is it just me….or is that really hideous?

Hideous… yet so NoHo.

NOHO,get a life losers. Why not try STUPIDSIGNINTHEVALLEYTRYINGTOSOUNDLIKENYHO?

Really, really ugly.

Astoundingly ugly.

“NoHo” illuminated at night, letting all those who pass through the gateway that if they’re looking for prostitutes, make a u-turn and head back over the hill.

That is astoundingly, yet characteristically, revoltingly tacky. But everything about NoHo is that way.

A friend to me as we drove thru a NoHo intersection & observed the “paint spatters” used to “decorate” the crosswalks: “That’s so you know that North Hollywood is ARTY.” I am so sick of them calling it an “arts” district. There is no place more artless.

it’ll look great when it’s covered in bird shit.

where on the noho website was the rendering found though? i’m having trouble finding it on their site.

yArD SALE!!!!

I like noho and im excited we will get an ugly light up sign.

i wonder how long before a pair of shoes hangs from it or its tagged C14

I look forward to it!

where on the noho website was the rendering found though?

Here it is. It’s a smaller rendering, which may or may not be a bad thing: CRA/LA

aye aye, back in the day when I lived down there, “Noho” is what happened after LAPD Vice did a raid on the various corners along Lankershim. Nice change for the better in recent years, but that sign…”A” for creativity but after that I’m not certain what to give it for the execution.

Lucinda…it is artier than it was 10 years ago, not much but better.

Does this mean the city is a hooker free zone?

Y’know, I think NoHo really is at a tipping point, on the verge of turning into one of the biggest “New Urbanism” success stories in LA (assuming that New Urbanism actually, y’know, succeeds), and seldom deserves the sort of “Ewwww! Thuh Valllllleeeee!” posturing it often gets from hipper-than-thou blog commenters.

But, jeez, that thing is hideous.

North Hollywood is not ok. Not in an artsy, bohemian kind of a way.

I refuse to be duped by signs, “theatre” districts (which is simply where failed actors over 30 have one, one person show after another hoping to get an agent to book them into a movie, it’s pathetic,) the North Hollywood Redline stop, condo developments, or fake “soft” lofts.

I don’t care. I dont’ care how many art galleries they put up there, I’m never ever going to think that place is kind of ok.

North Hollywod is still the 818 and it will never be ok, never, not in my world.

It will never be cool like Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Downtown, or Santa Monica. Yeah maybe they are hipster havens, but so what, what is so wrong with hipsters? The alternative can be way worse.

Why doesn’t North Hollywood just accept and embrace it’s fate as surburbia.

SGV has. It’s a nice place. It’s nothing wrong with surburbia, except when you pretend as if you’re not.

I wish people would stop calling North Hollywood Noho, its a million, trillion miles away from Soho, it’s not even a close 100th place.

Browne

PS I’m sorry for the NoHo people I have offended I just got back from the most awesome Happy Hour in the world at Vinoteca in Los Feliz.

If you’re not 12 and you want a great adult happy hour Vinoteca is a great place to drink too much at for a little bitty price.

I’m an avid reader of Metroblogging LA, and I’m continually appalled at the downright mean spirited comments directed at my home in the Valley by residents of the “real” Los Angeles. Yes, North Hollywood has it’s issues, but there are a lot of great things about the area, too. And for what it’s worth, why wouldn’t you call 22 live theaters within a two-mile radius an Arts District? I’m not a fan of the design for the gateway, and I’ll criticize that right along with you, but lay off the neighborhood as a whole – lest someone throw stones at your glass houses.

I agree with Eric. I would also like to add some things North Hollywood (NoHo) residents don’t have to worry about – Parking permits, limited parking, hiking areas that aren’t overrun by “hipsters” or “actors/actress wannabees.” I grew up in Hollywood in the 80s and early 90s. I definitely would not want to live on that side of the hill nowadays, I like the Valley. Much like Bay Area residents put LA down, seems elists from the Westside, Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park areas put down the Valley. I love my suburban, kitschy, schizophrenic city.

Eric and Roberta, 20 theaters don’t make an arts district, it makes for a theater district. There are some great things going on in that little section of Lankershim which is nice to see considering what it looked like when I lived at Chandler/Corteen a few blocks away.

A lot of things have happened there and other areas in the city where we see decay fester.

First is the absentee landlords didn’t give a shit how things look as long as tenants paid the rent.

Second is those living there don’t give a shit what it looks like as it slides downhill. Get to far off Lankershim and its a decaying mess.

No one spoke up and did anything to remove the gangs. They came, grew and festered. I am in the area often and am pretty amazed how Lankershim has been transformed but a block or two away the decay continues. Why….back to the absentee landlords again.

The biggest problem is that LA City Hall for years has allowed the nicer neighborhoods seperate and segregate themselves from their original namesakes. West Hills, Valley Village, Valley Glen to start the ball rolling got a name change and more money devoted to keep them nicer. In the end we end up with pockets that are allowed to decay, sit ignored while others flourish. LA continually has taken the cheap way out for years, but new signs for a coupla hundred buck naming a “new neighborhood” and allowing what is left to fester and decline. Not pretty and we all deserve better than that.

One of the things that makes the Hollywood sign (kinda like the google logo) so iconic is its simplicity.

I have to admit though, it does look like it belongs in the valley.

One of the things that makes the Hollywood sign (kinda like the google logo) so iconic is its simplicity.

I have to admit though, it does look like it belongs in the valley.

Seems kind of reminiscent of the proposed “Steel Cloud.”:
http://odlandscape.blogspot.com/2006/12/las-steel-cloud-1988.html

Frazgo, believe me I would rather that money for the sign be spent on graffiti removal or such endeavours. I have over the past year continually called the police or the city for things such as my neighbors yelling at 3am, or leaving bulk trash for weeks. We’ve even gone as far as trashing the neighbors x-mas tree which sat out there for 2 weeks, since they were too dumb to realize they could put it in the green bin. Their landlord, whom I saw during the remodeling of the home about a year ago, was surly and unfriendly, so I do agree there are a lot of landlords that let the house go to decay – whether it is physical or by allowing people who are inconsiderate to move in.

To be honest while I do like living in the Valley the one thing I miss about my old neighborhood in Hollywood was the close knit community (but this was circa the 80s/90s), my dad was one of the people who started with the neighborhood watch in Hollywood, to help drive out the drug dealers. Everything that has happened in Hollywood over the last couple years with the new businesses and gentrification were things they were talking about in the 80s and 90s.

That is the City for you, it takes years of planning to get anything done. That is why a lot of the time we have to do it ourselves because the city takes so long to do many things. I swear it took like a year to get a tree on the sidewalk to get cut down then to get the sidewalk removed and replaced.

North Hollywod is still the 818 and it will never be ok, never, not in my world.

You have no idea how relieved we are to hear that. :-)

Seriously, though: for better or worse (Your Mileage May Vary), the absence of people who think that nothing in “the 818″ will ever be okay, can’t ever possibly be cool, who wouldn’t want to be caught dead in “The Valley”, is one of the things that really does make the SFV a “different LA”.

I have a friend who’s a much-in-demand set designer. He lives with his partner near the Noho Red Line stop, in one of those new “soft lofts”. Gives him plenty of space for his drafting tables and models and occasional set pieces.

He works for different studios all the time. He’s a 4-minute subway ride from Universal, about 8-18 minutes from Warner Brothers, NBC, and Disney on the cushy LADOT Commuter Express “Studio Circulator”, and CBS Radford is a 4-minute subway ride, then two stops on a Rapid. All of that in the Valley.

Paramount, the last major studio still in Hollywood, is a bit more of a hurdle: it’s a 10-minute subway ride, then a 10-minute DASH bus.

He loves his walkable neighborhood, with its cafes and coffee houses and boutiques. It’s got a really nice new HOWS market.

And since he’s a set designer, he loves going to the theater all the time, even if some of the performers happen to be aging TV stars.

Soon, there’ll be a Laemmele indie-film multiplex across the street from his place.

And, having lived on the westside, he’s fond of the Valley, he says, because he’s “not constantly trapped in creeping 2 mph traffic filled with Beemer-Lexis-Bentley ego cases shouting into their cell phones.”

Because those people wouldn’t be caught dead in the Valley. :-)

I hope the people making negative comments are from LA. If you did not grow up (born) here, shut the fuck up and leave!

I grew up in Beverly Glen/Mulholland, so I love both sides of town. I spent a huge portion of my life on Lankershim Blvd. with my parents, It has improved quite a bit. I used to take TKD lessons at that Jun Chong TKD at 5223 Lankershim Blvd. when I was a little kid. After class I had to ride the bus to meet my mom, there were some rough people hanging out at the bus stops in those days! Now the place is Body Theory Gym, run by I believe relatives of Billy Blanks.

If you had grown up in one of the canyons you would like both sides of town. I lived in Beverly Hills for many years, on Wilshire for a while, but my favorite place is Studio City.

I forgot to add that I also think the sign is ugly.