The U.S. post office at 7320 Reseda Boulevard is being named the Coach John Wooden Post Office, under a bill sponsored by Rep. Brad Sherman and signed today by President Bush. Wooden, the former UCLA basketball coach, lives in Encino but that post office was already named for the late Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn. Wooden's daughter, Nancy Muehlhausen, lives in...

I enjoyed Saturday's cloudy skies and twenty-plus degree dip on the thermometer sitting in the backyard of the Northridge home where I grew up. Conversation was difficult, though, due to the continual roar of war planes overhead. These weren't the screaming after-burners that scratch your ear drums near a military flight line. These were the groaning radial engines and props...

Red-light cameras will be installed at a dozen intersections along the Orange Line. Since the Valley Busway debuted last October, most of the sixteen crashes involving Orange Line buses have been due to inattentive drivers running red lights, the MTA says. The latest collision, on June 5, occurred when a driver ran the light at DeSoto Avenue and hit a...

Cupid's, the unofficial hot dog of The Valley Observed, is celebrating sixty years in the San Fernando Valley on Saturday, June 17. All hot dogs will cost sixty cents, instead of the still-reasonable two bucks, at the last remaining original Cupid's stands in Canoga Park (opened 1962) and Northridge (1965.) The company now has a website up with the official...

The weekly Encino Sun debuts June 24. It's the latest from the publishers of the Studio City Sun (which began in 2002) and the Sherman Oaks Sun (2004). In Encino, says the press release, they plan to distribute 18,000 copies a week free to homes, plus more at the library, in markets and other spots. Publisher James Kaplan and Executive...

Today's Los Angeles Times notes the passing of Linda Menary, who ran the ramshackle barnyard petting zoo and pony ride called The Farm that has been at Tampa Avenue and Lanark Street in Reseda for about four decades. She died May 1 of a heart attack suffered while driving to Bakersfield for a horse auction. Her animals at the Farm...

From the Sunday papers: ♦ In a Daily News feature piece on how being a lowrider saved Abel Perez's life, some memories of Cruise Night: On Wednesday nights, they'd cruise Van Nuys Boulevard, mingling with the hot-rod guys, the surfers and their friends with the metal-flake rides with the little whitewall tires. The girls were nice, the coup de grace,...

When the porn company began to shoot on Hayvenhurst Avenue on Easter Sunday, there wasn't much the Encino neighbors could do but complain. The crew had the proper filming permits, and the city doesn't get any say on the content of productions. Still, as the Times reports in a front-page story, "Sure, the neighbors concede, they didn't actually see any...

Half of the homes sold in the San Fernando Valley in March fetched more than the median, and half sold for less. It's the highest median for the Valley on record, a 17% increase over last March. Yet, as the Daily News points out, it comes as homes are taking longer to sell so it appears that the rise in...

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and developer J.H. Snyder won't discuss details yet, but they are talking up plans to reinvent and expand the Valley Plaza shooping center around Victory and Laurel Canyon in North Hollywood. A new Macy's department store would apparently be part of the project. "That will be the biggest investment in retail in the Valley ever...

Can't believe I mentioned this at LA Observed a while back, but neglected to link it here. "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central devoted a segment to informing viewers about the San Fernando Valley, and especially its 27th congressional district. Congressman Brad Sherman played along, answering Colbert's questions with a straight face and mock-angrily objecting whenever the host brought up...

Los Angeles' redevelopment authority plans to reinvent the 1959 Canoga Park branch library at 7260 Owensmouth Avenue—a city historic-cultural landmark—as an upscale restaurant. The agency paid $1.1 million for the property last year, hoping that a restraurant near the restored Madrid Theater on Sherman Way would help enliven the old downtown area of Canoga Park. Canoga Park Improvement Association...

Valley boosters are hoping to stage a half-marathon along the Orange Line route to mark the anniversary of the busway between North Hollywood and Woodland Hills. Today's Daily News says it would be held October 29, supported by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine and the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley. First the MTA has to agree to stop the buses...

The MTA now says it will spend $3.6 million to renovate the old Lankershim train depot in North Hollywood, possibly as a customer service center. But the agency won't say where the depot at Chandler and Lankershim boulevards will end up being located, and that upsets some people who want the landmark preserved where it has stood since the 1890s....

The blog Here in Van Nuys turns its gaze east to North Hollywood to point out the creeping destruction of a neighborhood of older, Spanish-style homes where actresses Carol Burnett and Agnes Moorhead once lived. The photo stream at Flickr focuses on Huston and LaMaida streets....

The cover of the Studio City Sun features the impending closure of longtime bookstore Dutton's. Davis Dutton, whose parents opened on Laurel Canyon Boulevard in 1960, met his wife Judy in the library at North Hollywood High. Once the final sale concludes they will relocate to the San Juan Islands in Washington state....

Novelist and author Luis J. Rodriguez has a blog and posts this week about the fourth anniversary celebration at his Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural in Sylmar. He started the cafe with his wife, Trini, and brother-in-law Enrique Sanchez. I want to express my most heartfelt thanks to the community, the incredibly creative community in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, but...

The Craigslist posting says that everything must go "including shelves, racks, display cases, counters. We're trying to make some money so please feel free to come in and make offers." The cover of the Studio City Sun says the store was around 62 years. Last day will be Feb. 28....

Mayor Villaraigosa, City Council member Wendy Greuel and a bevy of media traipsed out to Reseda and Rinaldi this afternoon for the unveiling of a high-tech traffic control system on major streets along the 118 or Ronald Reagan Freeway. Lights at all the big intersections on Devonshire and Rinaldi streets, from Balboa west to Topanga Canyon Boulevard, are now synchronized...

C. Frederick Wehba II, vice-chairman of the Bentley-Forbes real estate investment firm, blogs that the San Fernando Valley is nearing capacity. He basically agrees with a story in the Daily News (no longer online) that says the office and industrial markets are maxed out. If you think the Valley is too full, you might cringe at these long-ago quotes that...

Clocks at Olive View hospital in Sylmar stopped at 6:01 am on Feb. 9, 1971. That's when the Valley was shaken awake by a 6.6-magnitude earthquake that began under the mountains behind Sylmar. When the shaking stopped sixty seconds later, parts of that hospital and the San Fernando Valley Veterans Hospital (also in Sylmar) had fallen, the lower dam at...

America's Suburb.com is now known as The Valley Observed. It's now a blog too, and that makes it a cousin of the other website about Los Angeles that I publish, LA Observed. The two blogs are similar and yet distinct, like the Valley and the city themselves. Everything about Valley history and lore that used to be here is still...

The friendly landmark on Laurel Canyon is shutting down. I posted this at LA Observed: The Dutton's in North Hollywood is in the midst of a clearance sale and will be gone by mid-March, Davis Dutton tells Daily News columnist Dennis McCarthy. Davis and his wife Judy are moving to Washington state, where they will continue trading in rare books...

In the 1980 film Foxes, Cherie Currie made her movie debut opposite Jodie Foster as a tough Valley teenager with a soft side who gets in trouble with drugs over the hill in the Hollywood club scene. In real life then, Currie was a punk rocker with The Runaways. Today, she uses a chainsaw and a blowtorch to shape logs...

Efforts to preserve the old Lankershim rail depot (commented on a few entries below) were the subject of a story in the Feb. 17 L.A. Times. The station used by Southern Pacific trains and Pacific Electric "Red Cars" is called a crucial spot in Valley history by Guy Weddington McCreary, whose family helped settle the town that became North Hollywood,...

The Valley's last beloved Chris' & Pitt's barbecue closed in 2003. The old place at 13237 Victory Boulevard near Fulton in Van Nuys was torn down for a new Walgreens drug store. The demolition brought howls of protest from BBQ lovers and an anguished column in the ValleyBeat newspaper by columnist Erik Himmelsbach. But a piece of good news....

It was fitting when Boeing bought Rocketdyne in 1996. Both company names had been part of the Valley's history. A Boeing plant had been located at the original Burbank Airport, called United Airport in 1930. Rocketdyne has been in the Valley in some form since the late 1940s, when the Santa Susana Field Laboratory opened to begin test-firing rocket engines....

It will cost $2 million to save and restore the old Lankershim train depot, the MTA in Los Angeles says. Built in 1895, the wooden structure at Chandler and Lankershim boulevards served the Southern Pacific railroad and the old Pacific Electric Red Cars that rattled through the town before it joined L.A. and became North Hollywood. Efforts to save the...

I don't know how it happened, but we're all happy about it anyway: America's Suburb.com was selected as the Good Housekeeping site of the day for Aug. 22, 2005. The magazine's nod came with a nice little bump in visitor traffic. The same day, America's Suburb also was called out on a website called Blogging about incredible blogs. Welcome to...

One Six Right, the documentary about Van Nuys Airport that was mentioned here before, is getting a week-long theatrical release in Los Angeles August 12-18, 2005. It will screen at 2 p.m. each day at the Laemmle Grande 4-Plex on Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles. Here's the film's website, which has many historical photos of the airfield....

Turns out that comedian Bob Hope was not buried in the main cemetery out back of Mission San Fernando Rey. Instead of sharing the same grounds as Ritchie Valens, William Frawley and Chuck Connors, the longtime Valley resident has been interred in a new garden designed by his wife, Dolores. It's within the mission walls and has space for Mrs....

Early accounts of life in the Valley reported that both grizzlies and black bears were commonly spotted lurking in the grass on the plain. It's not surprising. Runs of steelhead swam up the Los Angeles River then, and wild berries grew in the canyons. In fact, records show that in 1873 a 2,350-pound grizzly bear was shot and killed just...

The May 15, 2005 edition of the New York Times Magazine took a detailed look at the Granada Hills neighborhood developed by Joseph Eichler in the 1960s. The tract west of Balboa Boulevard is being considered for protection under the Los Angeles historic preservation overlay zone ordinance. "We clocked over 500 people coming through our neighborhood," Adriene Biondo said recently....

In 1964 the theater-in-the-round debuted on Ventura Voulevard with high hopes for elevating the culture of the Valley. A staging of The Sound of Music opened the doors, but before the decade was out, rock shows and boxing matches were tried to bring in crowds. Nothing worked, and in 1980 the theater on Chalk Hill began new life as a...

Efforts to give official historic status to the original residential blocks of Van Nuys are the subject of a feature story by Dana Bartholomew in The Daily News. Some homeowners are asking City Hall to create the Valley's first Historic Preservation Overlay Zone. It would give residents some control over renovations and demolition of the bungalows built soon after Van...

The circa-1932 miniature of the downtown Los Angeles City Hall is undergoing repairs and restoration. A Daily News feature on the project says the building should reopen in the spring of 2005. The photo ran with the story....

The former Southern Pacific Railroad station at Chandler and Lankershim boulevards is one of the last true relics of the 19th century San Fernando Valley. Built in 1895, it is reputed to be the oldest structure in North Hollywood. In 1911 it became the Lankershim stop on the Pacific Electric streetcar line across the Valley. It is eligible for...

Nice mention of America's Suburb.com and the ValleyBlog in the April 11-24 (2005) issue of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. Reporter Jeff Weiss writes, "When it was reported that there were bloggers in Baghdad, you knew it was only a matter of time before they came to the Valley." The SFVBJ site requires registration for some stories and subscription...