Yesterday's prompt was "It's the home of..." i.e., what is it known for? Well...in certain parts, gangs...hmmm. I did a little more historical research, and came up with this composite painting:
Before the San Fernando Valley was the home of endless suburbs, it was an important source of produce, and two of its most frequently grown crops were walnuts and oranges. If you own one of those suburban houses that was built before a certain year, like I do (mine was built in 1949), you probably have an ancient leftover orange tree in your back yard from those endless groves. Mine is barely hanging on at this point—after all, it's more than 70 years old!—but despite the fact that it's about a third the size it used to be, it still bears about a dozen perfectly delicious juicy oranges every January.
Besides the suburbs, represented here by a partial view of my own bungalow, Van Nuys citizens used to most of them work at the General Motors plant, but that closed down in 1992, changing the economy of the region significantly.
Van Nuys is the home of one of the busiest general aviation airports in the world, with more than 230,000 takeoffs and landings every year. The movie Casablanca was filmed there, and it's also where Norma Jean Dougherty, a worker on the drone assembly line, was discovered and morphed into Marilyn Monroe. It was built in 1928, and is still going strong today.
And of course we must mention the climate, which is predominantly sunny, and graced by the stately yet ridiculous silhouettes of palm trees along many of its boulevards.
Today's prompt was "Main Street, high street, downtown, crossroads." With Van Nuys being the seat of government for the region, and all of that being located on Van Nuys Blvd., that street would seem to qualify today, although the first street actually designed and built for the city was Sherman Way! I drew a bit of the government section of the street (badly), and up front I featured a longstanding tradition of Van Nuys Boulevard: Cruising, as memorialized by the movie American Graffiti. Show off your cherry car, pick up a date, hang out with your buddies on a warm summer night...as you can see from the posted sign, the local constabulary doesn't view that activity so benignly.
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