Vegetable Stand Must Give Way : CSUN Breaks Ground on Future
For vegetable entrepreneur Beth Bollinger, Friday’s ground-breaking ceremony for the $150-million expansion of California State University, Northridge meant one thing: goodby, corn stand. Bollinger’s corn stand on Lassen Street near the intersection of Zelzah Avenue has been a San Fernando Valley institution for 35 years. She and her husband bought the stand from its original owner about 20 years ago, and, almost every day during the spring and summer, it is surrounded by customers eager to get low-priced, freshly picked vegetables.
But the green-and-yellow wooden stand is smack in the middle of the area slated for an expansion of the CSUN campus, an area school officials now call University Park. Crews already are building dormitories near Bollinger’s stand. Friday’s ground-breaking ceremony was just another signal that the stand’s days are numbered, Bollinger said.
“We knew this was coming,” Bollinger said philosophically. “I can’t be mad about it, but I am upset, and I know the customers are mad about it.”
Bollinger and CSUN officials are trying to work out an agreement that would move the stand to the northeast corner of Lindley Avenue and Lassen Street. Bollinger said negotiations for the new spot “are in limbo.”
Ambitious Plans
During the CSUN ceremony, the future of the vegetable stand was never mentioned. Speakers instead described a series of ambitious plans for what was once a little-used part of the campus.
Already under construction are 200 units of student housing. In upcoming weeks, work is scheduled to start on a 20,000-square-foot conference center for seminars and workshops, and work will begin soon on a 200-room hotel on the southwest corner of Devonshire Street and Zelzah Avenue.
Plans for University Park also call for a 17,500-seat athletic stadium, an art gallery with 10,000 square feet, two commercial research buildings, three buildings that will serve as a media and entertainment center and a 2,050-seat auditorium.
The CSUN expansion will eventually provide enough dormitory space for 2,400 students. Affordable student housing near CSUN has been in short supply since the campus first opened in 1956. Students eager to get in the new dormitories, the first phase of which is to open in 1988, are already sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan: “Easy Living in University Park.”
The CSUN development is one of the first state university construction projects in the nation to be privately financed. Watt Industries is developing University Park in exchange for part of the income from the commercial facilities to be built there.
At the ground breaking, speeches lauding the expansion and its private financing were made by Ray Watt, chairman of Watt Industries; CSUN President James Cleary; Ann W. Reynolds, chancellor of the California State University system, and elected officials ranging across the political spectrum from such liberals as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda) to conservatives such as state Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette (R-Northridge) and Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the West Valley.
Edda Spielman, president of the CSUN faculty, said University Park’s achievements should not be measured in buildings constructed, but in the quality of the educational programs it will house.
Customers buying corn and canning tomatoes at the Bollinger stand had lower expectations.
“I’ll be happy if next summer I can just buy fresh corn around here,” said a woman carrying a bag of vegetables to her car.
