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.
Fans of LA architecture, as of LA geology, must kneel to a brutal truth: here today, gone tomorrow. Please appreciate the former Sunkist Growers’ Headquarters Building (1969; A.C. Martin and Assoc., arch.), while ye may. She will never again be a prominent landmark, since the parking lots that surround the building are being developed into a massive new mall.
Mid-November; an underground parking lot is being made out of the old loading dock. (A good idea. A much better idea would have been to ban cars from the campus entirely and use that portal for transit to give the development a “Sunkist Station”stop. Na ga happen.
Strange But False: Despite the anecdotes, the Sunkist Building wasn’t meant to look like an orange crate, or a wine crate, or even a milk crate. It seems the design was purely an economical way to house and park xxx workers in x,xxx square feet. It’s also not true that Sunkist wanted to be near the Valley orange groves, or to honor the rich fruit-packing history of Van Nuys. The groves and packers by 1969 were already mostly gone, and the site was selected because it was cheap empty suburban land near a new freeway. Finally false, and for the same reasons, is the idea that when Sunkist abandoned this site for their new HQ in Valencia, they were following the orange growers, or honoring the namesake LA citrus variety that made their fortune. Nobody in the organization apparently gave a thought to Valenicia, the city, as related to its product. (Sunkist is a corporation, even if it was founded by farmers.)
Below: Dec. 2019. This was after Sunkist had moved out, but the building was still intact with the original plantings.
Brutalism, that ghastly concrete corporate 1960’s-1980’s mistake, was mellowed here by an elegant and austere classicism. That drawn-in waist; she courts the eye with that Grecian bend. In the 1970s, when Sunkist Building was a landmark visible from the freeway, it subtly “matched” the craggy white slate hills of Sherman Oaks. (Thought I doubt that fitting in with local geology was intentional.)
At any rate, it seems they intend to keep the building and its courtyard as the center for the mall. A noble choice for this lovely site.
Enjoy this treasury of photographs showcasing the geology, botany, and fascinating social history of LA’s greatest park, now celebrating its 125th birthday.
My favorite picture ever, I think. A bride escorted by her dad up Fern Dell. I had just passed the wedding party and officiant at the top of the trail, nicely kitted out, waiting in excitement. The bride was grimacing with fright as she caught the light. What a spot for a wedding! What a spot for anything.
TRAILS CAFE
The rancho adobe (in some form, since 1795!) was preserved as Park Ranger HQ.
This unbelievabvly rich land was Rancho Los Feliz — “the Felizes’,” the first (or second) rancho grant in California. It was granted as a reward to a retiring military intendente of Los Angeles. The Pueblo was successfully settled and competent, the Tongva successfully relocated to San Gabriel, and happy Mexican farmers were churning out grain in the vast riverbed. Griffith J. Griffith bought the rancho from Yankee speculators for a song, and when he offered it to the City, with his grand visions of civic adornment and classical education and human uplift and ecological connection — he practically had to beg the City to take it. They were afraid to take Griffith’s gift, thousands of untouched watershed acres, because Griffith personally, had problems… it turns out,he shot his wife in the face, in a hotel room on Santa Monica Beach. The City Fathers were afraid the voters’ wives’ ministers’ wives would reject the City Council socially, if they shook hands with a beast like Griffith. He did two years in Q.
This photo is from the California Department of Corrections online article about Q’s famous alumnus, which tells the whole lurid story! Click, Baited Reader, click….
It took decades before Victorian propriety thinned out enough for the City to take possession, and it took decades more (1930!) for them to get around to building the Observatory and the Greek Theatre; both were stipulated in the conveyance. The delay was a good thing too, architecturally, for the Observatory — by then, the grace of Art Deco had come in to soften the Greek of Griffith’s preference, and the Federal Fascism that looked forward to Roosevelt’s New Deal; and it could all coalesce with modern engineering. It is one of the most iconic buildings on planet Earth (which it turns out is where we are; go inside and they’ll explain.)
The Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round. Since we’re nosing into the Holidays anyway (Sinter Klaas, Dec. 5), and there’s apparently no other footage anywhere of the Merry-Go-Round, and the dead operator who loved and maintained this instrument for years can be seen in the video in his Sinter Klaas cap, here is Jolly Old St. Nicholas, with bells and whistles, and the moose bugling along. Enjoy the View Walt Disney had, a bench in the Park, watching his Merry- kids -Go -Round, and see if you dream up anything as lucrative as Disneyland, like he did. Dream harder…
“Griffith Park is 125. It looked 125 five years ago. It will look it twenty years from now. I hate parks.”Holly-leaf cherry, Prunus illicafoliaToyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia. It is the official native plant of the City of LA.Covellite, a secondary volcanic rock.The gorgeous Nevins Barberry, Mahonia nevinii, is one of the rarest plants in the California Floristic Province. Around 500 wild individuals of the species are recorded, and most of those occur in Griffith Park.
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 