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.

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. :-)

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.

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

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

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.