No Hope for Burbank Airport
No Hope for Burbank Airport
Earlier this month, the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority unanimously voted to rename the Burbank Airport after the late comedian Bob Hope, who died in July. On the surface, it seems like a nice, feel-good gesture for the longtime Toluca Lake resident, a beloved figure who finally expired at the ripe age of 100.
“I'd rather have airports named after old dead rich guys than after sponsors,” says Sue Elliott-Sink of Northridge.
“He was a larger-than-life icon who's brought an inordinate amount of joy to the world, and that's not a bad thing,” adds Ken Sharp of Encino.
Okay, it's a given that some folks actually thought Hope was a funny guy. But let's not forget that he was a serious tool of the establishment (á la fellow airport celebrity John Wayne), a golf partner of virtually every right-wing demagogue of the second half of the 20th century.
Oh, and in addition to the alleged joy Sharp alludes to, such as “entertaining” troops in Vietnam who'd much rather have seen Angie Dickinson dancing naked, he may be linked to some of the most hideous urban blight Southern California – and particularly, the Valley – has ever seen.
Bob Hope was a very wealthy man. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and much of it may have come from the proceeds of that architectural and retail abomination we know as the minimall. Could it be true that this American treasure raped and pillaged the San Fernando Valley to line his own pockets? Great Americans don't behave that way, do they?
Hope invested his show-business scratch in real estate, and at one point owned 16,000 acres of undeveloped Valley land, which he snagged for $10 an acre. He eventually sold half (for a reported $40 million) and used the rest to pollute the landscape. And for this, he gets an airport.
Charles Eisher has led the charge to expose Hope's ugly legacy on his Disinfotainment website (www.ceicher.homeunix.com). “Hope was a money-grubbing land speculator that owned a lot of the Valley, one of the biggest landholders around, and pushed around a lot of people to become even more obscenely wealthy,” he tells me via email.
Here's a fine example of Hope's less than pious motives. When the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District wanted to buy 706 acres of mountain land from Hope in 1986, he asked for $20,000 an acre. The district's appraisal said the land was worth $1,100 an acre. The deal fell through. But after five years of hand-wringing, he managed to fleece the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy out of more than $20 million in public funds for Jordan Ranch in the Simi Hills and Liberty Canyon near Calabasas.
And In addition to all the taxpayer cash Bob and Delores got to roll around in inside their Toluca Lake home, he may have also managed to line his pockets from the ruins of the oil crises of the mid-'70s. The OPEC embargo destroyed the businesses of countless gas stations, and the lots were transformed into retail eyesores.
A few miles north of my home, on the corner of Woodman and Osborne, sits what's considered the first minimall in Los Angeles, built by La Mancha Development Corp. in 1973. Oddly, there are no banners at the location celebrating this dubious fact. At least Numero Uno's stayed in business for a quarter century. By 1985, there were 3,000 of these badboys in Los Angeles.
In 1988, Councilman Michael Woo called our fair city “the minimall capital of the world.” And he wasn't smiling when he said it. He and his fellow councilmembers decided the insanity must be stopped, passing an ordinance establishing guidelines to slow the growth of the monstrosities. A year later, an L.A. Times quality-of-life poll revealed mimimalls to be Angelenos' biggest pet peeve after potholes.
Minimalls are here to stay, and, apparently, so is Bob Hope, at least in Burbank. “I'm disgusted with the whole idea,” Hope-hater Eisher says of the airport renaming. “I think they should change the name to ‘The Johnny Carson Beautiful Downtown Burbank Airport.'”
Sounds good to me. The late-night legend derisively plugged the Valley's entertainment hub for years, effectively putting it on the map. Carson's worst crime may have been the horrendous line of polyester men's wear bearing his signature sold in the '70s at Sears. Checkered pants, wide collars, and unnatural fibers certainly contributed to style blight, but you could always take off your clothes. Building demolition, on the other hand, is a bit less practical.
The moral of the story? If you rip apart forests, impose a plague of hideous property development, play a lot of golf, and easily yuck it up on TV, you qualify as a national treasure. Based on recent elections, stars are proving our most bulletproof currency. America's become the starfucking capital of the earth.Published: 11/26/2003
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