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In an echo of the early ‘90s, name-change mania has seized Van Nuys, the Valley’s largest community and once one of its proudest.

More than 800 residents of the areas to the west and north of Valley College want to call their neighborhood “Valley Glen” and formalize the change by posting blue, rectangular street signs advising visitors that they are no longer in Van Nuys.

The movement is like many name-change tempests that have swept through Los Angeles in past years. Passionately supported by people looking to strengthen community spirit and shore up real estate prices, name changes have since been ridiculed by commentators as a typically L.A. way of treating urban ills as image problems.

But mockery notwithstanding, name changes still carry as much emotional freight as ever--even by people who privately consider them silly.

The proposed Valley Glen name change carries little official weight. The neighborhood would remain part of Los Angeles, ZIP Codes would not change, and the rest of Van Nuys would keep its name. Only the signs, which are subject to approval by City Councilman Michael Feuer, would identify the new community.

Still, the issue has become among the most controversial in Van Nuys in recent years. A group of about 200 residents to the north of the proposed name-change area have signed petitions saying they want to join Valley Glen too.

Other Van Nuys residents have criticized the move as divisive. “Don’t turn your back on a place just because it’s not pretty,” said Stratis Perros, 29, a lifelong Van Nuys resident. Valley Glen “is part of what’s good about Van Nuys. Soon all we are left with will be the bad parts.”

“Yes, it’s just a sign,” said actor Ron Recasner, who lives outside the Valley Glen boundaries. “But it’s people sectioning off and being exclusive.”

A standing-room-only meeting at Valley College to discuss the name change drew about 120 people Monday. People booed, clapped and interrupted each other. When one woman called Van Nuys “a cesspool,” Recasner leaped to his feet, shouting his objection.

An African American, Recasner reminded the crowd that real estate covenants once barred blacks from the area. The room then erupted and people buried their faces in their hands in exasperation.

Some council members in recent years have attempted to place an unofficial moratorium on name changes because of the controversies they stir.

But Feuer, in whose council district the proposed Valley Glen is situated, instead decided to forward the proposal to his newly created Livable Neighborhood Council in the area, a group he created to handle just such local controversies. Feuer hopes the group can be a model for local decision-making bodies now being proposed as part of efforts to reform the Los Angeles City Charter.

But at the end of Monday’s meeting, the Livable Neighborhood Council deadlocked 5 to 5, with three abstentions, leaving the final decision to Feuer. He says he will make it in the next few weeks.

Van Nuys is named after Isaac Newton Van Nuys, a prosperous wheat farmer who sold his ranch to the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Co. in 1909.

Van Nuys was envisioned by early city planners as a sort of suburban utopia centered around industry, said Greg Hise, assistant professor of urban planning at USC. When an auto assembly plant opened there in 1948, community pride was at such a high pitch that a four-day celebration was held, he said.

Today, the auto plant is closed and its site is being converted to a shopping center. Van Nuys has about 140,000 residents and little of the utopian feel once hoped for.

Formerly home to a mostly white population, it has recently seen an influx of immigrants from Armenia and Latin American countries. African Americans moving north from South-Central L.A. are also among its newer residents.

The area within the proposed Valley Glen boundaries has traditionally been a Jewish enclave, and the area is whiter than the rest of Van Nuys, residents say.

But Valley Glen supporters react strongly to the suggestion of some critics that they want to segregate themselves from more diverse areas.

Rather, they say the name change simply recognizes their efforts to organize the neighborhood, and would help promote community involvement. Over the years, neighborhood groups have painted out graffiti and held block parties. They created a “Safe House” program of involved neighbors to watch over strolling schoolchildren.

One name-change advocate, banker Jeff Cristol, recently organized a tutoring program for the mostly Latino residents of a nearby apartment building.

“We want to create something,” said Doug Claybourne, a movie producer who said he lives in “Valley Glen” because it reminds him of his native Oklahoma. “What will improve Los Angeles? Small communities that have given themselves different names? Or bigger spaces on the map that someone else has mapped out?”

Nor do residents in the proposed Valley Glen conceal their aversion to the rest of Van Nuys. “Sadly today, Van Nuys is something you have to say under your breath,” resident Bobbie Fresh-Ghent said.

“The issues in Van Nuys are quite severe,” said her husband, Peer Ghent, president of the Valley Glen Neighborhood Assn. “They are beyond the ability of a group of 1,200 people to conquer.”

The Van Nuys Homeowners’ Assn. opposes the the name change, and representatives believe Feuer is “feeding the frenzy,” the group’s president, Don Schultz, said.

Flip Smith, owner of a tire shop on Van Nuys Boulevard and president of the Mid-Valley Chamber of Commerce, is also opposed.

But even Van Nuys supporters say community pride there has taken a beating. Litter, graffiti, teenagers selling drugs in daylight on the street and storefronts plastered with illegal signs were mentioned by people on both sides of the name-change issue as irritants.

Cristol, the banker, told of his car being stolen recently. When he got it back, the inside had been spray-painted with gang graffiti.

“I think there is a lot of anger that things were allowed to deteriorate for so long,” said Perros, the name-change opponent. “There were so many grand plans for Van Nuys for so many years, and nothing came of it.”

Recasner, the actor, said the name-change issue is in part rooted in cultural tensions in ethnically diverse Van Nuys. Everyone is prey to such tension, he said, adding that he has gotten irate at children from nearby apartments who drop candy wrappers on his lawn.

With the children mostly from immigrant Latino families, “I find myself saying ‘those people’ . . . then I have to catch myself,” Recasner said. “You can’t fall into that.”

But Oscar Lopez, owner of Cali Viejo, a Salvadoran restaurant on Van Nuys Boulevard, says he doesn’t blame residents for wanting their own neighborhood name, even if it is to distinguish themselves from his street.

“I think it’s normal,” he said. “But it does feel like discrimination. There is some anger left inside you.”