Van Nuys for cruising again

It took Van Nuys merchants, the Daily News and the LAPD decades to eradicate the Los Angeles tradition of cruising on Van Nuys Boulevard. They finally had to shut the boulevard to all traffic and make arrests to make the crowds go away. Now they're trying to bring it back, targeting one Wednesday — the boulevard's traditional "club night" — a month.

From my Gone But Not Forgotten page at The Valley Observed:

Cruising on Van Nuys Boulevard was a ritual of local youth culture in at least five decades until a police crackdown ended the tradition in the 1980s. On Wednesday Club Night and on weekends, "the Boulevard" was jammed with cruisers and sidewalk gawkers, stretching from Sherman Way south almost to Ventura Boulevard at its peak. The point was to look and be looked at, to hook up for dates, and to flaunt your style. Cruising was "an expression of democracy…in a three-mile tunnel of high octane exhaust fumes,’’ Charles T. Powers wrote in the L.A. Times.