On Monday, October 3, 2016 I went for a midday walk around the Van Nuys Civic Center.
I carried my Fujifilm XE-2 with a wide angle 16mm lens.
I was just documenting the surroundings, a habit of mine.
The photographs are in black and white, the buildings are stark, the plazas empty, the sun and shadows stark, clear and sharp.
That was the autumn when Mr. Trump was running against Mrs. Clinton.
Cue the ominous music.
These are the buildings and the places where the people who hold authority, work overseeing or not overseeing our governance. The police, the council person and her minions, the regulators of health, safety, zoning; the judiciary who rule upon us and judge whether we are lawbreakers or innocents; they are all found in these blank, lifeless blocks of flat roofed offices.
All around there is parking, more than enough parking for people who no longer need to work here. Many of the multi-story concrete structures were empty in 2016, now they are even emptier. The post office is closed. The James C Corman Federal Building is empty. The library is always closed, though I don’t know if it is officially closed, perhaps a judge will issue an order on the legal status of the library.
Nearby, depending on the hour or the day, there will appear tents, shopping carts of trash, improvised portable slums. Now they are up on the Orange Line at Kester. They are taken down, cleared away, and then grow up somewhere else, in the park, on the sidewalk, next door to your home.
The Civic Center seen up close is a place of repressive, mute, inhuman architecture, a conglomeration of concrete, strips of windows, grandly monotonous. It is a bitter irony that hundreds of millions of dollars built these edifices only to have no humanizing or civilizing effect upon the lives of the citizens of Van Nuys.
From these structures, we are sent motorized birds to fly overhead at all hours, patronized by politicians spouting identarian nonsense, paying homage to the oppressed while doing all the oppression by doing nothing. Secret recordings of one of the elected leaders who once reigned over us, Former Councilwoman #6 Nury Martinez, revealed her low-class judgment, predicated on ethnic power trading. No wonder nobody of any ethnicity can build housing, keep the streets safe, clean up the garbage, the illegal dumping or stop the cars that speed six at a time through red lights.
In all these buildings surely there must be an architectural dreamer who can summon the wealthiest Angelenos as Mr. Biden did last week. Invites should go out to those who have access to power and money: Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston, and Rick Caruso. Chauffeur them 20 minutes, from Bel Air to Van Nuys. Here they can announce a grand scheme to reconstruct a civil, humane community of affordable apartments and lively shops, restaurants and parks to replace the gulag of grossness we now have in the heart of this district.
But this is just fantasy. Who ever heard of a celebrity with friends caring about the conditions of her city? It’s almost as unimaginable as UCLA and USC students protesting against homelessness, violence and poverty in the city of Los Angeles.
Tragically, or amusingly, this once pristine office tower and adjoining asphalt parking lot was the subject of Ed Ruscha’s art. He made aerial photographs in 1967 that today sell for tens of thousands of dollars. In 2014, the photograph below was on sale for $8,500.
It’s a characteristic of LA that money and fame are the only values that matter. The reality of the human condition of this city, even when it exists in poverty, despair, violence and suffering, cannot move our public officials to action.
7101 Sepulveda
The condition of this crime infested, unsanitary, disgusting property is appalling, but it typifies the dysfunction and deafness of the city of Los Angeles which does not respond to anything affecting common folks who have to live, work and walk past two decades of unattended to blight.
I came across these photographs of a public hearing with parents, students, teachers and community leaders who were gathered to talk about the introduction of sex education at Van Nuys High School in the summer of 1959.
The photos were taken by a photographer for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and featured in stories about these meetings.
Men in suits, women in tailored skirts, dresses, and jackets, and young men and women smiling, conversing, socializing all under civilized and orderly processes.
Educators were trusted, parents were thought to know better than youngsters. All of this would be overturned in the coming decade.
This was the America we all knew back then, the America that showed the world what democratic debate and public behavior was all about. This was a gathering to talk, listen and expound upon the proper educational methods for the teaching of human reproduction.
Look at it, think of our current lunacy, and weep.
Title Teacher hearing on sex instruction at Van Nuys school, 1959
2 images. Teacher hearing on sex instruction at Van Nuys school, 28 July 1959. Charles H. Bobby; John Fox; Lowell McGinnis; Diane Asness — 16 years; Cecil M. Cook (teacher); Clair Eberhard; Bonnie Gottleib — 16 years.; Caption slip reads: “Photographer: Snow. Date: 1959-07-28. Reporter: Slates. ASsignment: Teacher hearing. 3-4: L/R Diane Asness, 16; Cecil M. Cook; Clair Eberhard; Bonnie Gottlieb, 16. 51-52: L/R Charles H. Bobby; John G. Fox; Lowell McGinnis”.
MacLeod and Sunset, Calvert St. Van Nuys, CA.Pizzas
MacLeod AleAndreas Samson, Katie McLaughlin, Colt Olin
MacLeod AleKatie, me and Colt
MacLeod Ale
A well-placed source who knows their finances told me that MacLeod Ale, which has been in business at 14741 Calvert St. in Van Nuys since 2014, will soon shut down for good.
I was an early supporter of the brewery, having found out about its impending opening when I worked at the Hollywood Farmers Market and saw someone walk past with a “MacLeod Ale, Van Nuys” t-shirt.
I lived in Van Nuys. I published a blog about Van Nuys. I stopped the man wearing it and asked.
“My friends Alastair and Jennifer are opening it next year. Do you want to meet them?” he asked.
I went with him to their house in North Hollywood and met them. They served me their British cask ale, unlike anything I had drunk before. It was warm, nutty, dark, low alcohol. I wasn’t sure I liked it, preferring higher alcohol, IPA, cold beer.
But I was enthusiastic about MacLeod Ale. It was a light development in the darkness of Van Nuys, a new place making something, a spot for community, a birthplace of a unique Van Nuys institution.
I saw some of the grueling hard work that went into building it. The concrete, the machines, the tanks, the labor, the building up of something where there had been nothing.
When they opened there might have been five beers, all brewed on cask, maybe some nitro, I can’t remember. I just remember that there were people socializing, everyone nice, amiable, good-natured, throwing darts, eating peanuts, coming into the brewery every night for a pint.
There were families with kids eating pizza or food from trucks, and drinking beer, and kids running around, and parents enjoying themselves. There were old people, young people, people of every background, nobody was an outsider.
I told Jennifer, one of the owners, about a brewery in Minnesota where customers bought “memberships” and soon she had a beer for life program, now memorialized in chalkboard, hanging on the wall, of all the founders who spent $1,000 each to fund MacLeod Ale.
Despite my enthusiasm for the brewery, I honestly don’t drink that much. I went there once or twice a month and drank a couple of beers. But every time it seems I had a great time, a thoughtful conversation, a chance meeting, a human experience.
The exhausting work that went into the enterprise, the hours that made this brewery possible, which created a destination for music, games, food and culture cannot be duplicated anywhere else in Van Nuys.
MacLeod Ale survived the pandemic. They opened another restaurant in Highland Park which didn’t last long. They went into debt. They have loans. Even though they do bring in crowds, in recent months, the writers and actors strike has doomed their business which is down 20%.
Why do fine things like MacLeod Ale have to die? Is there nobody with a lot of money and a lot of heart who can step up to rescue them?
We need MacLeod Ale more now than ever, as a communal, kind place to talk to human beings face to face.
Every new house around me, nearly every one, is ugly. They either have no architecture or they are builder’s standard stucco with vinyl windows and gargantuan garages. These garages will store junk (not vehicles) and the house will cost $700,000 to build and sell for 1.5 million or 2.5 million and still be the homeliest thing you ever laid eyes on.
These new houses never have symmetry. The windows are too small or there are two many. Random shapes and designs are slapped together and ignorantly mashed up to produce cheap and gaudy eyesores. The most common thing is the all concrete garden with gates, a dozen security lights, cameras, large vehicles on a circular driveway. And a double width, double height iron doorway.
I wonder why there is not a single builder who can just observe and copy classical architecture and create a pleasant, well-proportioned and elegant little house?
Like you see in Denmark.
As an experiment I instructed an AI program to create: “A two story tall Danish house with pitched tile roof and casement windows.”
These are some of the designs it produced. Tell me these aren’t better than 99% of all new houses built in North America.
AI knows everything about Van Nuys. But it has no opinions about Van Nuys.
It hasn’t lived here 20 years, woken up under helicopter patrol, been robbed, assaulted, attacked or killed.
It hasn’t driven down Victory Boulevard on a Saturday afternoon in the summer heat when there isn’t a soul walking down the street, just eight lanes of vehicles speeding past trash, ugly apartments, homeless encampments and mini malls. It hasn’t witnessed charming ranch houses with flower gardens, mature oaks and picket fences turned into concrete paved, iron fenced, security camera rentals with dozens of SUVs and strangers smoking weed next door.
It knows nothing about the way Van Nuys was in the 1950s when every boy and girl was blond haired and rode their bicycle to school and lived on fifteen cent hamburgers and never gained a pound.
So perhaps ignorance, absent biases and prejudices, is the best approach to exploring Van Nuys.
Why not give Van Nuys a chance to succeed in fantasy where it has failed in reality?
Magictravel is artificial intelligence for travel planning. I asked it to come up with a three-day itinerary for a visit to Van Nuys, and it supplied me with a refreshing, cynicism free, daily calendar of events.
Blithely ignorant but well-informed, practical minded in suggestions, woefully dumb in logistics, it served me up activities and destinations timed for travel and visits.
Day One:
For breakfast they recommended Nat’s Early Bite and I do like that place. I’ve eaten there many times. French toast and coffee for two in 2017 was about $20 so I assume that will be $45 now. 8-9am.
Breakfast would be followed by a shopping tour of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which, if pre-pandemic memory serves me, has about three shops, many vacancies, and twelve places to eat, eleven of them frozen yogurt. 9-10:30am
Exhausted by so much shopping there, I would drive for 36 minutes to have lunch at Tokyo Fried Chicken in Monterey Park. 12-1:30pm.
Then I would get back on the freeway, drive 25 miles, all the way from the San Gabriel Valley to Encino, to spend three hours in 5-acre Los Encinos State Historic Park with its 19th Century Adobe House. I would spend three hours here, walking around in the hot summer heat, from tree to tree, truly stimulated by this fascinating place. 2-5pm
For dinner I would dine at The Front Yard on Vineland Avenue in the Beverly Garland Hotel. I only know from a recent visit there, that this is (shockingly) a quite lovely place with flowers, trees, fountains and a very civilized atmosphere quite unlike that which exists on Vineland under the freeway. 6-7:30pm
After dinner I would return to Woodley Park and take a nighttime stroll from 8-9:30pm. There are no cafes, no breweries, no dessert places, just many parking lots, a duck pond, and darkness. A little boring but this is considered top notch in Van Nuys.
I didn’t ask for a suggestion on where to stay, so just assume I spent it at my home in Van Nuys.
Day Two:
We are eating breakfast (from 8am to 9am) at Crumbs and Whiskers 7924 Melrose Avenue. I leave my house at 7am because I know traffic is heavy over Laurel Canyon.
But now, after coffee with cats, I have a sneezing attack. Crumbs and Whiskers was (surprise!) a cat café and I am highly allergic to felines. No worries. I will take a Claritin.
Magictravel.ai does not suggest post-breakfast activities near this restaurant, such as walking around Melrose, visiting Farmers’ Market, exploring Hollywood, LACMA or the Petersen Automotive Museum.
Being LA it suggests more driving.
We will get back in the car and drive 15 miles, 35 minutes away, to Woodley Park and walk around The Japanese Garden. 9-10:30am.
Lunch will be at Mariscos Los Arcos at 14038 Victory Bl. Family-run Mexican seafood. This sounds really delicious. ….12:30-1:30pm
After eating I’m anxious to get going to arrive at my next destination which is the Van Nuys Airport Observation area on Waterman Avenue, just west of Woodley and south of Roscoe. Yet another activity which takes place on hot asphalt, this is a delightful suggestion in the 100-degree heat. 2-3:30pm
After the thrill of watching jets tax, land and takeoff, there is refreshment at The Great Wall of Los Angeles (12900 Oxnard) where a 2,754 foot mural painted on the concrete wall of the LA River near Valley College seduces you with its depictions of women and minorities who helped build our stunning state of California. From 4:00-5:30pm I will walk back and forth along the dry concrete river and enjoy the artwork from the other side of the sewage channel. It cannot be seen up close by pedestrians, only by high sewage waters.
Finally, from 7:30-9pm we are having dinner on Sepulveda Boulevard in a very charming section of Van Nuys near Saticoy at Mercado Buenos Aires. Speeding cars, police sirens, car washes, and nowhere to walk add to the feeling of an endless vacation in paradise.
Exhausted from driving back and forth all day, I retire to bed in my house in Van Nuys. I may ask Magictravel for a body wash suggestion.
Day Three:
The last day of touring in Van Nuys. Visitors can leave after today.
Unluckily, for me, I have to live here full time.
Here is my itinerary:
8am-9am: Breakfast at Sabor and Sazon 14540 Vanowen St. I arrive there to find it is no longer in business but is now a marijuana dispensary.
Still hungry from not eating breakfast, I rush over to the Woodley Park Archery Range where I will spend the next hour and a half wandering around an archery range without a bow and arrow. 9-10:30am.
But I’ve got lunch plans. Picnic lunch at the Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve. I will eat here (consuming the lunch I haven’t bought) surrounded by shopping carts, charred plants burned by hundreds of encampment fires, and try not to watch men having sex nearby. 12-1:30pm
Woodley Park/EncinoWoodley Park, 2018.
Still in the park, I plan to play golf which seems nice enough since there are trees and irrigated lawns watered with recycled H20. 2-3:30pm.
Nearly my entire second day in Van Nuys has been spent inside the confines of Woodley Park. Then I’m off to a more glamorous destination: Valley Glen.
Being a real foodie, I’m excited to eat authentic mid-century American “Italian” food at Barone’s Italian Restaurant at 13276 Oxnard St. with its retro vinyl booths and wood paneled rec room. I will probably order Fried Zucchini, Frank’s Special Pizza with Barone’s Famous Cheesecake and a few beers. 6-7:30pm.
After this great meal I will drive over, in the still hot, humid, smoggy night, to the Skyzone Trampoline Park 7741 Hazeltine 8-9:30pm where I plan to jump up and down with my stomach full of pizza, cheesecake, fried zucchini and three beers until I barf all over the trampoline.
Here in Van Nuys 
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