Potholes Fail to Tip the Issue

Bruce Feng, determined to be fair to Los Angeles, pulls his City of Burbank van to a stop where Clybourn Avenue dead-ends at the eastbound Ventura Freeway.

For more than five miles, the boundary between L.A. and Burbank runs down the middle of Clybourn, the main drivable street shared by the two cities. Feng, Burbank’s public works director, wants to point out a spot where L.A.’s portion of the road is better maintained.

“On our side, you can see the asphalt’s got what we call alligator cracking, whereas the L.A. part is very smooth.”

Feng falls silent. His engineer’s eyes have fallen on a couple of unexpected infrastructural anomalies just inside the North Hollywood section of the larger city.

“Oops,” he says. “Looks like they’ve got a pothole on L.A.’s side. And I see a gutter there that’s too low and collecting water. Also, this big asphalt patch is asymmetrical, and it should be squared off because that holds better.”

“OK,” he concedes, “maybe you can’t find a stretch where L.A.’s better. It might be equal, but not better. But it’s really an apples-and-oranges situation. It’s not that L.A.’s doing a terrible job, just that we’re fortunate to be Burbank.”

Reputationally speaking, these are grand days for Burbank. Gone is the notoriety the city endured a generation ago, thanks to the disparagement visited on “beautiful downtown Burbank” by NBC’s “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show.”

Today, the debate over whether the San Fernando Valley should secede from L.A. and form a separate city, an issue that will be decided on the Nov. 5 ballot, has cast Burbank (and the adjacent city of Glendale) in the most golden light. Secession leaders hail it as a paragon of diligent civic stewardship and pudding-smooth roads, beloved of its citizenry, visibly distinct from broken and graffitied L.A. Everything, in short, that a new Valley city could become.

As Valley secession leader Jeff Brain lamented at one recent public meeting: “Why must there be a glass wall between North Hollywood and Burbank?”

The hosannas emanating from the secession debate have intensified the pride Burbank’s civic leaders take in their city. That pride seems tempered, however, by a realization that overly extolling the virtues of Burbank while its mammoth neighbor is undergoing such painful domestic woes would be less than tactful.

“The reasons Burbank is such a well-run city and looked to as an example by others are, first, we have a tremendous economic base,” says Mayor David Laurell, referring to the seven major entertainment companies based there. “No. 2 is, we use it extremely prudently. And the third element--the thing that secession proponents have to remember--we are a small city, 17 square miles. We’re a little over 100,000 residents. That is ... extremely manageable.”

By contrast, a new Valley city would encompass about 211 square miles and more than 1.3 million residents.

“To think that if they move forward with secession, that automatically they’re going to wake up--what’s one of the names they’re considering? Camelot?--and it’s going to be Camelot or nirvana or Shangri-La, well, it’s simply not,” Laurell says. “The fact that Burbank is such a well-run city doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have its problems. This is not Shangri-La. This is Burbank.”

When civic passions and rhetoric rise, inflamed perception often obscures reality. Is there really a “glass wall” dividing L.A. and Burbank? Can a traveler really tell immediately from the surroundings that he or she has departed L.A. and passed into a more blessed condition known as Burbank?

Mostly no.

But sometimes yes.

It depends where a person makes the crossing.

A reality-seeker undertaking a slow drive of the Burbank-L.A. border might begin on Clybourn from Lakeside Country Club, which is along the L.A. River, and head north to Cohasset Street (Clybourn accounts for about 5 1/2 of the roughly 6 1/2 miles of drivable boundary between the two cities).

The border then runs east for about a mile on Cohasset, which is interrupted for much of its length by Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport. The remainder of Burbank’s border with L.A. is a roadless line through the Verdugo Mountains to the north. On the east and south, Burbank is bordered by Glendale and the L.A. River, save for a fragment of Griffith Park, which is in L.A.

In general, the eastern side of Clybourn, Burbank’s, doesn’t look markedly different from the western side, L.A.’s. With only a couple of exceptions, housing stock seems in about equal repair (mostly good to excellent).

Burbank’s road surface is overall somewhat smoother, and is devoid of the potholes and upheaved sidewalk sections very occasionally to be found on L.A.’s side. It also shows noticeably fewer incidences of green fur growing in asphalt fissures.

In some stretches, such as just north of Camarillo Street, the L.A. side of Clybourn looks to be in even better shape than the well-kept Burbank side. In a brief stretch north of the airport, however, broken-down curbs and vigorously growing weeds mark the west side, while the Burbank side is clean and clear. Similarly, near Chermak Street, the L.A. side is momentarily embarrassed by some gutter trash and an abandoned grocery cart, phenomena not seen on the eastern side.

If there is one place where the L.A.-Burbank dichotomy is most profound, it is where Burbank Boulevard crosses Clybourn. In L.A., Burbank Boulevard is an earthquake in the suspension system of a car. As soon as it crosses the intersection into Burbank, it becomes smooth as glass.

Not quite as bad--but bad--is the entry into Burbank on Magnolia Boulevard, where the roadway in L.A. is half concrete and half asphalt, with numerous bouncy seams and patches. The road surfaces goes suddenly smooth at Cahuenga Boulevard--still in L.A.--and continues in that condition after passing into Burbank.

On the other side of the ledger, Camarillo Street in L.A. is a perfectly level and sleek road that momentarily gets a little rougher when it becomes Verdugo Avenue in Burbank (it smoothes again almost immediately). And Riverside Drive is even smoother in L.A., as it passes through the commercial center of the handsome Toluca Lake area, than it is after entering Burbank.

“When you add it all up, the physical difference, from an infrastructure standpoint, isn’t all that much,” says Feng, the public works director. “The difference is more our responsiveness. If you’ve got a pothole, it’ll be filled within 24 hours. We are able to remove 85% of the graffiti we find within 24 hours.

“But it’s not just roads and things like that. It’s community spirit. Community pride, civic pride--that’s what makes this town work. You could throw all the money you want at North Hollywood, but without that community spirit .... “

He shook his head.

“But we’re not perfect, and we’re not all that unique. You been to Glendale? I mean, you could eat off the sidewalks there.”