Tag: Van Nuys and the Valley

The Nest Nightmare.

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A few months ago, our HVAC company, Around the Clock, told me they would install a free Nest Learning Thermostat in our home. Free. And there was also a $185 LADWP gift card that would be sent for registering the device with the utility.

The tech came to our home. He installed the beautiful modern device on the wall. He waited as I opened the Nest App on my iPhone. Then he showed me how to turn the thermostat to enter the wifi password, which was a tricky kind of maneuver of rotating the dial of the device and punching each number, each letter, each symbol, each CAPITAL LETTER, of my wifi password.

After I opened the app, and tried to connect it to the thermostat, a message came up:

Cookies are disabled.

Your browser has cookies disabled. Make sure your cookies are enabled and try again.

These words would haunt me.

The Nest App on the iPhone would not work unless I enabled all cookies. Whatever that meant.

The tech could not wait around, he had to go to his next appointment, and to be fair, why should he spend his free time as I tried to install the app and make it work and connect it to the thermostat?

So that first afternoon with the new Nest Learning Thermostat, I called Apple and called Nest, and four hours later Nest had me sit down at my desktop computer and sign into Nest.login.com and register the app and the thermostat there. Then, finally, my iPhone app worked with my thermostat.

A week later, I signed onto LADWP to register my Nest Learning Thermostat (NLT), to get my $185 gift card. But LADWP said “You have not installed the NLT.” I sent an email to them, and they sent me one back and said there was nothing they could do, that I had to call Nest to get them to connect my thermostat to LADWP.

NLT is an “approved thermostat” and I should be able to register it without any problem online at LADWP.

I called a Nest tech to finally see if someone could troubleshoot the app. The tech had me stand in front of the thermostat and completely erase all the settings, including the tricky, laborious and irritating wi-fi password which had to be entered once again. I had to find the serial number of the device, by turning the dial of the thermostat, and read it over the phone to the tech, and then he guided me, over 45 minutes, in connecting the thermostat to my Nest App on my iPhone.

“Sir, I assure you theez prublem eez soulved,” he said in accent unknown.

Mid-May I had to replace my 2014 home computer router.

And, of course, after installing the router, when I opened my Nest App, the thermostat was missing from the Nest app. Was there any reason that replacing my home router should somehow be connected to the Nest Thermostat? I had to input the wifi password back into the thermostat, with the tricky, ridiculous, rotating dial and the CAPITAL LETTERS, SYMBOLS, lower case letters, and numbers that comprise my home wifi.

And when I went to reinstall the Nest App. The same error message came up!

I had enough! I no longer would use the Nest App on my iPhone.

Instead I used the thermostat on the wall, as if it had no smart features, as if it were 1975 and this was the only way to turn it on.

In the past week, the temperatures have gotten hot, there is monsoonal moisture, and the climate is crazy, as we all know.

To save money, I set the thermostat to COOL 78.

But it kept going to COOL 75.

I would turn it to COOL 78.

And it would COOL 75.

I never cool at 75 because I don’t want to pay $3,000 for electricity!

So again, today, I had to call the Nest Tech, on the phone, and he had me once again read my name, my phone number, my email, my Nest Learning Thermostat to him, as if I had never called before.

Turns out I had to go into SETTINGS, to HOME AWAY/ASSIST and choose OFF. The thermostat was “learning” and learning to COOL 75 because this “smart” setting was ON. But I had never turned it ON. I never used anything HOME AWAY/ASSIST.

How could I use a feature HOME AWAY/ASSIST without an APP?

He had me RESET the Thermostat, and said I should “wait 24 hours” to see if the thermostat was unlearning what I had never taught it to learn, and if there were any other problems, he was sending me an email, with a case number to call back to troubleshoot the problem if there were any other problems.

If there is any more trouble, now I know what to do………

House Hunting in 1999.

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23 years ago, I was 36, living with Danny in a spacious two-bedroom on the third floor of a well-maintained elevator building in Studio City overlooking the Los Angeles River and paying $950 a month.

I worked in documentary television and hopped from $1200 a week jobs easily and without fear of unemployment.

I had some savings and we began to look for houses to buy, with a budget in the range of $150,000-$225,000.

We found a 900 square foot ranch house on La Maida near Tujunga and Riverside in Valley Village. It was very small and outrageously overpriced at $299,000. We liked the location but decided against it.

Then we saw a fixer upper on Atoll Avenue, near Oxnard and Fulton, just north of Valley College. They were asking $164,000, but the house had no kitchen. None whatsoever. Our realtor, Marty Azoulay, said he talked to the owners and they would throw in a stove and refrigerator if we agreed to the deal. 

We nearly went for the Atoll Avenue house, but after several nerve-racking days we backed out.

We sometimes shopped at 99 Ranch Market on Sepulveda, and one day we found 6436 Blucher Avenue, the last street before the 405 freeway, on a block between Victory and Haynes.

It was 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1,846 square feet. We toured the property and took photos. There were steel windows and window air-conditioners, old carpeting, old bathrooms with corroded porcelain, steel awnings that overlooked a front yard with a decapitated tree and the consistent noise of the freeway, only a few hundred feet away.

“Caltrans is building a sound wall. Should be completed by 2002,” Marty assured us.

Next door, a new bachelor owner had just bought the exact same type of house and he had fixed it up nicely, with freshly painted light blue and light green walls. 

But 6436 was in very poor condition. Everything would need upgrading or replacing: bathrooms, kitchen, roof, electrical and plumbing.

We spoke to our realtor and told him to offer $15,000 less than asking. 

He contacted the seller and he came back with her answer.

The house would sell “as is” and she would not budge.

She stood firm at $180,000.

So, we walked away, and ended up buying another house a few blocks away for $194,000.

Van Nuys as Subject

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Artsy has a number of artworks for sale, some quite expensive (over $2,000), with Van Nuys as the subject.

The variety of mediums and styles is fascinating.

Compulsion by Alex Prager 2012
Drive in Theater Hwy 5 Van Nuys CA 1973 Steve Fitch
Leaving Van Nuys Amy Bernays 2009
Lobby Cards VNB 1979
Van Nuys 2018 Sinziana Velicescu
Van Nuys CA 2016 Sinziana Velicescu
Van Nuys Paradise 2018 Lindsey Warren
VN Monotype Series No 6 Makoto Fujimura

Postmistress of Van Nuys

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October 29, 1960 reads, “Bluebird Christine Hughes, 8, 15736 Magnolia Ave., Encino, of Hesby school, receives the first block of Camp Fire Girls stamps from Mrs. Kay Bogendorfer, postmistress of Van Nuys Post Office. Sharing the ‘big moment’ is Leana Holman, 12, 10436 Densmore Ave., Granada Hills, Camp Fire Girl from Vintage school. Special limited issue of stamps commemorating Golden Jubilee celebration of Camp Fire Girls go on sale Wednesday in Valley post offices, and nationally, to mark opening of organization’s golden year and national convention in New

Among the charming relics of the past is a look to what people cared about 62 years ago.

In 1960, the United States Postal Service issued a limited edition of stamps to commemorate the Golden Jubilee (50 years) of the Camp Fire Girls.

Readers of the Valley Times would see the postmistress (yes, that is what she was called) Mrs. Kay Bogendorfer selling stamps to two young Camp Fire girls, Christine Hughes, 8 and Leana Holman, 12.

The girls’ home addresses are listed in the photograph.

The listing of facts, the honorary titles, the respect for young women, the admiration for the post office, all of it was taken for granted.

A House Fancy Enough for a Fireman

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To those who don’t know it, Valerio Street in Van Nuys, especially between Van Nuys Boulevard and Kester, is lined with many exquisite, old, historic homes on large properties. Often these houses have Spanish architecture, swimming pools, and many fruit trees.

One of these, at 14721 Valerio, is on a 15,000 sf lot. The home is 3 bedrooms, two baths with a red tile roof, backyard swimming pool, and a very tranquil, luxurious garden.

Built in 1933, by one of the founders of Van Nuys, Mr. WP Whitsett, for $2,500 (two-thousand five hundred dollars) it is now on the market for $1.1 million dollars.

June 2, 1933 permit

In the 1937 telephone directory, the homeowner is listed as James T. Von Eschen (wife is Clara.) 

The 1940 US Census says Mr. Von Eschen was born in 1903, and the couple had two sons, James, 12 and John, 11. Marvin Grimsrud, brother-in-law, 38 years old, also lived in the house.

Mr. Von Eschen was a fireman.

The Folks Who Moved in Next Door.

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For about five years, an encampment of vagrants, with cars and trucks full of bikes, shopping carts, electronics, blankets, and various junk, spread their filthy circus along the corner of the Vanowen and Kester.

There were men and women in parked cars, and drugs, and women in the back seats of the vehicles. The sidewalk was taken over by them. They had complete autonomy and seemingly the blessing of the city to live outside.

Our senior lead officer, whose name I don’t care to name, cleared them away. He appears monthly on a Facebook chat room to brag about the latest clearance. “Happy to say they are gone,” he will say on Zoom.

But the camp of tramps always comes back.

They next set up their junk show on Lemay, in a quiet residential area, where they lived along the parking lot that borders the Casa Loma College.

Day and night they sat out on lawn chairs or slept on mattresses behind trees. One man danced with his dick out for an 8-year-old girl who rode her bike past. Complaints flooded LA311. Ms. Nury Martinez, Latin-X Councilwoman, got letters, emails, phone calls. LAPD Van Nuys was called numerous times. Yet the trash camp endured.

Outdoor urination, pot smoking, liquor, prostitution, dumping, disorder, noise, none of it mattered. It stayed in place, just like the homeless circus that has played on for 3,000 days and nights at the NW corner of Gault and Sepulveda. 

Gault and Sepulveda. Another long running blight on the neighborhood ignored by government officials.

After six months, their crap was cleared. 

Two weeks later the tarps and the shopping carts went up along Lemay near Norwich. That took dozens of calls to remove. Then it was gone.

Then they came back to Saloma and LeMay. That lasted a few months.

Now they have reappeared along Columbus Avenue across from the grammar school. While it’s doubtful anyone is actually learning grammar in that one-starred rated school, what’s certain is that the garbage camp is illegally set up in full view. 

When people wonder what drives Angelenos mad, it is this: there is no control on the disorder and criminality of this city and state. 

San Francisco, true jewel of the west, has gone to hell.

Los Angeles, costume jewel of the west, has followed suit.

And when mayoral candidates go on podcasts and talk ad nauseum about their humane and expensive solutions for the poor people who are homeless, you want to scream!

Why should the suffering of private persons, their addictions and mental illness, be allowed such a prominent and destructive place in the lives of all law-abiding citizens in the State of California?

“One of my proposals is to create a $1 billion revolving private equity fund with which to build permanent supportive housing. That’s housing that’s been costing $600,000-800,000 a unit. That can be cut to a third of that cost using a private equity model that has worked on the streets of Los Angeles,” says Mayoral Candidate Mike Feuer.

Is anyone knocked-up on drugs and alcohol going to sober up in a new, unsupervised housing unit?  

Here’s an idea: use the billions in homeless funds to send $100 Visa gift cards to legally housed residents, home owners and renters, who report trash camping in their neighborhoods. Top off the yearly payments to those who report the vagrants at $2,000. Thousands of Angelenos, short on money for gas and groceries, would be impelled to report vagrancy and clean up dumps that have destroyed our city.

Do the people burning down parks and sleeping under tarps on bus benches care to move into a new studio apartment? 

Trash camping?

Don’t permit it. Don’t allow it. Don’t normalize it.

Burning parks, setting fires along freeways, camping out on public sidewalks and streets. This is the state of California, the most technologically advanced region on the planet.

So much money, so much talk, so little results.