What people in California mean when they say the valley


California has a lot of valleys. But only the the valley. The San Fernando Valley.

And yes, I know how big California is, and how many mountains it has, and how many valleys. But if you mention the valley, you are talking about the San Fernando Valley.

The San Fernando Valley is, technically speaking, part of Los Angeles. Places like Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, and Canoga Park are actually just part of the city of Los Angeles. That is, they are city of LA water, city of LA police, that sort of stuff. To make it even more confusing, there's Burbank, which is in the valley, but they actually are their own city, with their own mayor, police force, etc.

I lived in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s, and since I'm a bit of a map geek, I started being very specific about where I lived. That's because there's the Conejo Valley (where Thousand Oaks is), the San Gabriel Valley (where Pasadena is), and LOTS of other valleys. But when someone at a party in Santa Barbara asked me where I lived, and I said "the valley", and I was asked "which one?" - my host jumped into the conversation to clarify that there was only one "the valley".

The valley of the 1980s was the time of "valley girls", which became recognizable in popular culture by saying things like "gag me with a spoon!" (I still have no idea what that's supposed to mean). Valley girls shopped at the Sherman Oaks galleria.

If you're interested in making the San Fernando Valley your home, and would like to know where to live, look at it as if it were a bowl, with the most affordable housing in the center and the most expensive stuff along the edges. I worked in Warner Center, which is in Woodland Hills, where the rent was so expensive that I couldn't even imagine it, and I lived in a "less-than-fashionable" area nearby called Canoga Park. And with all due respect to the nice people of Canoga Park, it wasn't a place that I exactly bragged about. So if you live in places like Tarzana, or Encino, you say so, but if not, you just say that you live in the valley, if you know what I'm saying here.

Image at the top of this post: Van Nuys, California in the 1970s. The valley.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more