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Topic Archive: Los Angeles history
Nope, the image is not a scene from a movie. It's something better: real life. It's one in a great collection of 960,000 old LAPD...
Posted April 14, 2008 12:35 AM
Cecilia Rasmussen's regular Sunday column in the Times on L.A. historical figures went out with a bang. She and the paper commissioned DNA tests that...
Posted April 6, 2008 10:50 PM
Back when boxing was a big spectator sport in Los Angeles, Art Aragon fought major bouts at the Olympic Auditorium, Wrigley Field and Hollywood's Legion...
Posted March 25, 2008 11:58 PM
The former Kathleen Soliah was released this week from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla after serving six years. Nabbed after two decades in...
Posted March 20, 2008 11:58 PM
Not too many musicians follow this particular career arc. Buddy Miles, who died yesterday in Austin of congestive heart failure, began as a session player...
Posted February 27, 2008 07:35 PM
Mickey Cohen was L.A.'s best-known and most media-savvy mobster in 1958, the year that USC's library focuses on in an exhibit of photos from the...
Posted February 25, 2008 01:08 PM
Runyon Canyon hikers Bob Eicholz and Steve Scott a few years ago discovered the remnants of a large sign in the brush above their Outpost...
Posted February 17, 2008 10:09 PM
One of my favorite quirky L.A. public sculptures — the gold panner of Carthay Circle — has been stolen and recovered. The bronze cast in...
Posted February 15, 2008 04:45 PM
Channel 5 will remain at the Sunset Boulevard location indefinitely. The sale to Hudson Capital has been pending since last year and went through at...
Posted January 30, 2008 03:59 PM
One of the most unusual, and storied, commercial buildings on Wilshire Boulevard is back on the market. The one-story, ranch-style office complex at the southeast...
Posted January 7, 2008 01:24 PM
Valley history buffs were aghast to learn last week that the first hangar built at what's now called Van Nuys Airport was in the process...
Posted December 23, 2007 04:53 PM
In 1957 the mayor of Los Angeles helped install a plaque at 7th and Main streets downtown commemorating the birth of the local film industry...
Posted December 16, 2007 09:22 AM
PhotoFriends.org is the site for the nonprofit organization that supports the Los Angeles Public Library's photograph collection, which is lovingly nurtured (and increasingly put on-line)...
Posted November 19, 2007 09:01 AM
Another theater is going dark. Landmark is leaving the NuWilshire in Santa Monica, though it seems the chain wanted to stay but was kicked out...
Posted October 29, 2007 11:52 PM
Disney announced a $1.1 billion makeover of California Adventure to make it, well, more like Disneyland. They also plan to add a replica of the...
Posted October 17, 2007 12:16 AM
This shot of Angels Flight in its old location beside the 3rd Street tunnel is one of the photographs in the exhibition of "Julius Shulman's...
Posted October 11, 2007 10:59 PM
A 1,000-page manuscript, The Development of Los Angeles City Government -- An Institutional History 1850-2000, will be delivered to the City Council this morning. The...
Posted September 26, 2007 09:32 AM
Larry Harnisch at The Daily Mirror blog dug this photo out of the Times news archives and asks, what are these guys doing? The...
Posted September 24, 2007 08:26 PM
The transsexual sportswriter formerly known as Mike Penner is interviewed by host Madeleine Brand on tomorrow's NPR show. It airs at 9 am on KPCC-FM...
Posted August 14, 2007 03:36 PM
The last bastions of incivility are disappearing from of one of traveling rock and roll’s mightiest icons — the Hyatt West Hollywood, Laurel Canyon author...
Posted August 6, 2007 08:56 AM
Hard to believe now, but the biggest industry in the Los Angeles area used to be aircraft and rocket manufacturers and the smaller firms that...
Posted August 1, 2007 09:06 AM
Noted photographer Edward Weston preferred smallpox and poverty to Los Angeles, as he says in a new post at Native Intelligence. But he made some...
Posted July 25, 2007 11:55 PM
While researching his forthcoming biography of the late California political leader Jess Unruh, Bill Boyarsky delved into the story of how reporter Paul Weeks covered...
Posted July 12, 2007 03:31 PM
It's not as classic as Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, but a YouTube user named Meadowlawn has posted a video of downtown's Broadway district as...
Posted July 11, 2007 10:37 AM
In honor of the 38th anniversary of a landmark moment in Los Angeles rock and roll lore, here's some YouTube video of Jimi Hendrix jamming...
Posted June 21, 2007 12:51 AM
The bulldozer came today for that circa-1911 model home built to help sell the new town of Van Nuys. In those days, Van Nuys and...
Posted June 20, 2007 04:25 PM
Now that 1947 has morphed through 1907 into 1927 (and spawned an L.A. Times imitator blog revisiting 1957), Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak's original website...
Posted May 7, 2007 09:01 AM
"Original blogger" Army Archerd compares the recent "Entourage" premiere party in the dome at the Arclight to the theater's 1963 unveiling as the Cinerama Dome....
Posted April 9, 2007 08:45 AM
Petersen was a giant figure in Southern California car culture and created a large magazine and book empire, Petersen Publishing. He grew up around his...
Posted March 24, 2007 09:42 AM
The Communist Party USA has donated its archives to New York University. "Decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal...
Posted March 20, 2007 08:51 AM
Most entertaining blog promo for a friend's project that I've seen in awhile — and nicely retro too — from Mickey Kaus at Slate: In...
Posted February 2, 2007 12:44 PM
Later in life, Daniel Finegood became a husband, father, art lover and longtime member of the board of the Oakwood School. But on January 1,...
Posted January 25, 2007 02:35 AM
If you enjoy remembering old local restaurants and already exhausted Jonathon Foerstel's Los Angeles Time Machines, writer Mark Evanier's POVOnline is an entertaining place to...
Posted January 16, 2007 11:09 PM
Word swept through local preservation ranks yesterday that a crew began demolishing Downey's historic Johnie's Broiler about 3 pm — on a Sunday. No permit...
Posted January 8, 2007 10:57 AM
Now this is cool. The Jewish Journal has turned up and posted on its website an audio recording of the Rev. Martin Luther King giving...
Posted January 4, 2007 04:47 PM
Meant to re-post this oldie but goodie from 2004 for New Year's. On Dec. 31, 1897, a cameraman for Thomas Edison shot movie footage of...
Posted January 3, 2007 02:00 PM
Bobby is getting mixed reviews as a piece of drama, but this Los Angeles history buff liked it. Where the story line lagged, the sound...
Posted November 29, 2006 11:51 PM
Angelenos older than about 40 probably remember signs for Brew 102 as a downtown L.A. landmark off the Hollywood Freeway. Next to the brewery were...
Posted November 22, 2006 12:56 PM
This shouldn't happen at the Los Angeles Times. In the staff-written web story about the UCLA student who got the stun gun, the Times says...
Posted November 16, 2006 12:19 AM
Doing its part to mark the 225th birthday of Los Angeles, IN Los Angeles asked author Stuart Timmons to come up with a whopper of...
Posted October 9, 2006 05:30 PM
In Sunday's LAT, West magazine staff writer Lynell George revisits the large swath of traditional Los Angeles neighborhoods that came to be lumped together as...
Posted October 8, 2006 01:41 PM
The building at 2379 Glendale Boulevard in Silver Lake is on the market for $2,995,000, according to an email from Dion Neutra. It's where his...
Posted September 28, 2006 12:25 PM
One of the surprising things about retired LAPD detective Steve Hodel's 2003 book arguing that his father killed Elizabeth Short was that James Ellroy endorsed...
Posted September 5, 2006 02:48 AM
Los Angeles mystery writer Naomi Hirahara, whose best-known character is Japanese American gardener Mas Arai, will be giving a private walking tour of Little Tokyo...
Posted August 30, 2006 08:52 AM
Raphael died in her sleep last Saturday in a hospice in Palm Desert, following what Todd Everett calls "a long and excruciating illness." She was...
Posted August 18, 2006 10:59 AM
Demolition of the final remnants of Marineland of the Pacific gets started today on the Palos Verdes peninsula. The Daily Breeze reports that about 20...
Posted July 20, 2006 09:26 AM
We grow it, saute it, stuff it, roast it and slice it into ratatouille. Now the Times' food section tells us that there's a long...
Posted July 19, 2006 11:12 AM
Are they: Early L.A. stage actorsElected officialsCaltech scientistsReporters at the L.A. Record, circa 1905 Answer follows....
Posted July 14, 2006 12:55 AM
I knew that the threatened Nickelodeon Theatre had a lengthy history in Hollywood, but I had rushed out Tuesday's Morning Buzz item without researching all...
Posted July 13, 2006 01:33 AM
Came across a nice shot of the council chambers at City Hall the way it (and the elected members) looked during President Franklin Roosevelt's first...
Posted July 11, 2006 05:46 PM
Back in February, some will remember, I linked to video game re-creations of old Southern California amusements like Busch Gardens, Jungleland, Nu Pike and the...
Posted June 28, 2006 01:09 PM
CityBeat and its parent company, Southland Publishing, are moving on up. Southland closed escrow on the gorgeous former Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles branch...
Posted June 21, 2006 01:05 PM
Came across a website that bills itself as A People’s Guide to LA: "an attempt to map sites of racial and class struggle in Los...
Posted June 12, 2006 08:45 PM
Kent Twitchell's mural at Olympic and Hope of artist Ed Ruscha was found destroyed Friday, but no one took the blame for ordering it painted...
Posted June 3, 2006 12:04 PM
Speaking to the Guardian about Ask the Dust, John Fante and our fair city: Robert Towne, the writer of Chinatown, grew up in San Pedro,...
Posted June 2, 2006 08:15 AM
Seems to me that Michael Walker is doing the whole book-blog synergy the right way, and creating a readable and valuable Los Angeles neighborhood website....
Posted June 1, 2006 07:05 PM
♦ Just how capriciously does the county apply its practice of releasing jail inmates early? Quite, according to DA Steve Cooley. ♦ The Daily News...
Posted May 29, 2006 11:57 PM
Holiday schedule today. I'll do a roundup later of items that are piling up. Saturday morning was the annual planting of the flags at the...
Posted May 29, 2006 01:09 AM
News on Chowhound that Eurochow has closed brings to mind the history of arguably the most recognizable structure in Westwood Village. The domed landmark where...
Posted May 21, 2006 10:37 PM
Landmark's Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles is closing for renovation June 2-29. While it's being spiffed up, the every-Saturday-night Rocky Horror Picture Show will...
Posted May 5, 2006 12:45 AM
Bob Kholos was a KMPC and Radio News West radio reporter in Los Angeles who became the first press secretary for newly elected mayor Tom...
Posted April 20, 2006 04:28 PM
Black Dahlia expert Larry Harnisch has been blogging the errors he finds as he reads through Donald H. Wolfe's new book The Black Dahlia Files:...
Posted April 14, 2006 09:27 AM
RJ Smith wrote about rock music for the Village Voice and Spin before landing at the LA Weekly and, now, at Los Angeles magazine—where he...
Posted April 11, 2006 11:28 PM
Every Los Angeles political story has a backstory. At his blog, John Stodder takes off from the recent news about Sunshine Canyon landfill to reconstruct...
Posted March 22, 2006 11:18 AM
Architect Welton Becket's low-slung, ranch-style house at the southeast corner of Wilshire and Highland has changed hands. For sale signs have been replaced by fence...
Posted March 21, 2006 12:16 AM
Since posting its first story about the missing former Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center on Sunday, the Jewish Journal has done more checking and found that...
Posted March 15, 2006 03:12 PM
The former Soto-Michigan Jewish Community Center, designed by Raphael Soriano and called by the Jewish Journal "the focal point of Jewish social and political community...
Posted March 12, 2006 04:11 PM
Front pager in the L.A. Business Journal mentions that the circa-1930 Wilshire Theatre, designed by S. Charles Lee as the Fox Beverly Hills, will be...
Posted February 14, 2006 01:11 PM
There seem to be a lot of Angelenos who fondly remember the old pony rides and amusement park that Beverly Center displaced. Re-creations of it...
Posted February 14, 2006 12:39 PM
It was thiry-five years ago today that the bedrock buckled beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, unleashing what became the Sylmar earthquake. In all that time,...
Posted February 9, 2006 03:30 AM
Jack Weiss steps in on the police commission ruling, more jail riots, the gang war rages in Watts, girls behind bars, more left-turn arrows—it's a...
Posted February 9, 2006 02:17 AM
This photograph that the owner says shows the Quartermaster's Depot at San Pedro circa 1863 recently sold on eBay for $4,569. Visible in the...
Posted February 6, 2006 10:16 AM
Jack Weiss makes his ambition more or less official, Anthony Pellicano comes back to town, the Ambassador gets a proper send-off, Channel 13 News adds...
Posted February 3, 2006 08:56 AM
Michael Schneider went by the Ambassador Hotel site this afternoon and found a bunch of photographers gathered for the last rites. He'll be posting his...
Posted January 16, 2006 05:21 PM
The House that Jack Kent Cooke Built might be no more, air rights are hot again downtown (and so is Richard Meruelo), Tad Friend expounds...
Posted January 16, 2006 03:43 AM
This is all that was left of the Ambassador Hotel on January 11, as seen from Wilshire Boulevard courtesy of The Ambassador's Last Stand. (Remark...
Posted January 15, 2006 06:43 PM
Took a copy of the The Argonaut to lunch today and learned something that I guess makes sense, but still surprised me. In the 1930s...
Posted January 11, 2006 03:15 PM
In Sunday's LAT Magazine, Mark Kendall tells the story of one of the city's lesser-known historic locales. The house (in what's now called Historic Filipinotown)...
Posted January 8, 2006 01:12 PM
Judging by my email today, the L.A. Times' failure to get together an obit on Frank Wilkinson (while the New York Times did recognize his...
Posted January 4, 2006 10:05 PM
Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register See/ReadStar-News Read Variety ReadHwd Reporter ReadLa Opinión Read Slate:...
Posted January 4, 2006 02:23 AM
Welcome back to work. Since it's been awhile, I'm letting it run long... Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News...
Posted January 3, 2006 03:02 AM
Somebody asked me recently at a party if I remembered riding on the Pacific Electric Red Cars that used to rattle famously across Los Angeles...
Posted December 23, 2005 11:05 AM
Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe near Paramount Studios has been prime Democratic turf since Gov. Jerry Brown made it his L.A. headquarters in the 1970s. His...
Posted December 21, 2005 11:43 PM
Car racing has a long history in the Los Angeles area. Legendary driver Barney Oldfield lived and raced on Wilshire Boulevard and drove on the...
Posted December 18, 2005 03:25 PM
L.A. blogger Tim McGarry grew up with the Ambassador Hotel in his life. He accepts that the new schools will be a good thing and...
Posted December 16, 2005 11:33 AM
Like a lot of others with fast Internet connections, I've been losing hours to Microsoft's free new Windows Live Local satellite (and aerial photo) service....
Posted December 14, 2005 03:06 AM
Painter Gregg Chadwick photographed yesterday's demolition of the garage at the Los Angeles Museum of Art where murals by Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee inspired...
Posted December 13, 2005 02:55 PM
Franklin Avenue has begun a fun blog exercise. He's seeking nominations for the treasures of Los Angeles that are getting up in years and will...
Posted December 7, 2005 11:18 PM
At 1:30 Mayor Villaraigosa will announce a deal to scale back the old LAX expansion plan (and settle the lawsuits) at a command audience of...
Posted December 1, 2005 01:16 AM
Last night's sold-out show at Staples Center was a homecoming for Paul McCartney, whose current U.S. tour ends tonight. He and Heather Mills own a...
Posted November 30, 2005 01:45 AM
⇒ The Paul Williams-designed Holmby Hills home adjacent to Harvard-Westlake (formerly lived in by Bruce McNall and Ronald O. Perelman) will be saved and moved...
Posted November 27, 2005 11:54 AM
LARadio.com is marking off the shows that Howard Stern has left on 97.1 FM—that would be fifteen, including today's. The charmingly noir 1947Project is counting...
Posted November 22, 2005 02:56 AM
Final demolition of the historic Ambassador Hotel has been moving ahead somewhat out of view up until now. Crews have cleared the grounds, gutted the...
Posted November 11, 2005 06:25 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa has dispatched city traffic officers to thirteen intersections along the Orange Line route across the Valley. The MTA will also step up its...
Posted November 3, 2005 10:46 AM
The McMartin Preschool case is ancient history to many people in Los Angeles, but in 1984 the shocking story exploded out of Manhattan Beach. Dozens...
Posted October 29, 2005 12:16 AM
Daniel A. Olivas at The Elegant Variation reviews the new release of Chicano, thirty-five years after the landmark book by L.A. journalist Richard Vasquez first...
Posted October 21, 2005 01:12 AM
USC has in its archives some precious copies of a noteworthy Spanish-language newspaper in Yankee Los Angeles. El Clamor Público began publishing in 1855, five...
Posted October 17, 2005 07:09 PM
Happy news for the Angel City Press clan. Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History by Ernest Marquez won the Southern California Booksellers Association...
Posted October 16, 2005 02:33 PM
A sampling of starters for the day... ♦ Simon Wiesenthal died in Vienna at age 96, the center on Pico Boulevard announced. Standing ovations in every...
Posted September 20, 2005 01:54 AM
Franklin Avenue blogger Michael Schneider used the blackout to drive over to the Ambassador Hotel and pick up his purchase from Saturday's clearance auction. (On...
Posted September 12, 2005 06:36 PM
Posting will be light today... • Mayor Villaraigosa safaris out to Tujunga this morning to unveil his appointees to the Fire Commission. If you don't know...
Posted September 9, 2005 12:58 AM
• The L.A. Conservancy threw in the towel on the fight to save the Ambassador Hotel from demolition. The school board votes today on a plan...
Posted August 30, 2005 02:37 AM
Downtown's shuttered Herald Examiner building at 11th Street and Broadway is going to become offices and condos, with a surrounding residential complex featuring a pair...
Posted August 26, 2005 11:29 PM
Hard as it is to visualize, the urban sprawl that spills seaward from Compton to Long Beach and Redondo Beach used to be a giant,...
Posted August 19, 2005 10:49 AM
Shanghai-born Esther Wong began booking punk and new wave bands into her Polynesian-themed Chinatown club in 1978, hoping to increase the meager crowds. It worked....
Posted August 17, 2005 08:12 PM
Blogger Steve Smith posts his astonishment that longtime baseball figure Bobby Bragan just became, at age 87, the oldest pro baseball manager—and the oldest to...
Posted August 16, 2005 11:46 PM
Plans to demolish The Derby on Los Feliz Boulevard and build condos have got some Los Felizians in an uproar. The fledgling Save the...
Posted August 11, 2005 05:26 PM
The Beverly Hills home where George and Ira Gershwin wrote some of their famous songs has been quietly demolished despite efforts to save it, the...
Posted August 10, 2005 11:56 PM
Novelist Walter Mosley's latest Easy Rawlins mystery, Little Scarlet, is set right after the 1965 Watts riot. He writes on today's LAT op-ed page that...
Posted August 9, 2005 01:50 AM
This is going to be a light mid-summer week for me. But here's something to get you started. • The hoary old Olympic Auditorium—excuse me, the...
Posted August 1, 2005 01:50 AM
An L.A. judge ruled that the historic Ambassador Hotel can now be razed by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Los Angeles Conservancy and...
Posted July 26, 2005 12:40 AM
Dave Bullock is posting images and text from a 1906 driving guide to Los Angeles over at LAVoice.org. One of the first pages to be...
Posted July 13, 2005 12:26 AM
In this week's Downtown News, Jay Berman looks back at the story of legendary Los Angeles lawyer Joseph Scott. He arrived in town in 1893...
Posted June 6, 2005 02:40 PM
Chris Morris, music editor of the Hollywood Reporter, contributes a piece to this week's CityBeat about the new Ry Cooder album "Chavez Ravine." It was...
Posted June 2, 2005 01:28 PM
Alan Pavlik, editor and publisher of the online magazine Just Above Sunset, posted some photographs of flags arrayed on graves at the national cemetery in...
Posted May 30, 2005 10:43 PM
By this time tomorrow, every grave at Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood will be adorned with a small American flag. Plain markers exist for...
Posted May 27, 2005 11:41 AM
Legendary car customizer George Barris is putting seventy of his creations for Hollywood and other clients up for auction today at the Petersen Automotive Museum....
Posted May 14, 2005 10:28 AM
Today's Downtown News tells the obscure story of George Kress, the king of L.A. house movers back when it was common to see a home...
Posted April 18, 2005 01:39 AM
Franklin Avenue bloggers Mike and Maria drove past 4101 Wilshire this weekend and report, sadly, that Perino's — once L.A's most glamorous restaurant — has...
Posted April 18, 2005 12:43 AM
Los Angeles Time Machines is fascinated by Los Angeles restaurants and bars from the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s. Musso and Frank holds the place...
Posted April 14, 2005 04:42 PM
Imagine a blog that does nothing but noirishly count off the days in 1947 Los Angeles, felony by bloody felony. Stabbings, gunshots, suicides, interspersed with...
Posted March 23, 2005 11:12 PM
Turns out a second writer had her op-ed piece on the great rains of 1861-62 rejected by the Times. Frances Dinkelspiel, a Berkeley journalist and...
Posted March 23, 2005 08:59 PM
Ralph Shaffer is Professor Emeritus of History at Cal Poly Pomona (he compiled a searchable book of 1880s letters to the L.A. Times) and something...
Posted March 23, 2005 06:06 PM
Taking off from the news that Robinson's-May will soon vanish from the scene, Cathy Seipp revisits the department store past of Los Angeles in her...
Posted March 10, 2005 04:57 PM
A photographer at photoblogs.org has posted some tips for making last-hour pictures of the doomed Ambassador Hotel, which closed this week to on-site location work...
Posted March 5, 2005 02:11 PM
The landmark Ennis Brown house in Los Feliz has been ruled "uninhabitable" due to a crumbling retaining wall. Inspectors estimate that about $500,000 in rain...
Posted March 1, 2005 02:12 AM
University High School in West. L.A. has been around a long time. It was built shortly after the former city of Sawtelle agreed in 1922...
Posted February 11, 2005 02:10 AM
New Yorker editor Dana Goodyear's "Annals of L.A." story on the Ambassador Hotel is in this week's magazine (but, alas, not online.) She frames the...
Posted February 2, 2005 04:15 PM
Finishing off Monday's queue and looking into Tuesday: • LA.comfidential takes a look at the pro-Bush, anti-Hollywood billboards that Citizens United is buying near the Kodak...
Posted January 31, 2005 11:33 PM
Julius Shulman's files number more than 260,000 negatives, prints and transparencies, including some of the most recognized images of Los Angeles architecture. His iconic photograph...
Posted January 25, 2005 12:02 PM
On Kitty Felde's Talk of the City yesterday, author Douglas Flamming told some great stories about the little-known history of African Americans in early Los...
Posted January 18, 2005 05:58 PM
Suddenly Los Angeles is awash in lost murals by Mexican revolutionary artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1932, the comrade of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo...
Posted January 9, 2005 07:11 PM
There's another book of then-and-now photographs about Los Angeles coming. Los Angeles Views of the Past and Present opens with a foreword by Catherine Mullholland,...
Posted January 7, 2005 02:22 PM
The only Westwood Village building listed on the National Register of Historic Places is the more-or-less Spanish-style former Ralphs Market on Westwood Boulevard at Lindbrook...
Posted January 6, 2005 12:21 AM
A roundup of items in the news: Prostate cancer: Channel 7 weatherman Dallas Raines disclosed his disease on the air and underwent surgery today. The...
Posted January 3, 2005 10:06 PM
In a front page story in the latest L.A. Business Journal, Howard Fine says internal campaign polls show Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard Parks—the two council...
Posted January 3, 2005 04:41 PM
One of Los Angeles' more charming secrets is that there are still families here whose ancestors were original settlers of the pueblo and surrounding Spanish...
Posted January 3, 2005 02:49 AM
The Food Section, the New York-based website Gourmet calls "the consummate gastronomic blog," is devoting a week to Los Angeles culinary spots. Guest editor Kristin...
Posted December 16, 2004 12:57 PM
I missed this last week, and according to Google so did all the local media. Preservation magazine reports online that Sen. Robert Kennedy's murderer, Sirhan...
Posted December 10, 2004 04:43 PM
Today's political notes columns are light on City Hall items, but Rick Orlov does mention the new blog by Ken Reich, the former Times political...
Posted December 6, 2004 02:26 AM
The Times' society editor for 14 years (1971-1985) chronicled the days when the Chandler family reigned over Hancock Park and the prominent names in Los...
Posted December 3, 2004 09:20 AM
Long before Hollywood came into being, a photographer for motion picture pioneer Thomas Edison traveled the Southern Pacific railroad shooting the first movie footage of...
Posted November 28, 2004 03:47 PM
The Los Angeles Conservancy, Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, Mexican American Political Association and other groups announced lawsuits yesterday aimed at blocking plans to...
Posted November 24, 2004 01:35 AM
My post on last Sunday's story about the Black Dahlia case in the L.A. Times Magazine prompted the following email from Elisabeth Reynolds. Other thoughts...
Posted November 23, 2004 10:24 PM
The drive to win historic status for the residential center of old Van Nuys is picking up momentum. The Times covers the subject today (and...
Posted November 23, 2004 01:56 AM
Retired LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel is still trying to convince people that his father was a 1940s serial killer who mutilated Elizabeth Short, the...
Posted November 22, 2004 11:32 AM
I've been reminded that Norman "Jake" Jacoby, the veteran police reporter for whom the press room at Parker Center is named, was the subject of...
Posted November 11, 2004 11:34 PM
Jazz musician Jon Hartmann's third self-produced album pays tribute to the long-vanished Pacific Electric Railway "Red Cars" that used to rattle ever-so-slowly down the center...
Posted November 10, 2004 12:04 AM
I don't remember what got it started, but a recent search sent me hopping from place to place across the web and, ultimately, diverted me...
Posted November 9, 2004 09:12 PM
Bill Plaschke in today's Times reconstructs how the Standells, an L.A. garage band from the 1960s, showed up at Fenway Park before the second game...
Posted October 31, 2004 11:31 AM
On Radford just north of Ventura in Studio City, the offices near CBS where John Wayne hung out when the studio was Republic Pictures, where...
Posted October 27, 2004 11:39 PM
• The website of the city-landmark El Rey Theatre on Wilshire's Miracle Mile has a page of photos out of the past, showing both the interior...
Posted October 24, 2004 11:55 PM
One of the odd things about growing up in the San Fernando Valley (there were many) was hearing the nighttime roar of rocket engines and...
Posted October 21, 2004 01:59 AM
Buried at the end of today's Downtown News story on the Ambassador Hotel controversy, school board member David Tokofsky flings a stinging barb at the...
Posted October 18, 2004 11:09 AM
Supt. Roy Romer's plan for razing nearly all of the historic Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard squeaked through the school board on a 4-3 vote....
Posted October 13, 2004 12:36 AM
This is the week the school board might decide the fate of the Ambassador Hotel. On Sunday, board member David Tokofsky offered a new plan...
Posted October 11, 2004 02:41 AM
In September I posted about plans for razing the vaguely Moroccan-themed Beverly Theater and about the Art Deco office building next door, originally California Bank....
Posted October 7, 2004 02:19 PM
A couple of change-of-pace baseball items. Today, the Burbank Central Library opened an exhibition called "The Times They Were A-Changin': Baseball in the Age of...
Posted October 4, 2004 11:00 PM
Maxwell Kennedy, a son of slain Senator Robert F. Kennedy, held a news conference in MacArthur Park yesterday to say that his mother, Ethel, and...
Posted October 1, 2004 12:46 AM
That Moorish-themed building on Beverly Drive just off Wilshire that used to house Fiorucci—and most recently bore an Israeli Discount Bank sign—was the first movie...
Posted September 30, 2004 01:11 AM
Seymour Hersh chats about his book Chain of Command with Lawrence O'Donnell on The Politics of Culture Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. on KCRW (89.9 FM...
Posted September 20, 2004 10:55 PM
Questioning the facts and reasoning behind the lefty rhetoric of UC Irvine historian Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz and The Ecology of Fear...
Posted September 17, 2004 01:31 PM
The soccer field and subway tunnel mouth at 2nd Street and Glendale Boulevard near downtown received city designation as a historic-cultural monument, clearing the way...
Posted September 16, 2004 01:20 AM
In 1984, when Hennessey & Ingalls published a study of architect Myron Hunt's best work edited by the respected critic David Gebhard, the Ambassador Hotel...
Posted September 15, 2004 12:12 PM
One of the eight new Los Angeles Unified campuses to open this week is built on the site of the former Van Nuys Drive-In theatre...
Posted September 10, 2004 10:51 AM
Where else but here would deem an eight-story parking garage as a cultural monument. The Beaux Arts-style design by Curlett and Beelman at 816 S....
Posted August 6, 2004 10:50 PM
Preserve L.A. has an update on the old 1920s subway tunnel entrance visible on West 2nd Street at Beverly near downtown. There was a City...
Posted August 6, 2004 12:26 PM
MSNBC's gang of convention bloggers is a strange group. It crosses the spectrum from Pat Buchanan to Willie Brown and includes Ron Reagan and a...
Posted July 27, 2004 11:56 PM
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West will be announced today, the Times says. Bill Deverell, the historian and ex-Cal Tech professor now at...
Posted July 19, 2004 08:42 AM
Tim Wind was one of the LAPD officers videotaped kicking and striking Rodney King on a dark stretch of Foothill Boulevard in Lake View Terrace...
Posted July 12, 2004 12:02 AM
Robert Tagorda, who blogs at Priorities & Frivolities, posts that as he and his wife prepare to leave for Harvard, they will be making last...
Posted July 3, 2004 12:35 PM
Before he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrayed a paraplegic war veteran in The Men. For local history buffs, what's...
Posted July 2, 2004 09:45 AM
A little help for an L.A. freelance writer... Rodger Jacobs is looking for information on an effort in the 1960s to build an escape route...
Posted June 21, 2004 03:56 PM
On June 12 it will be ten years since the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman that made Bundy Drive, Rockingham Avenue and...
Posted June 6, 2004 01:57 AM
Get ready to hear yet again, over the next 24-48 hours, the story of how radio SigAlerts came to be part of the Los Angeles...
Posted June 3, 2004 03:44 PM
The silver, chandeliers, furnishings, a 1905 Steinway grand piano and everything else left from the old Perino's will be auctioned this Saturday at 7 p.m....
Posted June 1, 2004 11:41 PM
Today's Washington Post runs two unrelated dispatches from the California deserts. The first reports from the Flying J Travel Plaza in Barstow: Inside is a...
Posted June 1, 2004 01:44 AM
My favorite obituaries are of people I never heard of but wished I had. Claudia Luther did a nice job in the Times today with...
Posted May 22, 2004 12:01 PM
In the comments to Cello returned with damage, below, blogger "A Fly in the Wall" asks if the incredibly relieved Stradivarius-forgetter Peter Stumpf spoke up...
Posted May 19, 2004 02:36 PM
Before HBO or Blockbuster came along, selected parts of Los Angeles could see movies that were no longer in theaters on the legendary Z Channel....
Posted May 14, 2004 10:14 AM
Cybele at blogging.la has posted an item there (with pictures) on the display of old Los Angeles street lamps planted in the shopping center parking...
Posted April 15, 2004 12:17 PM
Caltech (soon to be USC) history professor William Deverell delivers a paean on the L.A. Times op-ed page: Kevin Starr is nothing short of the...
Posted April 13, 2004 02:12 AM
Last night's crowded (and reportedly under-catered) LA.com party was not the final event to be held in the once-grand, but long-abandoned Perino's after all. Collage...
Posted March 26, 2004 12:23 PM
An L.A. Times piece today by Stuart Silverstein reports on USC's recent academic hiring binge. Among the new professors is respected L.A. historian William Deverell,...
Posted March 19, 2004 11:22 AM
LA.com is making a marketing splash if nothing else, with ads visible around town and spots on KCRW. Now the portal website backed by Dean...
Posted March 15, 2004 01:02 AM
Tonight KCET's "Life & Times" (7 p.m.) looks back at the astonishing career of Paul Revere Williams, the first African American architect in Los Angeles....
Posted February 25, 2004 04:10 PM
In today's Downtown News, Michael Imlay looks into the colorful history (and the future) of the Hall of Justice downtown. Beaux-Arts in style, the 1925...
Posted February 16, 2004 11:29 AM
Blogger BoifromTroy is gay, Republican and lives in West Hollywood. Blogger Tiffany Stone is (apparently) none of those things. But after he wrote of his...
Posted February 13, 2004 01:04 AM
Collage Dance Theatre, the innovative company behind last year's "Sleeping with the Ambassador" performances inside the abandoned Wilshire Boulevard hotel, is looking at doing a...
Posted January 22, 2004 12:33 AM
In yesterday's LAT Book Review, David L. Ulin considers the newest study of Los Angeles by Cal Arts professor Norman M. Klein, a novella and...
Posted January 19, 2004 12:15 PM
In the L.A. Times food section today, Charles Perry unfolds the colorful past of theme restaurants in Los Angeles. He says it all began with...
Posted January 7, 2004 12:07 PM
The fight over the Ambassador Hotel just got more complicated, and the momentum may have shifted away from preservation. A community coalition with political connections...
Posted November 21, 2003 01:49 AM
PreserveLA.com calls itself "a forum and clearinghouse for the latest news, information, and techniques concerning historic preservation and the history of Los Angeles and Southern...
Posted November 18, 2003 02:21 PM
Ralph Shaffer is professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly Pomona and the historian who put together the website (and book) compiling letters published in...
Posted November 10, 2003 01:01 AM
Jon Weisman, who blogs at Dodger Thoughts, points me to a surprising and pleasing L.A. history website: walteromalley.com. Walter O'Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers and...
Posted November 9, 2003 11:02 PM
Robert Kardashian, the Simpson friend and lawyer who later questioned the football star's innocence, died last night of cancer. It was at Kardashian's Encino home...
Posted October 1, 2003 06:39 PM
I shouldn't have been surprised (end of post) that studio location filming irked parts of L.A. in the 1920s. An e-mailer writes that film crews...
Posted September 2, 2003 11:54 AM
Roger Vincent in the L.A. Times gives a good update on the probable fate of the old, elegant Perino's restaurant site on Wilshire: apartments. In...
Posted August 15, 2003 12:23 AM
In writing books about the city's past -- and learning that it pays to Google every topic and name, no matter how dated -- I've...
Posted August 14, 2003 04:42 PM
From The Smoking Gun: Ever wonder what's become of California's murderous Menendez brothers? Well, to be honest, neither has TSG. But that didn't stop us...
Posted August 14, 2003 01:34 AM
Warner Bros. has demolished the studio backlot's legendary western street, where movies dating back to Errol Flynn's day and TV series such as "Maverick" and...
Posted August 13, 2003 11:31 AM
Injected this quote into the Wilshire book tonight, and had to share it. “The street traffic congestion problem of Los Angeles is exceeded by that...
Posted August 12, 2003 01:30 AM
Freddie Blassie entertained Los Angeles as the most hated villain of local "professional" wrestling in the 1950s and 60s, when wrestling and roller derby were...
Posted June 4, 2003 08:12 AM
The teenage busboy photographed as he cradled the bloodied head of Robert F. Kennedy on the pantry floor at the Ambssador Hotel on June 5,...
Posted June 1, 2003 01:04 AM
Fun read on the Southern California beach and teen culture of the 1950s: Deanne Stillman's encounters with the original Gidget, posted at California Authors.com. As...
Posted May 28, 2003 11:30 PM
© 2003-2008 • About LA Observed • Contact the editor
| Downtown project stalled: This was to be a $125 million mixed-use development near the Historic Core, the Toy District and...
| More deli and meat selections, better signage and additional "international" products are in the works, according to the OC Register's...
| Stop me if you've read this one: While rooting around in the spam mailbox looking for authentic emails that somehow...
| The Lakers are challenged by Utah, while the Dodgers improve.
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