THERE ARE NO panoramas to be seen from the flat, unlovely boulevards of Panorama City, California. Formerly a sprawling sheep and dairy ranch that became, during the postwar years, one of the first planned communities in the San Fernando Valley, the area was the bustling home of one of General Motors’s largest assembly plants. It also featured an innovation-minded Carnation research lab and a network of neighborhoods full of then-hopeful-looking ranch houses. Today, after decades of decline (the GM plant closed in 1992, the lab was razed to build a high school), Panorama City is ripe for reinvention, its radiant mid-century optimism surviving mostly in memories, its prevailing mood one of gritty defensiveness.
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