash bags for disposal.

Work started around 8am, and by 11am the median had been raked and picked clean of garbage.

 

 

 

Van Nuys Savings and Loan.

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In 1954, architect Culver Heaton’s design for the Van Nuys Savings and Loan, with interior murals by artist Millard Sheets, rose at 6569 N. Van Nuys Bl.

Along with other financial institutions such as Jefferson Savings, Lincoln Savings, Great Western Bank and Bank of America, they served the local community of hard-working people who opened accounts that paid 3% or 4 1/2% interest and where polite tellers, dressed in pearls and high heels, addressed customers by their last (never their first) name.

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Photographer Maynard Parker shot these images of the bank exterior and interiors. They bespeak a dignified and progressive institution whose architecture was as up-to-date as its vision of a prosperous, safe Van Nuys. A sign on the outside of the building reads “The Home of Security” leaving no doubt to depositors about the solidity of the S&L.

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Mr. Sheets was a prodigious artist whose work can be seen all over Southern California, most notably on the exteriors of many of those white, marble clad, Home Savings of America buildings that resemble mausoleums.

Architect Culver Heaton designed many Mid 20th Century churches in Southern California in a style of expressionistic eccentricity long departed from our stripped-down imagination. His Chapel of the Jesus Ethic in Glendale (1965) is almost campy in form with its prayerful red roof, rising like hands, above a turquoise reflecting pool and a statue of Jesus on water fashioned by Herb Goldman.

Photo by Michael Locke
Photo by Michael Locke

In the 1980s, there was a national scandal and shakeout in the savings and loan industry and many closed down. The de-industrialization of Van Nuys, and its decline as a manufacturing and commercial center, coincided with a tremendous increase in immigration from Central America.

Today, a Guatemalan market, La Tapachulteca, occupies the old bank property.

2014/ Image by Andy Hurvitz
2014/ Image by Andy Hurvitz

But last year, in a hopeful sign of better times, Boaz Miodovsky of Ketter Construction, who is the new owner, plans on demolishing the old bank which has now been degraded from its original condition. His company will design and erect a multi-story apartment house with ground floor retail. The front, on VNB, will be five stories tall and taper down to three stories in back.These illustrations, which he sent to me, are preliminary and will be further refined to include landscaping and additional detail.

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Nostalgist and Van Nuys Neighborhood Council member John Hendry, who grew up and still lives in Van Nuys, alerted me to the impending demolition and asked me to research the origins of the historic structure. Quirino De La Cuesta, another VNNC member, stepped in and purchased these images from the Huntington Library.

And Mr. Miodovsky, in a nod to the old murals, will have new artwork painted within the new structure. It will be created by local artists and reflect the continuing development of Van Nuys which hit its bottom and is now climbing out parcel by parcel.

 

 

 

 

On the Agenda for Van Nuys Neighborhood Council

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Good citizen Maria Scherzer sent me an agenda document from the much respected Van Nuys Neighborhood Council whose work is so fundamental in making Van Nuys a great place to live. (See photo above)

I hadn’t thought much of the VNNC lately…except when I walked down Van Nuys Boulevard last week past homeless men, garbage piles next to the Marvin Braude Center, and finally stopped at the shuttered doors of the closed down Post Office. I wondered how a post office next to government offices, the police, library and in the center of the so-called business district goes dark, but I guess that is Van Nuys, 2013.

So let’s see (some of ) what’s on the agenda for the Wednesday June 12th meeting of the VNNC:

1. Comedy Show Presentation
2. Procedure to elect an Honorary Mayor of Van Nuys: Robert Redford, Tom Selleck, Sally Field, Paula Abdul or the “Lollipop Guild Actor from the Wizard of Oz”. The last named contender would have to be a minimum of 73 years of age, if he were only one year old when the 1939 Wizard of Oz was made.
3. Vote for removal of Katrina White from VNNC Board (that Cat is sure hated).
4. Sister City Proposal to link Van Nuys with Abuja, Nigeria or Van Nuys, Indiana.

Drive by shootings, a business district that is full of pawn shops and trash, vast treeless and unrented sections of commercial streets (Victory, Vanowen), crime, littered and neglected slum malls, abandoned houses , neglected properties, and falling down apartments. Those are the priorities and the problems of our district.

Abuja, Nigeria
Abuja, Nigeria

Abuja, Nigeria looks to be a vibrant, modern city, much more advanced than, say, Van Nuys, CA.

But let’s get back to the Munchkins.

The VNNC is spending its time electing a Munchkin for honorary mayor….

Think about that.

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