The Militant’s Epic CicLAvia Tour LVII!

Well here we are folks, the end of the 2024 CicLAvia season. This time around, for the 57th CicLAvia event and 8th of this year, we’re back to good ol’ Sherman Way in The 818 – this is the third time we’ve done this route. The first time was exactly five years ago to the day, on December 8, 2019, during a full-on rainstorm that drenched half of the event’s duration. And on the second time around, on February 26, 2023, it was the coldest CicLAvia evar, with a high temperature of 51º – although the sight of the snow-capped Santa Susana Mountains (not very tall mountains, at that) was quite a sight to behold.

For this Sunday, though, the proverbial Third Time’s a Charm, with the forecast calling for a very nice (albeit somewhat overcast) 69º along Moses Sherman’s Way. It’s time to celebrate – the Holiday Season (look for lots of Santa Claus cosplay on the route), the Dodgers as World Champions and the Galaxy as MLS Champions. So…Start the party, Los Angeles! Sherman Way is car-free!

As usual — Happy CicLAvia, Go Rams, Go Lakers, Go Kings Go and see you or not see you on the streets!

If you found this Epic CicLAvia Tour guide useful and visit any of these sites, please add the #EpicCicLAviaTour hashtag to any social media post that includes it. The Militant will be glad to re-tweet!

And if you appreciate The Militant’s work, kick him a little love via PayPal! He *hates* asking for money, but you know how it is these days…A Militant’s gotta pay his bills! He sacrifices a lot of his time to do this! Your support is much appreciated!

Support The Militant Angeleno!
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=K5XC5AM9G33K8

Thank you Margaret Wehbi, Angelique Rodriguez and Eddie Arias for your support over the past couple months!

Named after railroad executive Moses Hazeltine Sherman (you should be familiar with that name from the “Meet The Hollywoods” CicLAvia), who was responsible for bringing his Los Angeles & Pacific Railway (later merged into the Pacific Electric Railway) into the San Fernando Valley. The street was originally a zig-zagging $500,000 grand boulevard built in 1911 along the Red Car right-of-way, stretching from North Hollywood, running west along what is now Chandler Blvd, then north along what is now Van Nuys Blvd, and west along the current Sherman Way. As the SFV farmland gave way to (sub)urbanization and the street grid, Sherman Way was re-aligned and extended eastward as a straight thoroughfare in the 1920s.

2. Site of Sherman Square Roller Rink
1969-2001
18430 Sherman Way, Reseda

In the 1970s and 1980s, this was The Center of the Universe for many Valley youth: A roller rink during the skating heyday of the ’70s (and on Monday nights, the Skataway club, a weekly private hangout for celebrities such as Cher and Jack Nicholson), and also hosted a roller hockey league and a bowling alley. In the ’80s it became a popular venue for hip-hop events (an aspiring young rapper named Dr. Dre performed there back in 1985). Towards the ’90s, the venue hosted computer shows during the weekends, but was also plagued by gang activity. It was razed in 2001 and replaced by the current Walgreen’s pharmacy.

3. Site of Chuck Landis’ Country Club
1980-2000
18419 Sherman Way, Reseda

Originally built as a Sav-On Drugs store, Los Angeles nightclub entrepreneur Chuck Landis bought the property in 1979 and converted it to a 1,000-seat concert venue originally intended for country music acts. But the burgeoning local punk, new wave and heavy metal acts of the early 1980s found an ideal venue – artists such as Motley Crue, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Bangles, Jackson Browne and Guns N Roses played here in their early years, as well as established acts like B.B. King, The Beach Boys, James Brown, Prince and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. U2 played their very first concert in Los Angeles here in 1981. In the mid-’80s, the venue also hosted boxing matches. It petered out in the 1990s and is now the Restauracion Reseda Church.

The beginnings of the Sherman Way/Reseda intersection becoming the entertainment capital of Reseda started as far back as the 1940s when this S. Charles Lee (You’ll recognize his name as architect of many other historic theatres in these Epic CicLAvia Tour guides)-designed Streamline Moderne cinema showed double features to the nearby newly-developed residential community. The theatre closed in 1988, but it gained some notoriety in the 1997 film “Boogie Nights” and is planned to be resurrected as a Laemmle multi-screen cinema after a $5.65 million restoration project.

Though Westminster, Garden Grove and Los Angeles’ Chinatown are more synonymous with the Vietnamese community in Southern California, the largest concentration Viet Americans in the 818 is located right here in Reseda. This mile-long stretch of Sherman Way and adjacent area is home to a good number of Vietnamese eateries, including Pho 999 (7255 Reseda Blvd), Pho So (7231 Reseda Blvd), Sandwich Express (18575 Sherman Way), Vinh Loy Tofu and Bun Bo Hue (18625 Sherman Way), Khuu Bistro (18845 Sherman Way) and Pho Viet Cali (18111 Saticoy St). There are also many more businesses, cultural institutions, organizations and houses of worship with a two-mile radius of Sherman and Reseda.

One of the Los Angeles River’s many tributaries, this seasonal wash carries stormwater from Aliso Canyon (yep, that Aliso Canyon) up past Porter Ranch, running due south and joining the Los Angeles River near Yolanda Avenue. Thanks to the recent rainy weather, this wash is gonna be flowin’!

7. Los Angeles Jewish Home
1952
19308 Sherman Way, Reseda

Like many Jewish institutions in Los Angeles, this senior living and health care facility originated in Boyle Heights in 1916, expanding to the SFV in the late 1940s. It’s one of three campuses of the Los Angeles Jewish Home – the other nearby on Victory Blvd and another in Playa Vista. This campus, known as the Grancell Village Campus, is home to 1,000 seniors. Wonder if the residents know that the 1952 Spanish Colonial Revival structure on Sherman and Tampa was originally the Lorenzen Mortuary? 

8. ‘The Karate Kid’ Apartments
1963
19223 Saticoy Street, Reseda

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the motion picture, The Karate Kid (and Season 6 of its Netflix sequel series, Cobra Kai, which featured it during its premiere season – despite the fact that the majority of the series is filmed in Atlanta, GA), this is the location of where Daniel Larusso and his mom lived in Reseda and where handyman/sensei Mr. Nariyoshi Miyagi worked. The South Seas Apartments is a Mid-Century Modern-ish building built in 1963, with a postwar Tiki Culture-inspired name in Googie fonts. Can’t be more early ’60s than that! And it’s just a quick, 4-block detour from the CicLAvia route (The Militant recommends taking the quiet residential Beckford Avenue rather than Tampa to get there)!

9. Platt Office Building
1981
19725 Sherman Way, Winnetka

Conceived by carpenter Dennis Platt and designed by T.W. Layman, this office building built in the early 1980s (but meant to look like it was made in the 1880s) contains remnants from the Queen Anne-style Little Sisters of the Poor Rest Home originally located in Boyle Heights and various parts from Victorian homes in Bunker Hill, combined with re-created architectural sections.

10. Old School SFV Farm House
1922
20030 Sherman Way, Winnetka

Before the Dingbat apartments, before the suburban ranch-style homes, the San Fernando Valley had homes like this little all-wood construction gem on Sherman Way, just east of Winnetka Avenue. Built in 1922 – over a century ago – when the Valley was a patch-quilt of farms and groves, this little dwelling is a relic of a time when plants outnumbered people in what is now known as the 818.

In 1904, an idealistic farming dude named Charles Weeks moved from the Midwest to California, and in 1916 established a utopian poultry farming community named Runnymede (now part of Palo Alto) in Santa Clara County where families lived on one-acre farms and sustainably raised chickens and eggs, and through that, would establish ideal social structures. He then moved south to the farming community of Owensmouth in the San Fernando Valley and 100 years ago established a similar colony here known as the Weeks Poultry Colony. The Great Depression put the idealistic colony to an end, and Weeks moved to Florida where he lived the rest of his life until his death in the 1960s. The colony is long-gone, but Weeks left his mark on the community which still exists today: The area is now known as Winnetka, named by the remaining colony members after Weeks’ Illinois hometown, Runnymede Street and park were named after Weeks’ original Nor Cal colony, and nearby Independence Avenue originated from his poultry colony marketing pitch, “One Acre and Independence.”

Another currently-flowing Los Angeles River tributary runs under Sherman Way, originating in Browns Canyon in the Santa Susana Mountains. It joins The River just west of Mason Avenue.

13. Sherman Way Night Market
21051 Sherman Way (betwen Independence and Variel avenues), Canoga Park

Along Sherman Way in front of the CVS Pharmacy is informal collection of some 30 vendors (18 food, 12 merchandise) set up along Sherman Way in front of the CVS Pharmacy every evening. The food selections represent Mexican, Nicaraguan, Argentinean and Guatemalan cuisines, with the latter sporting multiple booths selling Pollo y Papas Fritas and cheveres (Guatemalan hot dogs), as well as handmade ice cream. Even though this CicLAvia ends at 3 p.m., a number of the vendors set up earlier in the day, so look out for them!