"Heather" is a 38-year-old undercover LAPD officer and mother of two whose blond hair helps her catch johns looking for prostitutes on Sepulveda Boulevard. That strip in Van Nuys has been a street-walker zone seemingly forever, despite occasional crackdowns and a city ordinance that allows seizure of the vehicles driven by men who solicit sex. She has worked Hollywood and...

Writing in the New York Times Travel section, author Marc Weingarten (of Studio City) spreads a little love on the new bars and restaurants along the Ventura Boulevard corridor. It's New York so he has to fall back on the Valley girls and pornography canards, but the Valley boosters will be happy. THE San Fernando Valley has always gotten a...

Author Josh Deutchman contributes a piece of short fiction to West magazine in the Los Angeles Times that evokes the freedom to roam of boyhood in the Valley. There's a message in there too about appreciating what you have. Here's a snippet from I Remember Rosemary Fishman: Nineteen eighty-one. If you were an 11-year-old boy, and you lived in the...

Come On, Feel the Nuys is by Daily News copy editor and Van Nuys resident Steve Rosenberg, who also runs 2,000 Days in the Valley. DN columnist Mariel Garza is also posting about the Valley. More at LA Observed....

Countless family restaurants that opened in the postwar rush to suburbia have vanished. See the Gone But Not Forgotten page for evidence of that. But Casa Vega, at Ventura and Fulton in Sherman Oaks, seems as popular and as hip now as when Marlon Brando and Cary Grant were regulars. It's certainly harder to get in. Brent Hopkins in the...

Author and investigative journalist Greg Palast credits his experiences in Sun Valley for developing his critical take on President Bush, the Iraq War and other issues, according to a guest column by freelancer Ed Rampell in the Daily News. His embittered memories of growing up Valley during the McCarthy and Vietnam eras are anything but "American Graffiti"-like reveries. "For me,...

Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, was a son of the San Fernando Valley. So too is Gregory Orfalea, the author of this year's The Arab Americans: A History, described as "a landmark in the multicultural history of America." Orfalea is a professor of creative writing at Pitzer College and...

Wild (or at least feral) rabbits that chew up backyard lawns and gardens are riling up folks in Tarzana and Woodland Hills. Daily News garden columnist Joshua Siskin ran some letters Saturday from homeowners who consider the intruders to be pests. "No amount of Liquid Fence (a deer and rabbit repellent), hot pepper spray or even our 100-pound German shepherd...

Author and television writer Lee Goldberg describes the wealthy community in the southwest Valley [uh, not the northwest Lee] on his blog in the course of applauding the city's recent ban on most public smoking. I live in the small, Southern California town of Calabasas, on the northwestern edge of the San Fernando Valley. There are a dozen gated McMansion...

The Daily News checks in on the small groves of out-of-place coast redwood trees found at Canoga Park High School and on Cedros Avenue in Van Nuys. Over the years, some of the trees between Burbank [Blvd.] and Oxnard [St.] have been chopped down. Some have grown unevenly for lack of water. And roots from the trees have cost neighbors...

The blogger at Travels West lists his ten favorites: 10. Ventura BLVD (most of it, at least) 9. Better customer service, compared to almost any other business south of the Hollywood Hills or the Santa Monicas 8. Valleyites are shameless flirts who flirt with you and not your money 7. Hole-in the wall hobby shops 6. More relaxed pace --...

The Glendale cemetery known for its statuary and art reproductions opened in 1906. It inspired biting commentary from Evelyn Waugh in The Loved Ones and spawned a chain of six other Forest Lawn memorial parks. Figures from Valley history who are buried there include Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Walt Disney, William Mulholland, W.C. Fields, Spencer Tracy, Don Drysdale,...

The blogger (Travels West) known only as M2 appreciates the historical context of his new digs in Studio City. After looking at a lot of typically ugly L.A. dumps, I found the ideal place quite by chance. It's in Studio City, my favorite 'hood in the Valley. On the corner of Vineland and Fruitland (don't start!), the building was built...

Mark Vallen is interviewed by Adrienne Crew at LAist: When I was about six years old, my parents moved to the San Fernando Valley, a place I’ve called home ever since. While I’ve taken up residence in various parts of the city, I’ve always returned to the Valley. Currently I live in the so-called "No Ho Arts District," a borough...

The question of whether The Valley Observed is needed was tossed around last week on some Los Angeles blogs. The topic sparked passion you wouldn't see if the question were "should there be a Silver Lake blog?" or a website devoted to downtown. LAist, where the subject came up, got more comments than usually weigh in on any topic there....

About the pungent aroma that surrounds the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Van Nuys, Ian R. Beste thinks it is not hops but comes from another ingredient in the process of cooking up Budweiser for the masses. He emails: I take my car to be serviced at the Saturn dealership on Roscoe that is part of the Galpin Auto Empire so I...

Not to pick on Van Nuys, but a new blog called Los Angeles City Nerd says the community has a distinctive smell—well two, actually. What Van Nuys smells like is, well, hops. Anheuser-Busch Brewery on Roscoe gives a strong aroma that is the most distinctive in the region. (Did you also know that the largest buyer of water from the...

Over at 2,000 Days in the Valley. Also in the blogs: In the Oaks points to online short films about Sherman Oaks and North Hollywood. On the Valley Flickr group, a shot from behind at the original Bob's Big Boy Burbank/Toluca Lake: More photos by the same photographer here....

Movie makers have used the Valley as scenery since before D.W. Griffith filmed Birth of a Nation beside the Los Angeles River where Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills is now. (Sadly, there was a time when his Klan riders would have fit right in with adjacent Burbank.) Add a couple more movies to the list. The 40 Year Old Virgin set...

Minnesota poet Randy Stern named his first published collection The Boy from Reseda, after his hometown. He plans to visit in April for the first time in ten years and blogs about his plans (other than seeing family and friends): As a regular patron of public transportation, now 31 years after my first ride on the RTD’s Victory Boulevard bus,...

In The Closers, the new mystery by Michael Connelly to be published in May 2005, fictional cop Harry Bosch returns to the LAPD and chases bad guys all over the Valley. The book begins with the murder of a high school girl on Oat Mountain, in the Devonshire police division known to Bosch as Club Dev because there is so...

Another movie set in the Valley opened the Los Angeles Film Festival for 2005. Down in the Valley stars Edward Norton as a delusional man who believes he is an Old West cowboy adrift in today's suburbs. There are apparently many Valley locales featured. It was written and directed by native David Jacobson, who says in the production notes that...

Burbankia is a site run by high school pals Wes Clark and Mike McDaniel. It covers much of the lore of Burbank, with some cool photos. They also point to a page on the Los Angeles River Railroads site in which Bruce Petty recounts his childhood in Burbank. The postcard above appears there....

I found this perspective view of the San Fernando Valley, created by overlaying elevation data from satellite images on a photograph taken aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2000, kind of intriguing. The view is from the southwest. Click ast_goruntu/astronom/EARTH/PIA02780.HTM" target="pics">here to open the full size image in a new window—but be warned, it's a big file and will...

The singer from New York who lives in Encino talks about her favorite Valley weekends in the L.A. Times Calendar section, available online only to subscribers: I remember when I first moved out to the Valley, there was a stigma against anyone who would even deign to live here. But I think it's a terrific place to live in. Tarzana,...

Erik Himmselsbach writes the Valley Boy column for the weekly CityBeat and ValleyBeat papers. His latest laments plans to tear down a complex of buildings on Radford Avenue near the CBS studio in Studio City that has been a home to writers and producers since Republic Pictures owned the lot. John Wayne kept offices there, and John Herzfeld wrote Two...

From my email, it seems that many people who visit America's Suburb.com grew up in the Valley but live elsewhere now. In a lot of cases, they haven't been back to the Valley for a long time. So for them, here's a website that presents a photographic tour of Van Nuys Boulevard from Chandler up to Nordhoff. I don't know...

On the hit Fox TV show "The O.C.", a running story line has the young, attractive and mostly spoiled Orange County kids watching a soap opera called "The Valley." The joke is that the characters and plot lines in "The O.C." are just like those "The Valley." (In an episode of the latter, a character complains, "I just don't feel...

This is the place to find recent noteworthy comments that describe some aspect of the Valley or its zeitgeist. High value is placed on cultural insight and literary merit. For a longer treatment of the sweep of literature and films on or about the Valley, visit the Valley Lit page. A note about links to other websites, especially media sites:...