Reseda life still shifting

Ten years ago, it seemed the world couldn’t get enough of Reseda Boulevard. Maybe you remember the photos and the TV images: the victims, huddled in blankets, crying on the sidewalk; the lines of shellshocked people waiting to buy food and water at the Ralphs at the corner of Devonshire Street.

Or, most terrifying of all, the Northridge Meadows apartment complex, at Reseda and Plummer Street, its second and third floors pancaked down on top of its bottom layer as if a giant had hopscotched across them. Sixteen people were killed there of the 57 who died when the Northridge earthquake struck Southern California on Jan. 17, 1994, at 4:31 a.m. Sharon Englar, 58, and her husband Phil, 62, were found dead “holding hands in Apt. 102,” The Times reported.

There was an unsettling incongruity between the awful, cataclysmic events and the innocuous, beige-stucco settings -- the Reseda-ness of the tragedy. But then, say some who live and work along Reseda Boulevard, this asphalt-covered sliver of the San Fernando Valley is an incongruous, in-between kind of place, strung out betwixt the Santa Susana Mountains and the El Caballero Country Club.

Reseda, they say, is an overlooked but pivotal enclave, a transition point between various ethnic groups, between East Valley and West Valley, Old Valley and New Valley. When director Paul Thomas Anderson made “Magnolia” (1999), his kaleidoscopic, biblically overtoned homage to the Valley, he named it for the thoroughfare that runs from the Verdugo foothills to Burbank’s Media Center district. He might as well have called it “Reseda” instead.

“Reseda is actually the hub of the Valley,” says Paul Trietsch, who for half a century owned Traders Loan & Jewelry, a pawnshop at the northeast corner of Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way, where he still works part time. “Actually, the ‘Northridge’ earthquake was centered in Reseda.”

A few blocks away, Dr. Dewayne Winrow, minister at the Reseda Boulevard Church of Christ, pauses from his paperwork to explain how the Northridge earthquake indirectly may have helped save his congregation. His former church, in Pacoima, was losing members, partly because “the black community has become very dispersed,” he says. “We were taking people out of a ghetto-type situation, lifting them socially.” Then, once they’d made it into the middle class, some parishioners didn’t want to come back to worship in Pacoima.

Some time after the quake, Winrow was driving along Reseda Boulevard and saw a for-sale sign on the church compound, then owned by the Mormons. “I guess as a result of the quake, the price was very reasonable.”

The congregation moved in on the first Sunday of May 1998. Winrow and the other worshipers like the economic and ethnic variety of their new neighborhood. “You can go five blocks this way and find homes that would be compatible with what we had in the Northeast Valley. You can go five blocks the other way and find million-dollar homes,” Winrow says. “Community is not community if there’s no sense of Otherness, if Otherness is not represented.”

Stories of devastation and of revival abound here; the Lord moves in mysterious ways, even on Reseda Boulevard.

On the boulevard

It’s a beautiful, cloudless winter morning, like that one a decade ago when a magnitude-6.7 temblor shuddered across metropolitan Los Angeles. Freeways collapsed. Billions of dollars worth of damage were done in less time than it takes to get out of bed. It was the most destructive quake in the region’s living memory, equal-opportunity mayhem.

But nowhere took a worse beating than the area around Reseda Boulevard. The nearby Northridge Fashion Center was a wreck. At Cal State Northridge, just east of the intersection of Reseda and Nordhoff Street, a parking structure collapsed and the college was obliged to use trailers as portable classrooms and offices for years afterward.

Trietsch spent the day playing golf.

“I came into work (and) the first thing I saw was all of my steel gates were still intact,” he says. One of the pawnshop’s display cases was broken, and there was stuff scattered here and there. “There was nothing I could do, so I locked up and went out and played golf.” It was funny, he says, because the tee would shake every time there was an aftershock.

That’s life in the Valley’s tectonic cross hairs, where the population rumbles with the slip-strike motion of newly arrived immigrants, and natural disasters come and go like adult film starlets or Middle Eastern bistros on Ventura Boulevard.

Some of those who’ve stuck through the bad times of years past on Reseda Boulevard say things are better now. Diane Taylor, Traders’ current owner, gives L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine a large measure of credit for the improvement. “Dennis got ‘em all out of here,” she says, meaning graffiti taggers and petty thugs. What the area really could use now, Taylor and her co-workers say, are some good restaurants that would bring a new clientele to Reseda Boulevard. Yes, even a Starbucks.

Up and down the boulevard, people speak of earthquakes with the buoyant fatalism of a Merle Haggard ballad. Ryan Rushing, 28, works at Cap’n Ed’s, “The Original Psychedelic Smoke Shop,” at 7011 Reseda Blvd. A venerable establishment that dates back to the Summer of Love, Cap’n Ed’s lets customers select from scores of beautifully made glass pipes in groovy colors. “They want to have a nice art piece to smoke in -- their tobacco, of course,” says Rushing, grinning and sipping a Red Bull.

Rushing remembers seeing the boulevard when he moved to L.A. from Kansas shortly after the quake. “It looked like something from ‘Road Warrior’ went through here.” But having grown up around tornadoes in the Midwest, Rushing says he’s not too worried about earthquakes. “If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen,” he says, shrugging. “But I know which way to run, right out that door, ‘cause there’s a lot of fragile stuff in here.”

‘I’m not scared’

Now continue on past Cap’n Ed’s, past Home Plate (Home of the Footlong, “Where 12 Inches Is Just Average”), Rhee Acupuncture, Rydell Oldsmobile and Whisper’z Bar & Grill. Slow down to admire the modern, beautifully landscaped Parc Ridge Apartments complex, where Northridge Meadows once stood.

As you cross over the Ronald Reagan Freeway and head into the foothills, keep your eyes open for a set of bluffs laced with horse trails on either side of the boulevard. Park your car -- you didn’t walk all this way did you? -- and follow the narrow dirt path gouged with horseshoe tracks up the little hill to your left.

Here, near the boulevard’s northern terminus, there is a God’s-eye view of practically the entire Valley. On a clear day you can see the planes taking off from Burbank and the high-rises at Warner Center in Woodland Hills. Through the Cahuenga Pass, the downtown L.A. skyline rises like a massive sundial. Hawks circle overhead. A swimming pool sparkles in the afternoon sun.

You’re surprised that no one has built his or her dream home on the edge of this precarious spot, an eight-bedroom mansion with cathedral ceilings and a Jacuzzi perched defiantly on the upper deck. Instead there’s only a small pile of rotted wood and an old bottle. This is where the city tapers out and nature takes over, where the Great Seismic Goddess comes to collect her debts and will someday return.

Back in the flats, on the boulevard’s 8400 block, Raul Flores doesn’t have much time to worry about earthquakes. As store director of Vallarta Supermarkets, he bustles about aiding customers who hail from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Argentina. “We had chili, we had sauces, water” on the floor. “There was glass, cardboard, you couldn’t walk,” he says, recalling the damage at the store’s prior location, not far from its present one, several times larger than the original.

But he’s not fretting about the next big jolt. “We just had one the other day, about a week ago,” he says. “I’m not scared of ‘em or anything like that.”

Evening approaches. The south end of the boulevard swarms with rush-hour traffic. A woman strolls along walking two small white dogs.

Somehow, a decade has already flown by. We have rebuilt our homes and mourned our dead. We have retrofitted our psyches and weathered other disasters. With difficulty, we have moved on with our lives.

And on the city’s mental Thomas Guide, Reseda Boulevard is now a fixed point. Or as fixed as anything can be until the ground moves again.