Paradise Now

Easily the most popular destination in the Valley and one of the most popular in all of L.A. is Universal City. From my first trip to California in '76 I still remember the mechanical shark attacking our tram and thinking, even as an eleven-year-old, how fake Jaws looked up close. More frightening was the hyper-real avalanche of five foot high stones that "accidentally" fell when an earthquake struck--the hills really shook!--until they bounced silently on the road and I realized they were foam.

That night I'm not sure where Dad parked the '67 Winnebago trailer and golden brown Dodge Van we packed with ten kids, but a five mile venture to the northeast on the Hollywood freeway would have encountered what made the Valley a Shangri La for the workaday Joe not part of the entertainment world.

In the 1970s Panorama City was still the booming Levittown of the West, with the San Gabriel Mountains as majestic backdrop, set on curving streets, glorious 3 bedroom tract homes, astro turf perfect front lawns, and American built cars in every driveway--perhaps even my Presbyterian Minister Grandfather's standard: the Impala, built just down the street at the GM plant adjacent the Southern Pacific tracks that border Van Nuys to the south.The plant closed in 1992 and six years later a shopping mall emerged on its site calling itself "The Plant". One supposes the name is meant to evoke images of old time industry much like Cannery Row in Monterey or Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco remade former warehouses and factories into popular tourist shopping districts. But whereas one could call these places classic simulations-- reconstructing the past minus its drudgery, pain and class conflict--"The Plant" reconstructs nothing but another hideous big-box mall.Based on appearance, "The Plant" might refer to the Palm Tree that sprouts up randomly amid a sea of parking spaces. Yet across the street is the anti-simulation: an abandoned ten acre facility reminds visitors of the 5000 lost jobs and the general deindustrialization that cracked and crumbled the backyard pooled paradise no less than the Northridge quake of 1994.On the always overcrowded 233, passage underneath the tracks marks ones arrival into this old "New City", and on arrival back to grade level, above a row of bulldozers, opposite "the Plant", a billboard proclaims "hundreds of great places to hang out in L.A.", as if asking "so what the hell are you doing here?"