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.
I found fossils of shellfish in fragments of freshly fallen conglomerate on the trailside of Pacoima Creek, between Lopez Dam and the Lopez hills.
They are reminders, miles from today’s shoreline, that the San Fernando Valley was once embayed, the playground of scallops and clams. Later all that shallow bay muck was uplifted — crunched up — by convergence of the migrating West Transverse Range fault block against the edge of the North American craton. The line of suture where the fault block docked (at San Gabriel Fault) is now just a couple of miles north of this spot.
Moules frites?Deviled littlenecks?I frutti di mare…petrificado; en croute.Only the shell of its former self.Fresh yellow-green mineralizing fluid?
😈 Hallowe’en 2021 Creepy Neighborhood Award: the Weird, Wicked West Valley
This year the Palsied Hand for creepiest, most terrifying 😱LA Neighborhoodgoes to [eunuch strikes gong] 🤔🤭😏🙄🤞🏼🙋♀️🤷🏽♂️🙈
The old Rancho Las Virgenes, once owned by Miguel Leonis, see below. This trailhead, north of the Kobe site at the end of Las Virgenes Road, is a perfection of West Valley despair. Gorgeous but dangerously sick, protected but a firetrap. This is the core habitat of the rare Engelmann Oaks, which you see, are as exquisite dead as alive. I quickly recognized the mineralization patterns roasting the hills. (Drought schmout, it just rained.) But I only got two hundred yards down the trail when I was overwhelmed with putrid, pungent fumes of natural gas from the blowholes along the trail;— the unmistakable odor of driving up the Turnpike past Elizabeth, NJ. I took to my heels. More on poison gas later….😈
West San Fernando Valley! Go anywhere west of Van Nuys and you’ll find yourself in LA’s Transylvania. The mountains are creepy, the hills are gray like ghosts, the boulders make obscene mocking faces at you, there are gas fumes in the canyons, and the treacherous slopes hide a thousand Ways to Hell. Its bowls and washes cradle weird gated suburbs where ageless rich people seem to go in (Tesla, Tesla, Mercedes, Audi, Tesla…) but never come out. There are stoplights that are red in all directions and never change. Take this virtual tour of the SFV’s strangely sterile, outlandishly pricey, desperately macabre badlands…Timid Reader, you’ll cringe, gasp and retch at these scary, spookly stories! 😈 HA ha ha ha ha….
‘They Like Me! They REALLY like me!’ — The West Valley
LEONIS ADOBE: The snake-like road at the bottom of the map is the Ventura Freeway, aka “the 101,” which follows the route of El Camino Real, which is Ventura Blvd, upon which the Leonis Adobe fronts, and has done since 1844. The town of Calabasas was built around the ranch — location location location. It served in good times as a coaching rest stop. But sometime in the mid-1870s, a brutish Basque bully of a sheepherder named Miguel Leonis got control of Rancho El Escorpion by marrying Espiritu, the legitimate Chumash heiress. Leonis turned her ranch house on the Camino into a center of terror and intimidation for the whole West Valley. If arguments and fistfights and lawsuits didn’t settle it Don Miguel’s way, a gang of hitmen at midnight would. Murders and beatings just happened to people who crossed him. He stole, swindled, and connived; he drove off Yankee squatters with blazing shotguns. He acquired land and wealth and water rights simply, it seems, in order to dispossess other people. When he died, he dispossesed Espiritu; she had to wage a court battle for 20 years against the estate; they finally ruled it did belong to Mrs. Leonis, the by-then octagenarian Indian princess. She lived in her adobe home until she died in 1906, still looking great by the way.
Miguel Leonis, the Devil of Calabasas, died in September 1889, while driving a wagon home from a victorious session in court at downtown LA, and a celebratory booze-up afterwards. As his horse plodded across the silent, moonlit Cahuenga Pass (recently bought by the brand-new village of Hollywood), somehow the drunken miser fell from his buckboard and tumbled under the wheels, which left rut-marks across his face and chest. If such a thing could be an accident, it was natural justice, fittingly ‘Hollywood’ in tone and atmosphere. BUT, the ghosts are all in the West Valley. The adobe is famous as one of the most haunted places in LA. The house is a museum, where people come to see ’em — as they did this afternoon with kiddies in costume, etc.
Bonus creep: John Carradine was the last private resident of the adobe, sometime before 1962. His son Keith recalled him as an abusive alcoholic, and his mother as a dangerous schizophrenic; there were beatings, bars on windows, etc. The boys’ childhood must have been pretty harrowing.
👹 KOBE’S DOOM — January 26, 2020, was a foggy, overcast day in the West Valley, not cheery and picturesque like the photo above. It seems the helicopter pilot became disoriented flying over the hills, tricked by the flat gloomy light. The accident shocked the world and sent basketball fans into mourning. The tragedy was compounded by an ugly legacy of accusations and lawsuits that have yet to run their course. This grim LA story just won’t go to its rest, trailing fetid fetters of money, fame, envy, and that most horrifying of all our dooms, human error. It may haunt us for a long time to come. RIP.
FOUNTAIN OF THE WORLD CULT BOMBING SITE
😈 Box Canyon Road is the road the heroine shouldn’t turn onto, in a Shirley Jackson novel. Meandering, narrow, hard to turn around on once inside, it is cut off from the rest of the Valley. This is one of those places that refugees from the new Atomic reality retreated to after the War… land so remote, so uncivilized, so sore to the eye, that nobody else had ever wanted to touch it before. Like many such marginal places in LA, it attracted its own cult; which, like many such cults, attracted its own disgruntled suicide bombers armed with twenty sticks of dynamite.💥 🔥
🛎🛎🛎👺 BONUS POINTS for the Standard Air disaster of 1949, noted in the red box above. The Fountain of Life folks helped rescue the survivors, God bless them all. This ghastly accident followed an eerily similar chain of events to Kobe’s demise; a pilot distracted by passengers, but not badly, flying in morning fog not too bad, descending through a familiar flight path too quickly, but not all that fast… The accident report is fascinating and depressing. It happened right at the Devil’s Slide, by Chatsworth Reservoir. For a chilling View of how the Valley fog can distort our hills for pilots, let lovely 🌋Lopez Canyon be our spokesmodel.👺 Land of Contrasts, indeed!
Top row, see the low hills in fog. Bottom, see the high hills hidden behind the low!
ROCKETDYNE SANTA SUSANA FIELD LABORATORY NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWNSITE / WOOLSEY FIRE RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT 😈 Suck it up, SFV, the wages of sin is dust! 😮💨 Lucky that Valley Village is a few blocks out of range of the worst zone. The View has already uncovered the Cold War hubris involved in Rocketdyne’s 1952 sodium-nuclear reactor meltdown and cover-up. Now that we definitively know it’s as bad as we all thought it was, let’s cover it up again.🙈 🕵🏼♂️ What about the possibility that the Woolsey Fire was started in the first place by methane or other hydrothermal venting? 🙉
THE DEVIL’S SLIDE, PIONEER CEMETERY, CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTH, VITRIOL FALLS
🤡 Check back issues of the View for the infamous Devil’s Slide. The stagecoach road leads straight down to Oakwood/Pioneer Cemetery, then veers sharply around it at the bottom.
The humid green lawns seem especially eerie in these Latter Days of drought and sprawl. The 20th century fixation on turning the West Valley into the West Country of England, or Westchester West, with green lawn estates and clapboard churches, seems…a bit like folly, eh? 🤡 The tombstones here are great, creative, not somber. Angelenos, RIP.
😈 The gaping mouths of Vitriol Falls must be fresh in your mind from the recent post:
CHATSWORTH PARK SOUTHhttps://ssmpa.com/chatsworth-park-south-old.php This was the old RR Ranch, home to Roy, and Dale, and Trigger, pictured below. 😈 Part of it was developed as a skeet-shooting range in the 50s; afterwards the City figured to save it for a park, happily (for wildlife) contiguous to other West Valley parks. But in 2008 they found spent shell casings and lead contamination everywhere. They closed the park for YEARS; in 2013, the City renovation plan emerged, which was to tear out all the nature and turn the site into a giant parking lot for…itself. Finally they came up with something green, but without any imagination or uniqueness or sense of site ecology — just swing-sets and brown lawns and picnic tables — but anyway a few years ago it was re-opened. It was a terrible disgrace for the City of LA to take so long. It took dogged community activism to get that park back; the link above is to the website archive of the Santa Susana Mountains Association. It’s worth a Hallowe’en skim to remind yourself how much citizen work it takes to get the right thing done.
JUAN FLORES CAPTURED “Head ’em off at the Pass!” The Santa Susana Pass, fka Simi Pass, and the San Fernando Pass, and the Newhall Pass, fka Fremont Pass, were collectively “the Pass” — and they were all used by bandits and desperadoes as hideouts and get-aways back in the days when the SFV was the Wild West. One of the dreamiest most charismatic worst was revolutionary hero California rights activist murderer and robber Juan Flores. After he shot the sheriff, but did not shoot the deputy, a massive manhunt was coordinated by Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando owner, U.S. Senator, and former Captain General of the California Lancers, Don Andres Pico. Flores was finally forced to surrender in the Pass. His hanging at Fort Hill, as reported by the Star, was so botched and gruesome it invites Hallowe’en perusal:
SPAHN MOVIE RANCH AND THE MANSON FAMILY CAVE
Roy Rogers wasn’t the only one whose Western-themed ranch hit hard times in the 60s. After the Hollywood studio heyday waned, Ed Spahn kept a movie location ranch going on some camera-ready acres in the Santa Susana Pass by booking it for TV Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. By the late 60s, even this second-wind was fading, and the ranch lacked business. So when Spahn met a nice fellow called Charles Manson who had been beating around the chaparral after leaving the Fountain of Life, Spahn hired him; and he let the youth’s groovy friends move in to do chores on the place, sleeping rough and running around barefoot and letting the sunshine in. 😈 Helter Skelter! On the new freeways, chic Laurel Canyon was just a few minutes away.
Natural gas — methane — can be smelled all over the West Valley but especially in Porter Ranch. (Natural gas is odorless; if you can detect it, it’s man-made. They put the sulfurous odors in so that it can be detected.) I’ve been driven off trails in Las Virgenes and elsewhere in the Wild West by the stench. It’s awful that the State has recently re-committed to pumping tons of methane into the West Valley storage grounds even after the scandalous Aliso Canyon leaks.
https://projects.laist.com/2019/after-aliso/ LAist.com has put together a good discussion of the problem. 😈 Because educated public discussion is always great at solving society’s problems! HA ha ha ha ha ha……
The family — who are keen gardeners themselves — wanted help re-thinking their front yard presentation. All the lavender along the walk, but one, had up and died. They had hoped for birds and bees zooming through the yard, especially since they have a fine raised vegetable bed. They wanted color and flowers, bright and homey. From back East originally, they missed lilac blossoms and fresh scents. The lavender almost fit the bill, until it didn’t. I knew many wonderful California plants could fit the bill too, but where to put them?
I reckoned that the lavender failed because there wasn’t enough soil area in the walkway planting strips, which are only a foot wide. Plus they were covered with hot, dark stones. Underneath was compacted clay soil, almost concrete. (Apparently the people from whom they bought the house had parked cars in the front yard for years.) The hopelessness of the front yard, I understood, was what led them to the solution of the artificial turf.
I never had experience with artificial turf. I was wary at first, afraid that I would accidentally rip it, like billiard-table felt; that it would seal off the yard from air- and water-exchange completely; or that it would act as a hot spot. I quickly learned how practical and comfortable it is, and appreciated the clean lines and modern look. But still, no place to plant. How to bring pollinators, scent, color, and seasonal variety from two narrow, low, clay strips?
I learned the family themselves had built the raised veggie bed, and also the other chic wooden planter boxes scattered around the house. I got excited by the idea, and asked if they could actually make planter boxes that would give enough cubic feet of soil to support Zen meadows, or bonsai arroyos. Even a foot high planter box could raise the level of good soil up over the hot concrete; and support plants tall enough to lure your fluttery pollinators, and also various creepers and wall-hangers to shade the sides of the boxes. I got even more excited when they said sure, they would build such boxes. And I was ecstatic when, two weeks later, I saw how elegantly they did it, shaping the planters to hug the slope. The result added depth at the front gate, perfect to anchor a showy blue ceanothus, which will give the family and the birds and bees, the California version of lilacs in spring.
The parkway strip was a hard-baked adobe brick covered in red mulch. It had only one tree from the city, plus a dying gardenia. These strips are notoriously tough to plant in satisfying ways: neglected in the past, frequently abused in the present; subject to all kinds of city ordinances; subject to wind-blown trash and doggie doo; shadeless and dry. Parkway strips are extremely restricted in plantable soil space. But given the already restricted space for planting, I realized we could double the yard’s total habitat area by contiunuing the Zen arroyo idea out to the street. It would be the week’s work of a Southern chain-gang to break up all thirty feet of that baked clay; but with a pick-axe and some sweat, I filled four small discrete “bowls” with enough good soil and drainage to hold suites of scrub plants and succulents. In between the bowls is like cement, but in the bowls the soil is soft and friable. By watering only in the bowls, and letting the edges bake, the creeping natives, I hope, will have time and space to establish themselves while, I hope, the weeds won’t. The natural look, and weed-repulsion, is enhanced with specimen rocks that will als shade the ground, and provide safe habitat for adorable lizards and birdies browsing for grass seeds. Luck gave me a bone-sere 90-degree day to work the transformation. It was terribly stressful on the plants as well as the gardener. We all shrank. I thought I had lost the yarrow and the buckwheat and the spreading sagebrush. But they are all already showing new growth, and general signs of happiness.
I wanted to continue the modernist avenue of plants — formal but exotic, wild but constricted — right up onto the porch. I wanted also some showy flowers to bring the hummingbirds right to the front door. But the porch is north-facing and perma-shaded. I put in Coral bells with sword fern at the foot of the stairs, which do okay in darker conditions. So do succulents, which I used to create a discrete, but dignified stage. Then I looked and looked for a pair of hummingbird sages, which thrive in deep shade, to fill matching pots I intended for the first step. The only ones I could find, however, maybe the last two in LA, were tiny seedlings no bigger than my thumb. It would be absurd to put them in big pots until they have had some time to grow up a little bit, so I gave them pots ”the next size up” and set them along the window bay, for next year.
It was a fascinating project trying to ”re-wild” such constrained plots. The results, in a year or two when it is all grown in, will I hope pay off.
The Valley Village View 