San Fernando Valley, or the Valley for short, is the mother of all suburbs.
Spanning a largish bunch of square miles north of the Hollywood Hills and thus omitted from most tourist maps (including mine), it was originally conceived as a contrast to the high glitz and rising real estate prices of more central areas of greater Los Angeles. Hot, barren, vacuous, all about ample parking - that's the image the Valley usually gets attached to it.
Originally a sleeping suburb for people who worked in "the city", meaning south of Hollywood Hills, it's now a city on its own right. With a population of 2 million people, it has in fact spawned sleeping suburbs around it for people who come to provide services for the people who live in the Valley. Suburbia brings forth suburbia.
While the Valley is where most of the porn produced in LA is made, it's also the place where normal people live. It is like an endless New York built horizontally, street after street after street of detached houses with their yards of four square feet of grassland.
My very first view of LA. Wasn't too impressed, for obvious reasons.
Most of the times I've visited LA I've stayed in the Valley, and again, it's world of its own. On occasion, it's ugly as sin, but it has a queer version of homely charm, with the slightly run-down strip malls and houses that are badly in need of a style consultant and a new layer of their pink paint job. In stark contrast to the sleek image Hollywood wishes to project, the Valley is a very unassuming place. And unlike Hollywood, which is an area imbued with cynicism and the harsh reality of life in a big city with its sex shops and heroin addicts, the Valley is a homebody's part of town. Not hip, just comfy.
I've never actually met a Valley girl that would fit the stereotype perpetuated by films such as, well, Valley Girl - the air-brained chick more worried about how her nail polish matches her bag and prone to exclamations such as "Oh!My!God!" and "Tubular!". Again, it's a misconception perpetuated by Hollywood, nothing more.
I think I like the Valley.
My mother would be scandalised of me admitting to like a place imbued with such an utterly unstylish lifestyle, but I gotta be honest.
