Tag Archives: Patrick Geddes

The Last Post

Patient Reader, I regret to report this is the last edition of the Valley Village View. I have hit the limit of the “storage space” allowed by WordPress for a non-monetized blog. That is, if I wish to continue adding to it, I’d have to pay them a monthly rent. Google’s gate-fee is not cheap; their idea is, it should be a privilege to put the View into competition with all their other products for the world’s eyeballs — and for me to hustle for ever-more readers eager to click-through their ads on my blog.

The View began as a way to share pictures with family and friends about the local and natural history of the place I call home. Very quickly I realized that I knew nothing about it, myself! And I could see that many of the most interesting things about Los Angeles, and especially the Valley, weren’t ‘covered’ online: events weren’t presented with accurate facts, landmarks weren’t honored with clear informative pictures, history and natural wonders were ignored. As my own ‘sense of place’ grew, I realized that I had to work hard to find facts, or forgotten but important names. I tried to tie each blog entry into the important themes and trends I’d discerned.

I am especially proud of the View’s multi-part explorations:

First, the Views of “Beautiful Valley Village” itself, its middle-class history, its walkable scale and unpretentiously homey Mid-Century architecture. I think the photo essay of the once innovative, now abandoned Valley Plaza may be the best visual record there is or was, of the sad fate one of America’s first modern shopping centers; another lost moment in LA conservation history. The low-slung, rock-faced, steel-and-glass rows of shops, booths, and showrooms now are falling, burning, or being allowed to be torn down, for the lack of an adaptive-reuse plan for the site.

“The Theatre of Conversion” series is the most comprehensive general account online of the religious and cultural interface that began in 1769 between the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash peoples, with their Chinigchinich religion on the one hand, and the Franciscans, with their Christianity. In addition to discovering the amazing lore and ritual of the datura plant, momoy, t was a golden chance to do the kind of history I admire most, a “local history from the soil up” kind of story. Comparing the Indians’ myths, plants, animals, food, medicine, and land-use, with the cultural apparatus and technology which was brought in by the Spanish, opened my eyes to the magnificent chaparral of the California Floristic Province, which was almost wiped out by the invasive Spanish Pasture Mix. Learning about Fr. Lasuen’s grandiose design for the most commodious building in Alta California, the Convento at San Fernando Mission, and the huge amount of quicklime-whitewash needed to cover all that adobe, and the huge amount of oak firewood required to kiln the limestone, and the quarrying of the limestone itself, and wondering where the neophytes got all the resources called for in Vitruvius’s whitewash recipe, led me into the geology of the canyons.

“The Transformation of Lopez Canyon” is an ongoing story that gives me hope for all of Southern California. If this abused, misunderstood sand-trap of hills can spring back from fires and floods and pollution and launch a mighty Superbloom of rare, even endangered species, as Lopez did in May-June of 2020, any place can. The CFP is robust and fit and apt and beguiling, and eager to steal your heart with water-sparing beauty and butterflies year-round, California, if you just let the dumb Connecticut-green lawn aesthetic die already. Of course, Lopez Canyon is also where I realized the Sylmar Hills were remnants of ancient mud volcanoes. This amazing revelation prompted the View to propose “San Fernando Valley National Geologic Monument,” (which is still an awesome idea) and led to a good survey of the rocks and rills round the rim.

I’m really sad to have to leave off “Van Nuys – A Viewing” in the middle. The story tells of how Isaac N. Van Nuys, one of the greatest wheat farmers and agricultural developers in California history, was descended from Dutch wheat farmers who settled in New Netherland in 1651. The story winds around to Brooklyn and New Jersey and to the Genesee Valley of upstate New York — each place, in its day, the center of a wheat-farming bonanza belt. The Van Nuys family story was revealed as a central thread in a much bigger story, that of the Anglo-Dutch commodity wheat culture of the former New Netherland counties. This family-based, small-freeholder, mercantile farming model was the economic and cultural template of settlement of the middle colonies, and it emerged from the English conquest of New Netherland. Wheat agriculture was carefully implanted along with religious freedom, when neither wheat nor free thought was flourishing elsewhere. Eventually, it was the norm that prevailed across the American frontier and drew in millions of immigrant homesteaders eager to copy it. But just as the riled heartland of sober, small-farming, reformed-religious Prairie Populists seemed ready to rise to national power under Wm. Jennings Bryan, the price of wheat collapsed, and the whole family-farm commodity wheat culture retreated. The rush of farm-leavers from rural counties fed the teeming cities. Part of the reason wheat went bust in Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma, was that one Isaac Van Nuys had athsma, and got the jump on the prairie homesteaders by moving clear out to California. By the 1880s Van Nuys was shipping huge cargoes of Pacific wheat to the grain market at Liverpool, and that encouraged other Californians to go big in wheat. Thus, one of the descendants of the original Van Nuys. who helped found family-farm wheat culture, was so successful he helped strangle it as a settlement pattern. When Ike Van Nuys sold off his massive Valley holdings to developers in 1911, the hay-day of America’s Anglo-Dutch freethinking commodity wheat agriculture was over; exemplified when hundreds of thousands of displaced and dispossessed Okie farmers arrived in the Valley for one last chance at land, and found LA instead. I regret I didn’t get to finish this story of family farms, religious freedom and progressive ideals; but it helped build America, and the future is full of time.

Thank you for following the Valley Village View. If anyone stumbles in here after this, I hope they will find working links and hashtags. I hope the site will still be useful and beautiful for you. I hope it encourages understanding of the phenomenally rich culture of Los Angeles. I hope the photography, especially of the native landscapes, inspires visions of the vast renewal that is waiting for us, could we only learn to give this remarkable land our attention, love and respect.

I., Van Nuys

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PART TWO OF “VAN NUYS — A VIEWING”

Modern Van Nuys. Ike isn’t to blame for the blight and anomie. What’s a farm town without farms?

The Hub of the San Fernando Valley is flattered, frankly, to bear the Van Nuys name; this may be why it has never changed. (The View regrets the loss of Lankershim; but that burg went “Hollywood.” Show people, shudder.)

Remember Isaac was technically not the founder of the City of Van Nuys but the wheat farmer who sold out to the developers. Technically, too, there never was a City of Van Nuys; it is, and was planned as, Los Angeles. But Van Nuys knew this. He understood regional planning from the ground up and it is a mistake, as has been suggested, to think of him as a rube gulled by the Chandler syndicate or flattered into reducing his price by the developers’ offer to name the town after him. If anything, the Van Nuys and Lankershim names were premium branding; their commercial success (agro-biz) had made them rural celebrities at a time when almost 80 percent of Americans were farmers and 99 percent were desperate to get rich. The syndicate’s development planned mostly 40 acre farmsteads with strategically-placed small-lot market-towns. They hoped to attract young white Eastern farm families fleeing the frost, good kids starting out but who couldn’t afford land back home. Little capitalists — this was explicit — eager for a warm, sunny spot to claim their “little land and a living” (Bolton Hall’s phrase, meaning freedom through farming from debt and wage-slavery). Isaac Van Nuys signed off on, allowed his good name to be put on, plans for a modern, model farm-servicing and depot buckle in an integrated agricultural belt, irrigated by nearly free public water, main streets blazing with light at midnight, linked by clean electric rail, to serve a growing metropolis. Isaac was, individually and in partnership with his brother-in-law James Lankershim, already heavily invested in booming Downtown.

Mr. Harry Chandler with Gen. Moses Sherman

Ike had known and dealt with the Huntingtons for years as a leading farmer in Los Angeles County, through whose land passed the SPRR. He had bought (or, I believe, advantageously swapped for) the old Southern Pacific Depot on the old bottomland of the LA River downtown, so that his new grist-mill enterprise “Los Angeles Farming and Milling” could be most advantageously placed right on the tracks between the Valley and San Pedro. In this sense, he was one of the planners of the vision. So the Valley annexation plan as a whole and Van Nuys’s land sale were not “wheel estate” flim-flummery. Rather, all the players were informed by, and self-consciously in-line with, the most progressive, up-to-date, economic, organic and holistic urban design thinking of the time. Remember civic theorist Patrick Geddes?

The drawing above is the famous “Geddesian Valley Section.” The other illustrations are also foundational to modern urban studies. Geddes wrote volumes of essential essays and studies, but his prose is tough sledding for laymen. His gift was inspiring an organic vision of cities through right brain engagement. The Boosterism of the Van Nuys promotional image may be corny, but it clearly reflects Geddes’s ideas.

Van Nuys was a key part of a planned Greater Utopia, Ltd. But that meant, it was condemned from the start to be the dusty, Babbittty, railroad farm-town part of Utopia. By plan, Van Nuys was the back service porch of gilded Downtown Utopia, where the nobs would forever guzzle champagne, over the hill and far away. Van Nuys is a Potemkin prairie village: it would never, could never, grow to overtake Downtown in commerce and real estate values, no matter the citizens’ thrift or ambitious industry. Early investors might not have thought about it too clearly, but they could never hope that someday their corner of Van Nuys would be the new booming “Boardwalk and Park Place,” full of hotels. Van Nuys proved the point; Like Pio Pico before him, he brushed off his last ceremonial pair of dusty trousers — his hard farming days of handling a team of twenty mules from the dusty box seat of a combine had gone years ago— and he moved back to LA to throw his pelf on the pile Downtown. Ike spent the last year of his life in silk pajamas unrolling blueprints, planning to corner the era’s Boardwalk and Park Place, 3rd and Spring, supervising construction of this:

The I.N. Van Nuys Building, at 3rd and Spring, LA’s hottest and most-marbled office block. 1912.

Van Nuys sold the ranch in 1909; the town opened in 1911, and Mr. Van Nuys died in 1912 — a few weeks before the I.N. Van Nuys Building opened. He died, also, a few weeks before the first Pacific Electric light-rail train arrived in Van Nuys and rolled passengers up Van Nuys Boulevard (then called Sherman Way). Ike possibly never set foot again in the Valley, never saw the new place called “Van Nuys.” He isn’t to blame for the sprawl, the blight, the anomie of today’s automobile graveyard Van Nuys. For Isaac, eternally, the town with his name was a four-square model farm town, with all the hook-ups a family needed to just move in and start plowing. And for years, it was.

The Jue Joe Ranch in Van Nuys. To Harry Chandler’s consternation, Chinese-American families were eager to live the Van Nuys lifestyle among their white neighbors. They taught LA a thing or two about how to handle the freshest fruit & veg in the glory days of truck farming. May those days come again.

Van Nuys The Man is absolutely absent from popular history as a personality — no memorable words, no bloviations on issues of the day; no hints of his pleasures and peeves, no memoir revealing his evolving sense of himself as a ‘player’; no scandals or rivalries in a town full of them. But this very absence to Modernity, is like the absence of sharp marble chips to a polished sculpture within. It reveals a hard core of values once so common-sensical and traditional they seem colorless today: he was sober, determined, loyal, ambitious, thrifty, patient, enterprising, dogged, nimble, polite, conservative, free-thinking, closed-mouthed, and open-minded. He was quiet and hoed his own row, minded his own family’s interests, yet everywhere he founded and built public things that made LA a first-class city and himself a millionaire. He was good with horses, a proud Mason, a father of three, and he made a fine husband to Susannah Lankershim, for whose mother’s sake he consented to become a public Baptist. He watched the weather, planted seeds and they grew. He was an upstate New York farmer from the old Dutch stock.

NEXT PART: How the name Van Nuys came to be permanently stamped on the dusty lower-left corner of our map, turns out to be a very rich land story indeed if we look into his Dutch ancestors’ experience, and Isaac’s own parents’ experience, and how they found land to farm. It is a Tale of Three Valleys — the San Fernando being the third. The progress of the Van Nuys family encompasses our whole history as an American people. It shows striking continuities, and illuminates pivotal moments in the rise of capitalism and modernity. It is the history of America itself. So View soon, THE HUDSON VALLEY VAN NUYSES…

View On The City Of Utrecht

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JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.
DUTCH STUDIES DIV.

1984, just before I started my year in Edinburgh, I had a summer course in Dutch culture at the Nijenrode Institute, a converted medieval castle in the dorp of Breukelen, the original Brooklyn. To get a borreltje, a brewski, the best bet was to head upriver (which is the dreamy Vecht, a branch of the Old Rijn) to spend a few hours in Utrecht.

The moment you step out of the vast modern, Tannoy-blaring ding-dong- Central Station, the largest and loudest in the Netherlands, you are under the elms in one of the finest living, working, pedestrian cities in the world.

As with Edinburgh (or Philadelphia for that matter), a walk around town can be a master class in urban studies. What Jane Jacobs said about Lower New York, the very greatest of all the old Dutch cities, applies a priori to Utrecht, the very oldest of all the great Dutch cities:

“Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large…[small shops], small manufacturers…small enterprises would not exist somewhere else, in the absence of cities. Without cities, they would not exist. The diversity…generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets. Even small operations like proprietor-and-one- clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars can and do flourish in extraordinary numbers in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support them at short, convenient intervals, and in turn this convenience, and neighborhood-personal quality, are their stock in trade. Once they are unable to be supported at close, convenient intervals, they lose this advantage. In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various, and the personal wither away.”
Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Great American Cities.

Jan Hendrik Verheye, View of the Choir and Tower of Utrecht Cathedral

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. 2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. 3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. 4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are living there for residence. The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.

St. Maarten’s Dom, built 1381-1382; the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. It gives an unforgettable, life-changing View.

“Historically treated, architecture has seemed too long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary science it begins anew with the living and growing city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had too little touch with the actual living polyps…”
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution

The above photos were not great pictures; but in b/w they seemed more interesting, and I now realize why. There are, combined. about 600 years worth of architectural styles for townhouses in these two street corner views, from High Gothic to to trap-gabled Renaissance, to 18th Century, to creamy white Art Nouveau, each distinctly a Dutch house.

The sea is of course an intermittent threat, but it was the alternately roaring and slackening Rijn channels that had to be tamed.

“I have often amused myself,’ wrote James Boswell in 1791, “with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium…but the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” Boswell not only gave a good definition of cities, he put his finger on one of the chief troubles in dealing with them. it is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this — analysis of cities, use by use — has become a customary planning tactic…to understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.

Click below for a brilliant urban studies blog which explains in a few simple maps the ever-changing channels of the Rijn-Maas-Waal delta. Every river in Europe, practically, runs within a few miles. The Utrecht achievement was turning silted-up old channels into the unique sunken canal system that winds through town, allowing downstairs private wharf tie-ups to almost every house in town. This determined Utrecht’s growth, trade, and evolution. It started as a Roman fort, Ultra Trajectum, (the further ford), the ruins of which were taken over by St. Willibord as a missionary outpost to convert the Frisians. Thus it also became the center of Netherlandish Christianity, and an ecclesiastical state, the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, one of the intellectual and artistic centers of Europe.

http://snailinthecity.blogspot.com/2014/03/utrecht-reworking-floodplain.html

I got another amazing chance to visit in 1997, when Sam Elias took me to Amsterdam (blessings!) and I took him to see Utrecht. He loves cities and architecture as much as I do. I took him to Het Kasteel de Haar; then he educated me, by taking me out to see Het Rietveld Huis, one of the landmarks of De Stijl in the leafy rich suburbs: another distinctly Dutch house, and it fits right in.

The Stadsbuitensingel, the old moat, was overdecked to lure car traffic into town in the 1980s.

The canal in-filling began as a redevelopment scheme that put one of the largest malls in the Netherlands, Hoog Catharijne, next to the train station, along the Catharijnesingel, the long straight stretch of the moat. The re-designed mall is an even glitzier behemoth in the town center, but the parking lots are gone, and now you can once again sail your jacht down the ancient, restored bed of the Rijn, as it flows right under the mall, and tie up right there, to buy your Coach bags and Hermes scarves.

https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-removed-to-bring-back-original-water/

“In our present phase, town-planning schemes are apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One is all for communications, another for industrial developments. Others are (more healthily) domestic in character, with provisions for parks and gardens; even by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival. But too many [developments] reiterate that pompous imperial art, which has changed so little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past or present. In their too exclusive devotion to material interests they present the converse of those old Spanish and Spanish-American cities which seem almost composed of churches and monasteries. What is the remedy? For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city’s life and its institutions, for of these the builded city is but the external shell.”
Patrick Geddes, op. cit.

What If We Gave An Economy, And Nobody Came?

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.

So, Patient Reader, you say you don’t understand economics, and you don’t want to? Do the charts and newsfeeds and TV crawls about “the economy” revolt you? Friend, I was just like you, and most of you know it. I hated Econ. and it made my head hurt and my heart ache and my stomach churn. It never enhanced my understanding of history or human behavior, in fact its dead operations and adolescent “game theory” approach of winners and losers almost always conflicted with what I felt was right. With all these odious physical reactions, and watching the course of world events, it has helped me to delve into basic principles, which (to be quite frank) were totally scrubbed from my entire formal education. Consult your own conscience, Patient Reader: who “taught you about money?” I bet you can tell me which years you spent in concentrated study on algebra or chemistry, or on the Sumerians, or Spanish. But which years in school gave you time for concentrated study on modern money supply, wealth, finance, or taxes? In seventh grade we were taught how to follow the stock market by picking stocks and reading the newspapers; mine never did anything. Other than that, my only formal class in “Business” was a typing class (valuable, but…) Understanding that economics means humanism, doesn’t make it hurt any less to read about the bloody mess mankind is making of the world. But it does feel good to know that you’re not crazy, and most of the people you love aren’t crazy, and that whatever is going on in the horrible world where phantom money inevitably destroys humanity’s real wealth ad infinitum, it isn’t economics.

Basic Forgotten Principe: Economics = Oikonomia = Stewardship

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.1.225

‘We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
–Oscar Hammerstein II

“Nearly every economist has at some point in the standard coursework been exposed to a brief explanation that the origin of the word “economy” can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomia, which in turn is composed of two words: oikos, which is usually translated as “household”; and nemein, which is best translated as “management and dispensation.” Thus, the cursory story usually goes, the term oikonomia referred to “household management”, and while this was in some loose way linked to the idea of budgeting, it has little or no relevance to contemporary economics. This article introduces in more detail what the ancient Greek philosophers meant by “oikonomia.” It begins with a short history of the word. It then explores some of the key elements of oikonomia, while offering some comparisons and contrasts with modern economic thought….
— Abstract of Dotan Leshem’s article on “Oikonomia,” cited in full below.

“For example, both Ancient Greek oikonomia and contemporary economics study human behavior as a relationship between ends and means which have alternative uses. However, while both approaches hold that the rationality of any economic action is dependent on the frugal use of means, contemporary economics is largely neutral between ends, while in ancient economic theory, an action is considered economically rational only when taken towards a praiseworthy end. Moreover, the ancient philosophers had a distinct view of what constituted such an end—specifically, acting as a philosopher or as an active participant in the life of the city-state.”
— Abstract of Leshem, Dotan, 2016 “Retrospectives: What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Oikonomia?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30 (1): 225-38.DOI: 10.1257/jep.30.1.225

The Valley Village View

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.