Geography of My Childhood
This is where I grew up in Panorama City, CA. My neighborhood was bordered by Osborne St. on the north, Woodman Ave. on the east, Chase St. on the south, and Van Nuys Blvd. on the west.
The houses were built by Kaiser Steel shortly after WWII. The company also built a hospital, where I was born, just out of the lower-right corner of the picture. It was a working class neighborhood, with many families working either for the GM plant down Van Nuys or the Anheiser Busch brewery out on Roscoe Blvd.
It was a good place to grow up. It was safe, aside from the Night Stalker summer, where everyone felt they had to sleep with their windows closed for fear of being raped, robbed, and stabbed by a crazy satanist.
One Saturday night when I was 10-years-old, I was listening to KIQQ-FM. The DJ dedicated the song "Funky Town" to Panorama City, he said, "Los Angeles' funky town." For some reason, this elated me. I thought we would all wake up famous the next morning.
The houses were built by Kaiser Steel shortly after WWII. The company also built a hospital, where I was born, just out of the lower-right corner of the picture. It was a working class neighborhood, with many families working either for the GM plant down Van Nuys or the Anheiser Busch brewery out on Roscoe Blvd.
It was a good place to grow up. It was safe, aside from the Night Stalker summer, where everyone felt they had to sleep with their windows closed for fear of being raped, robbed, and stabbed by a crazy satanist.
One Saturday night when I was 10-years-old, I was listening to KIQQ-FM. The DJ dedicated the song "Funky Town" to Panorama City, he said, "Los Angeles' funky town." For some reason, this elated me. I thought we would all wake up famous the next morning.
Labels: San Fernando Valley
9 Comments:
When I was in first grade, I stayed for a while in Kaiser Hospital (probably the same one) because I had a kidney infection. I remember it was close to a VONS grocery store and it seems like I could see that store if I looked down from the window. At that time my Mother and I lived in Van Nuys. I wish I could remember the name of the elementary school that I attended. I remember the house really well. It was a dark olive green rambler and it had tangerine trees in the back yard. It had a stone floor in the "family room" and I used to go home and stay by myself, and I would dance on the sofa to the Mickey Mouse Club and I remember falling onto one of those stones and hurting my knee. I remember having pretend garage sales and writing on the garage door with chalk, but I don't remember what I wrote. I remember rolly-polly bugs in the yard. They lived under rocks and you could curl them up and turn them into tiny marbles.
Well... thanks for the memories...
It was Hazeltine Street Elementary School, I'm almost certain.
Avenue, I mean
I love this post, this picture, and the memory of "Funky Town." I want to craft a geography of my childhood now.
Also: http://www.davidmaisel.com/default.asp
I am inspired by this artist, who I just learned about tonight. I think you'll like him, too. Especially Black Maps.
OK...I now have this flashback running through my head and it also has Barbra Streisand's voice crooning..."memories, like the corners of my mind" accompanying it.
Do you remember how Mom and Dad wouldn't let us cut through the park on the way to Chase St during the Hillside Strangler or Nightstalker cases?
Do you remember how we used to run past Tommy and Billy Sweet's house on the way to school hoping they wouldn't come out and taunt us the whole way to school.
Wow, you sure opened up a Pandora's box of memories with this post!
Part of my childhood was spent living in a little mining village called Gilman atop the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. I could look out my bedroom window and see herds of elk grazing in the lower mountain pastures below. It was absolutely panoramic.
Little could I have imagined then that 35 years later I would be pushing a shopping cart up and down Roscoe Boulevard, looking for a food bank.
A little strange that the first time I check out your blog, there is a picture of my old neighborhood. If you look closely, you can see me crashing my BMX bike.
What I remember most is riding around, having total freedom at the age of 8 or 9. All that mattered was that I got home when the street lights came on. Some summer days, I would leave at 8am and wouldn't return until 8pm. Those were the days.
I didn't even realize when I posted my first comment, that you had comments on the actual picture itself. Was I one of those bullies at the park?
There definitely were drugs used there. The wierd thing is that those guys were oddly protective of us younger kids who hung out there with them. They had thier side of the park and we had ours. If any outsiders tried to mess with us, they handled it.
By the way, where did you find that picture?
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