Odds & Ends Around the Valley : A Moving Experience
Nothing beats driving down Ventura Boulevard after 11 p.m. on a Wednesday and noticing that the car ahead of you is actually a four-unit, two-story apartment building.
That’s what happened recently to motorists in Sherman Oaks, who witnessed the relocation of an apartment building on Kester Avenue to its new downtown home on Toberman Street.
Talk about a terrible commute. “It took us all night to get downtown,” recalled Joe Hetherington. His company, Seay Industrial in South Gate, moves 75 to 100 buildings a year. “We went about 10 m.p.h., but we had to stop along the way.”
To move a two-story apartment building, you merely lift it off its foundation and remove the roof (to avoid entanglement in wires that cross over streets). Hetherington said it takes 30 to 45 days from the time the last tenant moves out until the building is ready to be moved.
What about the risk of damage during the move? “All you get from the ride are little cracks above doorways,” said Hetherington, who added that vandalism in the empty building causes more damage than the nightlong journey.
Most of the older apartment buildings that Seay Industrial moves end up in downtown Los Angeles as low-income housing. “You can save a third of the cost of new construction by moving an older building,” Hetherington said. (He charges $8 to $10 a square foot.)
New-and-improved housing (more units, more bucks) will fill the vacant lot on Kester. But the other housing will be built from scratch.
Unlocking the Grid
Bad news for those of you who read the paper or learn Spanish by cassette while stuck in Valley gridlock: Traffic may get better in the future. Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control, or ATSAC, is coming our way.
“We’re just starting to design a large project called the Victory/Ventura Freeway Corridor,” said Anson Nordby, senior engineer with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Traffic signals between Victory and Ventura boulevards, from Valley Circle Boulevard to the city of Burbank, will be hooked up to a central computer--which is about the size of a refrigerator. Sensors set in the roadway will report the amount of traffic to the computer, which will time the signals to maximize the flow.
A smaller version of this grand plan--which helped mitigate traffic during freeway reconstruction--is already operational at about 32 intersections in the west end of the Valley. The cost of the project is $20.6 million.
“The purpose of the Victory/Ventura Freeway Corridor is to help the east-west flow of traffic throughout the Valley. We fully intend it to make a big impact on traffic,” Nordby said. The only catch: Can you wait until Dec. 1, 1991?
Restaurant Blues
If you’re in the restaurant business, you might want to stop reading this item.
According to Orris Abbott, who owns several restaurant-related businesses (including The Restaurant Broker, a company that sells, well, restaurants, in Sherman Oaks), it’s a tough time to own an eatery--in spite of the fact that we eat out so much.
Restaurants in Southern California are suffering from a malady that some folks say made our country great: too much competition.
And the competition is not only from other restaurants. “You’ve got all these other businesses trying to sell food now,” Abbott said. “The convenience stores are now selling hot dogs and hamburgers. All those yogurt places on every block have discovered they can’t make it just selling yogurt, so they’re selling deli sandwiches and cookies. The grocery stores now have salad bars or carry-out counters. Even liquor stores sell deli sandwiches.
“The pace of our lives is picking up, and these stores provide meals for people on the run--people who otherwise would have gone to a restaurant.”
Plus, he said, there are just too many new restaurants opening up, especially among the chains. “Restaurant sales as a whole are up, but individually they’re down because there are simply more restaurants,” Abbott said. “They’re expanding faster than the population is increasing.”
Mark Leaf, a spokesman for the Southern California Restaurant Assn., said: “Half of all new restaurants close within the first year of opening. And 30% of those that it make it through the first year close by the second year.”
Not very palatable odds.
Shake and Quake
There’s nothing like a good earthquake to get you out of the house--and over to Universal Studios. “There are no hard figures available yet, but it looks as if our local business has picked up quite a bit as a result of the ‘Earthquake’ attraction,” a studio spokesman said. “For this time of year, we’ve never had crowds this large in our 25-year history. Business is up about 20%.”
About 45% of the visitors are from out of state, 30% are from other countries, and 25% are local. Maybe the local visitors have the greatest difficulty separating fantasy from reality.
Overheard at...
“Aren’t you glad you don’t see those ‘Baby on Board’ signs any more?”
--A woman at the Handy J Hand Wash in Sherman Oaks
