Like, It Needs a Name

News stories chronicling the progress of San Fernando Valley secession have ignored the most glaring and fundamental problem facing the wannabe city: What will they call it?

The Times, stuck (as are the rest of us) for an answer, studiously avoids referring to the inchoate town by name, thus occasioning some convoluted grammar in its reports of the issue. When a direct reference is unavoidable, the Times uses “the new Valley city.” That’ll look great on the 2010 census listings of the most populous U.S. cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles (Readers Digest condensed version), Houston, Philadelphia and The New Valley City.

An informal survey of this writer’s friends obtained the following responses: “I dunno” (45%); “Who cares?” (45%); “Get a life” (10%) and “San Fernando” (one person, statistically insignificant.) It was pointed out to the San Fernando respondent that an incorporated city already calls itself that. But perhaps some sort of royalty payment could be arranged. On the other hand, the new Valley city may not want to pay a royalty to San Fernando on top of the $68 million “alimony” the Local Agency Formation Commission wants it to pay to Los Angeles for the municipal services it will continue not to receive.

Those of us who don’t live in the insurgent burg already know what it’s called: “the Valley.” There’s a long, nasal stress on the first syllable of “Valley,” in the way New Yorkers pronounce “Jersey.”

The problem here is that calling California’s second-largest city “The Valley” sounds, well, stupid. People who live in the Valley know this. It is why they will never tell you that they live in the Valley. Just ask one. “I live in Sherman Oaks,” they say, or “I’m from Studio City . . . Encino . . . Woodland Hills.” No one wants to say “the Valley,” for fear someone from the Basin will think, “yeah, Reseda.”

Besides, telling someone that you’re from the Valley doesn’t play when you meet people from outside California. Their response is: “Which one? The Rhine Valley? The Loire Valley? Happy Valley Rehab Facility?”

So the Valley cityhood people should stop worrying about how many of the LAPD’s stealth fighters they’re going to get and jump on the name problem. Secession will come to a vote some day, and “resolved, that pretty much everything north of Mulholland should leave Los Angeles and incorporate itself as a city to be named later” is a definite loser.

On the plus side, the one urban difficulty the insurgents will leave behind is the city song issue. No composer has definitively captured L.A. as a toddlin’ town or a coronary depository. But in the Valley’s case, Moon Unit Zappa’s “Valley Girl” has solved the problem.