Valley Contributions
Apparently, our state librarian, Kevin Starr, has been concentrating on early California history too much to grasp what’s going on in today’s San Fernando Valley.
In his July 19 attack on Mayor Richard Riordan and the Valley, “A City Divided; Who’s standing up for L.A.?” he exhibits both ignorance and disdain for the Valley when he opines that if the Valley were to become a city it would be “a dormitory suburb pretending to have achieved urban status: a community whose signature cultural contribution, at least in terms of gross revenues, would be pornography.”
Starr is obviously not up to date on today’s San Fernando Valley, the home of Los Angeles’s most profitable public companies, according to the L.A. Business Journal. The Valley is the home of L.A.’s No. 1 tourist and entertainment destination--Universal Studios. It’s the home of not only the TV Academy but the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and CBS Studio Center (where some of America’s most innovative and popular TV shows were produced, including the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Seinfeld”). The Valley is the home of hundreds of entertainment legends who have made lasting cultural contributions to the world.
Our entertainment, aerospace, high-technology and health-care industry clusters are each multibillion-dollar generators of jobs and products distributed worldwide. Add the 50,000 other businesses, 600,000 people employed daily and our 1.3 million residents and we think even Starr will come to realize we’re more than the dormitory suburb he remembers from the 1950s.
DAVID FLEMING, Chairman
BILL ALLEN, President and CEO
Economic Alliance
of the San Fernando Valley
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