After decades away, cruising makes a comeback on the Los Angeles street where it made its name

Cruising returns to LA’s historic Van Nuys Blvd.

LOS ANGELES — As tricked-out old cars rumbled past on Van Nuys Boulevard, Reid Stolz still had trouble believing what he’d done.

This was not just any crowded six-lane urban thoroughfare but the storied street immortalized in the 1970s film “Van Nuys Blvd.” and in folk tales as the place where cruising may have begun.

But much has changed here in the land of cars since then. The cruisers left long ago, driven away by police. In the years since, they and their gas-guzzling cars were replaced by the big worries of global warming and $3-a-gallon gasoline.

Today, just as the decades-old American love affair with cruising seemed to be ebbing, the 52-year-old mechanic is all but single-handedly bringing it back to Van Nuys, giving thousands of car lovers a place again to transform it into a rolling ode to the 20th century.

“That first night, there were about 600,” Stolz says as he leans back on the hood of his 1972 candy-apple red Corvette. “Then it just grew.”

On this night, there’s a little 1923 Ford T-bucket replica here, a hulking 1969 Camaro with its thundering V-8 engine there, and any number of 1970s Pontiac muscle cars. As the first anniversary of the return of cruising approaches, thousands sometimes show up on the second Wednesday of every month.

So far, however, they haven’t brought with them a return of the huge traffic jams, drunken fights and other problems that led police to shut down cruising on Van Nuys in the 1980s.

Instead, as the sun goes down, cruisers rumble peacefully onto the historic if slightly ugly urban blacktop that cuts through the heart of the San Fernando Valley, looking to meet a fellow cruiser at a stop light and earn a smile and a thumbs up.

And they do it in seemingly every model of American car to roll off a 20th century assembly line.

“It’s kind of like bringing a field of dreams on fuel to the public, a big line of cars that are actually moving instead of just sitting still,” marveled Doug Auzine as he prepared to launch his 1955 Chevy Rocket into the parade from a restaurant parking lot.

Soon that old stationwagon-turned-dragster would join such other moving museum pieces as little deuce coupes, Ford flatheads, historic Model Bs and restored 1957 Chevys busy traversing a two-mile stretch of the street dotted with car dealerships, modest restaurants and small businesses.

Then they would all turn around and do it again.

Rikki Kirchner paused momentarily from buffing her mint-condition, pearl white 1970 Chevelle Malibu to wave at a middle-aged man rumbling by in a restored 1964 Chevrolet Impala. “That guy, he went to my high school, and he cruised back then. In that car,” she says.

That was in 1979, the year a film called “Van Nuys Blvd.” hit theaters and showed off the avenue in all its exhaust-fume glory, as it told the fictional story of a small-town boy coming to the big city to cruise “the street where it all began.”

But just a couple years after that film left theaters, the cruisers left Van Nuys. They were driven out by police who had become increasingly fed up with streets gridlocked by loud, exhaust-belching cars driven by people who parked just long enough to pack restaurants and order little more than sodas.

After police began writing tickets for every minor infraction imaginable, cruisers got the message and drove away.

Stolz, who practically lived on the boulevard during those years, believes the police action was probably warranted, the crowds and the trouble they caused having gotten out of hand.

So he worried about what he’d started when he received hundreds of responses to a half-joking message he’d posted on the Internet last June announcing the Van Nuys Cruising Association’s return to the streets.

For one thing, there was no such group, so Stolz quickly formed one and had T-shirts made up.

Then he notified the neighborhood what was coming and put out a list of ground rules: No alcohol, drugs or weapons, no drag-racing and no engines with open headers (an exhaust system alteration that can improve performance but also creates an earsplitting racket when the engine is revved).

To his relief, the thousands showing up pretty much follow the rules.

“Every now and then we’ll get a loud-party call” or a complaint of a jammed parking lot, said Officer Anthony Cabunoc, senior lead police officer for the area. “But that’s about it.”

Stolz, who has since stepped aside as the event’s organizer, says he expected all of his old cruiser buddies to show up. What caught him by surprise was the whole new generation of cruisers who had been looking for a place to go.

Gabriel Stasilli, 25, shows up in his 1969 Camaro Z-10, a replica of that year’s Indianapolis 500 pace car. He thinks he knows why it was a hit in the old days: “the freedom, the camaraderie, people shooting the breeze, hanging out, grabbing burgers, just good old fashioned American fun.”

Cruising actually began spontaneously in cities across the country in the years immediately after World War II, says Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, whose doctoral dissertation was on lowrider culture.

“The interesting thing is that it was interracial, intergenerational, even intergender,” she says, adding the combination of postwar prosperity and cheap used cars made it a pastime available to anyone with a driver’s license.

No one seems to know why Van Nuys Boulevard became a focal point, although being close to Hollywood probably didn’t hurt.

Nor did having three lanes in each direction, a Bob’s Big Boy drive-in restaurant and a General Motors plant (both now closed), says Leslie Kendall, curator of Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum.

As police chased cruisers off the streets around the country, the pastime often has been replaced by car shows, says Sandoval, with car clubs all over the country holding exhibitions some place just about every weekend.

But that’s not the same as driving up and down the street, showing off your ride to the guy in the next car, says Stasilli and other serious cruisers.

Which is why, Stolz believes, that cruising will stay on Van Nuys Boulevard forever.

Then he adds with a smile, “Or at least until they tell us to go away again.”