Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Click above, or below, to read Eric Mann’s fascinating article
I’ve been looking for the nails in Van Nuys’s coffin as far back and away as Iroquois Schenectady; one might have looked a bit closer in time and space. This morning I found a great article on http://counterpunch.org about how the hard-working middle-class of the Valley fought for their very existence in 1982 by insisting that the common wealth of the community was the point of enterprise, and its needs are more important than any pencil-head corporation’s balance-sheet shenanigans.
GM’s Van Nuys Assembly opened in 1950 and employed thousands of United Auto Workers until 1992, when the plant closed. Management had planned to shut down a decade earlier, but the Valley community supported the union, our local politicians supported the union, and one of Studio City’s greatest union men ever, Ed Asner (RIP) was turned like a Lou Grant bulldog on GM’s shiny-balloon CEO:
Eric Mann goes on to describe what sounds like a barnburner of a bargaining session:
The decade that began with chants that “the people united can never be defeated” ended, of course, with a great sucking sound.
In recent posts about the Knickerbocker history of Van Nuys, and others about California native plants, I have relied upon two remarkable sources. Both are seminal authorities on their subjects, well known as ”experts.” I’ve been generally aware of their names and work for many years; possibly you will recognize the names too. But despite my great admiration, I realized I knew absolutely nothing regarding their personalities, their path in life, or the full range and scope of their interests. So I looked them up, and was amazed to find a very deep connection I never dreamed.
It’s not such a stretch to conceive of Theodore Payne, of the eponymous Foundationfor Native California Plants [where I have learned so much just from browsing their nursery and asking questions of the staff] as an important and influential landscape gardener — that is, an artistic designer of natural open spaces, like the California Native Plant Garden at the Pan-Pacific Exposition pictured in the header.
Theodore Payne brung you a posey! Picked fresh.
But I was absolutely blown away to learn that Mariana Schuyler van Rensselaer, the society grande-dame author of the magisterial 1909 History of the City of New York in the 17th Century, Vols. I and II, was also a famous architecture critic, an aesthetic theorist, and in her spare time a widely-read expert on landscape gardening. She was friends and a collaborator with the Olmsteds and Calvert Vaux; she wrote a classic appreciation of H.H. Richardson, who was then passe. Her articles for Century Magazine did much to educate the public about the aesthetic, holistic and soul-replenishing value of artistically designed landscapes. It was Mrs. van Rensselaer who coined the term ”landscape gardener,” preferring it to ”landscape architect.” She pointed out “gardener” is the correct term for the job, except for the upper-class prejudice against “gardeners” as illiterate servants with dirt under their nails. Thus the profession seems to have settled on being classed as ”architects” because they felt genteel, and educated, and wanted to be conceived as seroious artists by society. [Well, who doesn’t?] And NOBODY, was ever more Society, than Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer…Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer…?
Mrs. van Rensselaer, by her friend A. Saint-Gaudens.
THEODORE PAYNE: The Theodore Payne Foundation website http://theodorepayne.org has a great illustrated biography of the man, excerpts of which, below to whet your appetite. Payne was born in 1872, in England, on the Althorp estate in Northamptonshire, had a wonderful Uncle, and went to dreary dismal Victorian schools that had excellent teachers. In 1893 he was journeyman nurseryman who came to America with friends to visit the Columbian Exposition, and never left, but migrated quickly to Los Angeles. Here are some highlights of his American career and life, to inspire Patient Reader: Click and read.
He promoted the Nevins Barberry! I bought mine there at the nursery, and learned by knowing it, how to spot them in the wild, as in Griffith Park. Still rare; but beautiful.
Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer is a, the, indispensible historian of Little Ol’ New York, where she wasn born in 1851, and where she died, at her townhouse on W. 10th Street, in 1934. (Though, after her very influential education in Dresden, most of her life she seems to have lived with her husband Schuyler in New Brunswick. This college town — Rutgers — on the Banks of the Old Raritan, has become something like the Dutch-American capital-in-exile, since, after all, King Charles took New Amsterdam York away from them and Albany! And Albany.) Here are web links and samples from online articles I’ve found about this amazing woman’s other work.
Mrs. vR was very inflential in publicizing and developing the vision of Vaux-Olmsted’s“Niagara Reserve,” New York’s, and America’s, first State Park. The plan preserved and enhanced the view-shed of the famous cascades from all sides and angles, spectacularly landscaping the surroundings with bridges and elegant viewpoints with benches, put to hard use by the newlyweds I’m sure. The awe, the ennobling aesthetic experience for visitors, the majesty of Nature, the freshness of the surroundings, the freedom from turbines and smokestacks and and dark Satanic mills, was the purpose:
Unusually dark, almost black squirrel. Portola seems to point to that squirrel; his gesture is a message for the Indians! Hallo; Portola didn’t explore California in a ship. Nor did he wear a Conquistador’s moro. Hmm..I suppose it’s meant as Portola, the embodiment of Cortez, still in the eighteenth century savaging the continent, still seeking Califia and her gold-banded viragoes. Hmm… theart made me think. So I guess the squrrel was just a McGuffin?
Homeless campfire scorched half the ”greenway.” Sigh.
I went over to check the the other side — and sort of cheered up…
Mulefat — Baccharis salicifolia. Salicifolia = ‘leaves like a willow.’ The gorgeous pink flower — somewhat a variation from the usual white — was the last bloom of summer on the Wash. The other blooms had already gone the way of all pretty pink panicles.
Cholla. Sweet and tasty; eat like watermelon. Peel the red skin and spit out the pits.
Growing up and through the arms of a sheltering white sage, I found a saltbush. I had just seen one on Sugarloaf last week, and tried to research the species name by using the usual head-banging method: stabbing words into the search engine, which you think would describe the plant to a botanist, if you were trying to think as botanists think. Chaparral erect shrub; numerous spikes cones inflorescences small yellow flowers; leaves dull green like oak but pointy spiny spiked pike-shaped lobed; September flower. Try! If you pull up saltbush I’m a Dutchman. I finally gave up and went to check the Linnaean for mulefat; and up came a random nature page that said it featured mulefat — but not showing mulefatat ALL. But there was a saltbush in the corner of the shot, and they, mentioned it the caption. So now I know! You too. Check out the fabulous leaves. They’re soft, not sharp at all.
Like almost every plant in the CFP this could easily be a prized garden ornamental. I went to Home Depot today on a yard-redo-job, and in their entire enormous garden wing, they had NOT ONE CFP plant for sale, except the remote possibility that some of the succuulents might be CFP cactus. But they didn’t even carry cholla! (I doubled right back to the Theodore Payne Foundation, nevermind the traffic, and got the right plants for a California garden…) My California Initiative — PLANT YOUR FUTURE! STATEWIDE, NO SALES TAX ON CFP PLANTS!Write your assemblyman. California plants hardly need water and don’t need any fertilizer or soil amendments WHATSOEVER. Every nursery in California should have them on prominent display, instead of their fifteen aisles full of butterfly bushes and pesticides and hi-nitro jump-juice that are poisoning the world. A CFP yard is practically free and brings butterflies and birds and bees TO LIFE and TO YOUR DOOR; a ‘conventional’ garden (lawn; plus your normal hyper-toxed beds-and-borders full of showy exotics) is expensive and KILLS LIFE DEAD. It’s as simple as that.
Toyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia. Gasp.
LA’s official city (native) tree!
Holly-leaf cherry
Yummy. An Indian staple. The flesh is a thn rind, sweet for sucking when almost black. Inside is a nut like a macadamia. eaten ground as flour for atole.
Prunus ilicifolia. (Holly is an Ilex; hence, ilicifolia, ‘leaves like holly’.
This looks like blueschist, super-metamorposed from Pre-cambrian Mendenhall gneiss. ”Fancy Rock” from the Limerock Cyn assemblage?
I don’t know why I never looked at the rocks and boulders on the surface of Tujunga Wash, since this has been the main drain for some of the most fascinating and complex geology in the country for millions of years. Many of the rocks are a very sophisticated gray-blue granite or granodiorite. Of course the Army Corps and the Greenway builders displaced the whole site of then concretized River; but it defies Occam’s Razor to imagine they carted in a bunch of rocks from upstream or off-site. I’ve read reminiscences of Baby Boomer local kids, who remember whining with boredom when their parents shopped at Valley Plaza, so they’d send kids off to play in the parking-lot-adjacent Wash.
The tan-yellow veins in the schist were dazzling with mineral sparkles in the afternoon sun; but the sparkle never comes out in photos. Gold-bearing ore? Gold Creek is a Tujunga Tributary.,.
The Valley Village View 