Sending in the white gloves

MTA photo by Gary LeonardMayor Villaraigosa has dispatched city traffic officers to thirteen intersections along the Orange Line route across the Valley. The MTA will also step up its education campaign to convince Valley drivers that they really do have to stop at the red lights and that there really are humongous buses speeding along this busway thing. Meanwhile, the MTA has put together a web page on the artwork that adorns each station along the Orange Line. Most of the artists chose to include aspects of San Fernando Valley history, which is appropriate since the busway follows an old railroad line that served the sugar beet fields and first towns that appeared early in the 20th century. The Tarzana station (pictured) uses zebra and giraffe patterns, as well as the entire text of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, to commemorate the writer and real estate mogul's founding of the community in the 1920s. Burroughs bought the biggest local spread from the estate of Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, renamed it Tarzana Ranch, and later subdivided. His family still keeps offices on Ventura Boulevard, in the converted home where Burroughs worked.

The Reseda Boulevard station incorporates the lyrics to Bing Crosby's World War II hit song, "San Fernando Valley," and a quote from author Catherine Mulholland.

Valley history timeline


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