San Vicente Mountain/ LA96C

Nature is slowly reclaiming an example of humanity's destructive potential.

The former LA96C Nike Missile site crumbles since its closure several decades ago. Built in the 1950s to defend the aerospace facilities of Los Angeles, it was obsolete by the late 1960s with the rise of ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles).

The environmental movement of the 1970s helped to establish much of the Santa Monica Mountain Range that splits Los Angeles in two (San Fernando Valley to the north, L.A. coastal Basin to the south), as protected open space. As part of this process, the LA96C missile infrastructure was abandoned and eventually turned into a picnic area and observation point with the Cold War features intact as a gritty yet beautiful testament to this aspect of recent history. Ironically, the high-security military nature of the facility protected the surrounding landscape from residential developments that characterize nearby portions of the mountains. Today this area is referred to as "Big Wild" and is home to mountain lions and other non-humans.

From the unpaved portion of Mulholland Drive, a walker can ascend to the site for a 360-degree view of much of the Los Angeles metropolis.

Recently I had fun here, taking in landmarks and watching the sunset.

Two features of the cityscape that I noticed first were lesser known locally-prominent structures of the Valley, and a startlingly good view of the skyscrapers of Downtown Los Angeles (through smog of course).

 Interestingly enough, the Westside of the region (beaches, Beverly Hills, etc) is not very visible and neither is Hollywood. It's a weird alternate perspective of Los Angeles that is simply Downtown and the San Fernando Valley (what I consider a "post-suburb" or postmodern suburb; essentially a place built as a suburb in the 1950s and 1960s but that has taken on more traditionally urban characteristics since the 1980s and 1990s). The far-away glimpses of other places offer only snatches of their full experiences. This includes the vague shapes of cranes at the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach,

the power plant near LAX airport, several high-rises that mark Wilshire Boulevard,

and the curious sight of Century City high-rises looming over hikers in the Big Wild.

For the Valley side, I began to pick out all sorts of details. I started with the East Valley (east of the 405 freeway). There was of course the cluster of high-rises in Sherman Oaks,

the tallest of which, (Valley Executive Tower, 22 floors) was built in 1984. Also in Sherman Oaks was the sight of the Fashion Square mall which is book-ended on the left by the Sunkist Building (a Modernist "crate" from 1971) and on the right by a Modernist 8-storey office building from 1965.

I spied the Art Moderne 1930s Sepulveda Dam which prevents much of LA from flooding during winter storms,

and behind it the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant adjacent to the Japanese Garden.

Valley residents: your dirty toilet water becomes water for Freeway landscaping and golf courses here.

The Valley Government Center (featuring state offices, federal offices, city offices, courthouses, a public library, and police station) was clear to the north of Sherman Oaks, in central Van Nuys. The Art Deco 1930s Valley Municipal Building has been joined over the decades by less intricate buildings.

To the east of this was the clusters of high-rises along Lankershim in North Hollywood including NoHo 14 Tower (tallest residential building in the Valley),

and offices and senior housing at Magnolia,

marking the center of the NoHo Arts District of intimate live theatres, including my favorite: Zombie Joe's Underground Threatre. Beyond North Hollywood, one could see Universal City's high-rises peeking out above hills,

Burbank's Media District (home to Disney, NBC, ABC, Warner Brothers, and other major companies),

and Glendale's late 80s/early 90s high-rises poking up above more hills.

Back in the vicinity of Van Nuys, I watched planes take off and land at the Van Nuys Airport,

(the white line snaking down the mountain is the Los Angeles Aqueduct)
and even some on their descent into Burbank Airport.

Nearby I saw the Budweiser Brewery from 1954 which used to feature a theme park with bird show (many birds escaped and reproduced and this accounts for the sightings of exotic birds around Valley neighborhoods).

Across the freeway from the brewery, is an area I lived in for awhile, North Hills. Formerly known as Sepulveda, the name was changed in the early 1990s because the area had become known as a poverty-stricken area with a drug dealing and gang problem and Sepulveda Boulevard virtually synonymous with prostitution. I once watched from my middle school P.E. yard as cops made a mass arrest at the Pink Cloud Motel. 

Landmarks here are the two sets of multi-story apartment buildings and Vallarta Supermarket (a Latino market chain formed right here in the San Fernando Valley and now found around Southern California).

East of this could be seen the cluster of high rises in Panorama City,

locally well known as a center for Filipino culture and community, as well as Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Thai.  A large medical center, Kaiser Hospital,

marks the eastern edge of Panorama. Further east is one of the sources of energy for Los Angeles, the Sun Valley Power Plant,

a steam/natural gas facility in an industrial corridor. The zoom on my camera did the best it could to show me Pacoima,

with public housing projects, the home of Ritchie Valens, a high-rise that is the tallest in the Northeast Valley, and the rounded red shape of an environmental charter school, symbolizing new opportunities in a historically maligned area.

I then turned my attention to the West Valley.

Prominent was the West Valley Corporate Center,

ten floors of class A office space dating from 1992. A short distance from this is Northridge Mall,

renovated since being destroyed in the 1994 earthquake. Also newly thriving is California State University, Northridge (CSUN).

The school boasts the world-class Valley Performing Arts Center (opened in 2011), the National Center for Deafness, the first Central American Studies department in the US, and the school's library was Starfleet Academy in the 2009 Star Trek movie (I'm a trek fan). 

Clusters of buildings on Reseda Boulevard lead my eyes down to Northridge Medical Center

and further down to central Reseda and the West Valley Government center

which features a regional library branch, police station, and municipal offices, as well as a public park honoring the only LAPD SWAT officer to die while working (killed during a shootout in 2008 in nearby Winnetka).

In the southwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, is the Warner Center. It is a large cluster of offices, townhomes, hotels, and shopping centers built on former agriculture fields in the 1980s.

The tallest of the buildings is 25 floors and dates from 1991.

Working my way back toward my vantage point was a cluster at Tarzana (named for Tarzan-author Edgar Rice Burroughs who lived in the area).

Below me was the Encino Resevoir, part of L.A.'s water supply system (though not fed from Tillman Reclamation Plant).

I turned my attention back to the other side of the hill to see more of Downtown, and the smog over the city became more apparent as the sun set.

The sun setting moved me.

We live on a sphere of life in space, all 7 billion of us. Earth is over 4 billion years old. We reached our current appearances about 200,000 years ago and behavioral modernity about 60,000 years ago. Industrialization is only a few hundred years old. The mountains on display all around me will outlive me by an unfathomable amount of years.

Zooming in on the scale of perspective, I find myself pondering one of my teachers insistence that the term "suburb" is effectively useless. There are just "urban places" (with various densities and building ages and land use patterns) and the "Big Wild". Urban reality in the 21st Century is a palimpsest- "a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain."