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.
Happy Labor Day! Celebrate the mythic history of Labor in California: take in View a select few of the labor-related panels from the World’s Longest Mural.
Sharp Viewers remember: from 1974-1984, the visionary Southern California artist Judith Francisca Baca and her collaborators at S.P.A.R.C. re-made an ugly stretch of the Tujunga Wash Flood Channel with a vision; and with her own labor, plus the labor of numerous others especially the schoolchildren artists. The result is a masterpiece of local history painting, unique in the world.
Labor upon land, is the human story. Whose land it is, and who gets to labor upon it, and who doesn’t, is one of the great themes of Judith Baca’s mile-long work.
Let Paul Robeson have the last word on labor in America; the quote is his.
The “Atmospheric River” last week brought our wetlands to raucous life, as see. The water shows how the Valley’s flood control system, designed by the Army Corps, operates.
Here begins Tujunga Wash (behind the Dam, it is Big Tujunga Creek). From this spillway to the LA River, the point is to get the water out as fast as possible. Thus Tujunga water is mostly lost to the Valley, though there has been some late movement towards aquifer diversion.The View of the Dam looking south. The hills peeking up behind, are the Santa Monica Mountains.View northwest, over the lake bed, then over Lake View Terrace, to San Fernando Pass (the lowest point, middle-right).
The landscape here is not at all natural; it is what has resulted after 80 years of experimental terra-forming, which only in the last five years, and with much hard work and re-directing failed plans, has turned the place into “beautiful.”
The levee holding Tujunga Creek
…a mile of rip-rap bound by chain link.
The flood plain: the Valley
Much of the former lake-bed turns into a seasonal wetland, and a de-facto riparian wildlife refuge, more or less contiguous with its mountain watershed. For years, drought dried the lake up, and it gave off an unholy chemical stink (not just the Cottonwoods.) TONS of invasive plants choked out everything, and there were more-or-less permanent hobo jungles in the tules. It was a bizarre place to hike. It’s much better now.
The catchment basin is full, forming a vernal pool. It hosts thousands of Corvus brachyrhynchus, American crows.
Throughout the 1930s, when NoHo and Studio City were booming, weeks of rain like we just could send rampaging floods of turbulent mud rushing out of Big Tujunga Canyon, carrying boulders, whole orchards, tree trunks and Valley houses away down the LA River, tearing out bridges and the Pacific Electric tracks. The Hansen Dam changed all that, and gave the Valley something to crow about:
Murder, Incorporated! Thousands and thousands of crows….
So let’s put our palms together. We have date palms, and fan palms. At a glance the trunks can look similar, but the crowns are easily distinguished. Old-World date palms have the long branches, lined with fronds, waved at the Missions on Palm Sunday. The North American desert fan palms have crowns made of broad fans, held out from the tree by a flexible, thorn-jagged petiole (the stem of the leaf). They naturally have a shaggy petticoat; if this is trimmed, they often leave a neat cross-hatched pattern on the trunks. If this is gone, the trunks are smooth.
Below, two desert fan palms on the right, and a date palm and its partner on the left. All appear to have been planted (in Hollywood) at roughly the same time, about 100 years ago. Imagine the architectural turn-over on this block since 1915.
The fan palms above are our native California fan palm (from Palm Springs, e.g.) Washingtonia filifera. Usually they have a full, open crown, like the splendid trees (below) outside Lankershim Elementary. When these were planted, the school was a wooden Victorian building and the Pacific Electric had just opened NoHo Station half-a-block away.
Then there are Washingtonia’s cousins from Baja,. W. robusta, who were discovered by Hollywood, turned into world-wide stars, and grew up to become LA’s beloved skydusters.
“Word.”
When you find the two Washingtonias planted side by side, grown to maturity, the difference between them is readily apparent.
Robusta rhymes with “skydusta”.
They are extremely closely related. As youngsters, these palms can look so similar as to be indistinguishable. I wonder if this filifera wasn’t planted by mistake among this grove of robustas (mix-up at the nursery, probably). Neither palm seems to mind in the least.
The Valley Plaza Tower, when built in 1960, was the tallest building in the San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles Federal Savings and Loan was the first bank tenant. In 1976 a patriotic mural was painted on the west face; but the current mural, faded to illegibility, features LA City Hall and, for some reason, a mountain-scape that looks like Yosemite.Acres and acres of ground-level parking lots for freeway-friendly convenience were a novel feature of the design of Valley Plaza; but to draw people off the freeway, developer Bob Symonds hired modernist architects Douglas Honnold and John Rex to design a 165-foot tower that he hoped could be seen for ten miles in any direction. The lot size is only 35 feet wide, so the building seems especially gracile for a skyscraper.
The Valley Village View 