The Heart of the Valley : In the Years After the Town’s Founder Began Peddling Land and Chickens, Van Nuys Blossomed Into a Classic Example of Suburbia

All the world sneers at short buildings. Even in Los Angeles.

Especially in Los Angeles.

Because Los Angeles in its turn, in its youth, was sneered at by big East Coast cities. And Los Angeles did what any eager young newcomer does. It crawled. It apologized for not having tall buildings. It built them. Then it turned on its own children, the sprawling suburbs. It turned on them the scorn it had endured, that awful insult:

Short buildings.

Which is why Van Nuys has a dignity beyond defense. Short buildings belong here. There are no apologies for adapting sensibly to a land of wide vistas and universal automobile suffrage, and behind the sun-bleached facades dwell marvels undreamt-of on 40th floors.

On the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Oxnard Street there is a little hamburger stand, a classic of the advanced lean-to school of architecture, with a few round-seat stools.

Ara Sevanian cooks Armenian hamburgers there, his own secret recipe. But he closes early because in his other identity, Ara--who survived membership in the Russian army and a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp--is a composer of classical music. He conducts orchestras, the sort whose members wear white tie or ball gowns when they play. His music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Khachaturian.

“I live here because when I moved here from San Francisco in 1955 I searched all over--East Los Angeles, Pasadena, many places. Van Nuys is convenient for all purposes. It was very nice place and still I am close to downtown. Music is my life and I like being close to Music Center. So I live here and started a business here.”

Honestly now: When you buy a hot dog on the street where the tall buildings flourish, does Zubin Mehta ladle on the kraut?

Rolling down Sherman Way, thousands of cars a day dive beneath the runway of the world’s busiest airport (kind of). Now, it’s true you’ve never caught a jetliner at Van Nuys Airport. You may well never have seen it or even heard of it. But nonetheless, it’s the world’s busiest general aviation airport, and the third busiest of any kind. That’s in terms of the number of takeoffs and landings, not people. (General aviation is what’s left after you subtract military and commercial planes, but a distinction is a distinction.)

And remember the last scene of “Casablanca”? Where a heartbroken Bogie nobly sends Ingrid-Ilsa off to do her bit against the Nazis, tears of repressed lust in both their eyes? Well, that was 99 and 44/100 percent filmed on a sound stage, but in that tiny flash where the airplane’s engine starts with a back-straightening roar and the airplane lifts off triumphantly for Lisbon, there, frozen forever into a classic moment of cinema, is Van Nuys Airport.

Van Nuys, modestly, does not brag of these historical high points, even now, in the throes of the celebration of its 75th birthday. W. P. Whitsett founded Van Nuys in 1911, buying a square mile of land along what is now Van Nuys Boulevard for $176,000 and raking in money by selling 50-foot lots for $1,000 each.

“He was the original promoter, the original P. T. Barnum,” as Bruce Ackerman, the head of the Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce, describes the founding father.

“He enticed people to buy lots by throwing in free chickens, saying the chickens would produce enough eggs to pay for the lot. He’d go down to Union Station and pay the baggage boys to put ‘Try Van Nuys’ stickers on the luggage of every incoming passenger.

“But he’s also the reason Van Nuys was one of the first planned communities. He sat down with a big map and planned the whole town, which is why major arteries are a mile apart, there are secondary streets every half-mile and tertiary streets each quarter-mile.”

If Whitsett was the founder, why is it called “Van Nuys”? Isaac Newton Van Nuys is described by Ackerman as a pioneer Valley landowner, another real estate dealer who was a contemporary of Whitsett’s. “Other than that, there’s not much known about Van Nuys the man,” Ackerman said. “His history is kind of a mystery.”

Like most Valley communities, Van Nuys is actually a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles, which annexed it in 1915.

By reckoning of the Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce, it stretches from Magnolia Boulevard on the south to Roscoe Boulevard on the north, and from the Coldwater Canyon Wash on the east to a western line that runs along the San Diego Freeway north to Victory Boulevard, west to White Oak Avenue and north to the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. There is a territorial dispute with the U.S. Census Bureau over a six-block stretch at the northwest corner, bordered by Roscoe and Louise, which the federal government classifies as part of Reseda and the chamber of commerce defends as Van Nuys.

Whitsett’s and Van Nuys’ enduring legacies are streets--especially Van Nuys Boulevard, which in the ‘50s and ‘60s and on into the ‘70s was a fixture of any Valley adolescence. Each Wednesday night, teen-agers by the thousands drove slowly up and down the boulevard, looking for each other and for trouble in vehicles from hot rods to mom’s sedan to pickup trucks towing speedboats. To preserve the general public peace and decency--and some of the boulevard’s merchants from death by apoplexy--the Los Angeles Police Department put an end to the cruising. Roadblocks broke up the flow of traffic; flares burned long into the night.

One night about four years ago, the LAPD failed to put out the flares and sawhorses. The quondam-, quasi- and would-be cruisers emerged--slowly at first, and then rapidly as word spread--and filled the boulevard. It didn’t last long. Within hours the LAPD was back with a chill blizzard of traffic citations. The next week the barriers had returned.

Surprisingly, the Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce is actually sponsoring a revival-of-cruise-night, the “History of Van Nuys on Wheels Parade,” on the boulevard Wednesday. “A last chance to cruise the boulevard,” as a chamber spokeswoman said. While it is supposed to be a vintage-car parade, it is open to any vehicular entries that the chamber does not feel obliged to reject.

This will be the penultimate event of the three-month anniversary celebration of the town of Van Nuys. The windup to the festivities began Saturday and continues today with a street festival at the Irwin Mall, a part of the group of government buildings where a shorter version of the Los Angeles City Hall stands, an outpost of the downtown forces. The conclusion will be “an old-fashioned barbecue and hoedown dinner,” May 22 at Valley Hospital Medical Center.

In the years since Whitsett began peddling land and chickens in what had been a remote stretch of dry land devoted to cattle, wheat, fruit trees and railroad tracks, Van Nuys became the heart of a Valley that blossomed with suburbs in the great post-World War II boom, a classic example of suburbia, with small frame houses and residents working for decades to kick a mortgage monkey, or maybe save enough extra to have a swimming pool. The population grew from 20,000 before the war to three times that by 1950.

By now, it has about 120,000 residents, but the complexion of Valley suburbia has changed, as much of the white middle-class flowed west toward the far end of the Valley and the Ventura coast beyond. Blacks, Asians and Latinos moved into Van Nuys. Nearly all theater marquees now bear Spanish-language titles. The fast-food outlets that were once universally hamburger-based now serve burritos and gyros, rice or barbecue.

The heart has visibly aged. Many of the neighborhoods have become run-down, and much of the city is given over to comparatively heavy industry--a brewery, an auto plant. Renewal efforts have made some progress but nothing spectacular. Still, tucked away on side streets there are neighborhoods that would gladden the heart of old W. P.: rows of neat houses shaded by trees.

The heart still beats, and if the Valley has a center, this is still it.

Drawn by the same dreams that grabbed the pilgrims from Iowa who found those stickers--”Try Van Nuys”--when they claimed their luggage at the station in Los Angeles, they’re coming still.

A little more space. A better deal. Some distance from the neighbors.

A look at the sky now and then.

Short buildings.