Valley Talk

Discovering Culture While many people see the San Fernando Valley as one giant strip mall, there are others who perceive culture and history in that suburban landscape. In fact, the Los Angeles Conservancy has organized a tour of the “Postwar San Fernando Valley” for later this year to celebrate the area’s architecture from the 1940s to 1970s. Participants will see such highlights as the neon circus clown sign that has marked Circus Liquor in North Hollywood for the past half-century. The Woodland Hills Trailer Park and Bob’s Big Boy also will be spotlighted. “People assume the Valley is a cultural void,” said tour coordinator Mary-Margaret Stratton, a lifelong Valley resident. “It’s my personal intent to rectify that view and show that there are also unique and special buildings. It’s not all cookie-cutter, there is some style.” Asked just what Valley style is, Stratton said, “very eclectic.” Also on the tour will be the Owens River Aqueduct, familiar to fans of the film “Chinatown,” and the First Lutheran Church of Northridge, nicknamed the “Elroy Jetson church” after the TV character for its space-age feel. Hello to Hollywood A group of Hollywood residents recently kicked off their bid to have that area secede from the city of Los Angeles with all the show-business pizzazz you’d expect complete with sci-fi film queen Elvira in attendance. “It was very, very Hollywood. You could see it was a photo op,” said Richard Close, chairman of Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, which is pushing San Fernando Valley secession. The Feb. 16 coming-out featured honorary mayor Johnny Grant affixing his name to the first petition that organizers will circulate to force a study of secession. Close said that neither the Valley nor the San Pedro/Wilmington areas have attracted as much attention in their breakaway efforts, but he’s far from jealous. “It’s good. It attracts public attention,” Close said. “It’s the same message. It’s just another messenger.” Valley of the What? There was one tidbit from the Summit 2000 conference that organizers with the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley weren’t exactly trumpeting. It seems a survey of 656 businesses found that only 9 percent of the respondents had ever heard of the alliance’s “Valley of the Stars” marketing campaign, which is designed to increase awareness of the Valley. The campaign includes banners on light posts around the Valley. Meanwhile, only 19.4 percent of the respondents had ever heard of the alliance itself. Douglas Svensson, a planner with Applied Development Economics, which conducted the survey, suggested at the summit that alliance members might want to work toward increasing awareness of the group. But Bruce Ackerman, president and chief executive of the alliance, doesn’t see the numbers as low. “Frankly I was pretty tickled to see this many people knew about the alliance,” he said. He believes more business owners would have recognized the “Valley of the Stars” campaign if the pollsters had mentioned the street banners. Protecting Porn Acting as a sort of one-man ACLU for the adult entertainment industry is all in a day’s work for William R. Lyon. As the new leader of the deceptively named Free Speech Coalition in Chatsworth, which works exclusively on behalf of X-rated entertainment companies like Vivid Video and Hustler, Lyon has just mapped out the organization’s agenda for the coming year. Priorities include protecting freedom of expression on the Internet, fighting restrictive zoning laws for adult video stores and strip clubs, and increasing membership among owners of those clubs. Is protecting the interests of the X-rated community a tough assignment for the man who once worked for a nonprofit foundation for developmentally disabled children? “The organization is not involved in (producing) adult entertainment, it’s just funded by it,” Lyon said. “I’m a staunch defender of the First Amendment. Bait and Switch The wait is over if you’ve been wondering what state Sen. Pete Knight, R-Palmdale, has been up to since sponsoring controversial state Proposition 22, which would outlaw gay marriages if approved by voters in the March 7 election. Last week, Knight introduced a bill to repeal a 43-year-old state law requiring sport fishermen to officially certify their trout catch with a notary public. The law was passed in 1957 to help enforce trout season. Apparently, it’s little known and never enforced. Calling the statute “a stinky fish law,” Knight says the bill is part of his larger goal to eliminate overreaching laws.