Topic Archive: Los Angeles history
Lots of festivities on tap, including musical performances and a big fireworks show tonight in Santa Monica Bay. It's likely to be a mob scene later on, so city officials...
Posted September 9, 2009 11:17 AM
OK I'm biased, but I thought we had a fun 30 minutes with authors Richard Rayner and John Buntin talking about Los Angeles' dark and storied past. Here's the audio...
Posted September 8, 2009 9:37 PM
The new episode of Vista LA that airs Sunday at 11:30 a.m. on Channel 7 focuses on recent improvements to MacArthur Park — led by the Levitt Pavilion — and...
Posted September 6, 2009 12:40 AM
Los Angeles photographer Phil Stern turns 90 tomorrow. That's his photo of Frank Sinatra lighting JFK's smoke. Vanity Fair celebrates the big day with an online piece by David Friend:...
Posted September 2, 2009 3:42 PM
The former Charles Manson follower who murdered actress Sharon Tate in Benedict Canyon 40 years ago is reportedly dying of brain cancer and 85% paralyzed. Supporters want her to be...
Posted September 2, 2009 8:24 AM
Along with all the other L.A. milestones this summer, this week is the 45th anniversary of Bob Eubanks and KRLA bringing the Beatles to the Hollywood Bowl. Steven Cuevas had...
Posted August 20, 2009 7:09 PM
Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme is the woman who pointed a gun at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento in 1975. Before that, she was the Charles Manson follower who served as the...
Posted August 14, 2009 8:58 AM
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...
Posted August 13, 2009 10:58 AM
Hat tip to the New Beverly Theater's Twitter poster for noticing that the Mann Festival has put up a final message to patrons. Known previously as the Egyptian (and as...
Posted July 30, 2009 11:35 PM
Frances Dinkelspiel, the author who talks tonight at ALOUD about "Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California," is also president of the board at the...
Posted July 16, 2009 3:25 PM
With local media obsessing a bit this week on the 50th anniversary of the partial meltdown of an experimental nuclear reactor above Chatsworth, here's the first comprehensive news story on...
Posted July 14, 2009 4:56 PM
In this issue of Los Angeles Magazine and on the website, Steve Oney revisits the summer of 1969 when Hollywood figures, and then much of the city, were terrified by...
Posted July 2, 2009 8:35 AM
As part of the promotion for the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno, GQ magazine runs photos of Cohen-as-Bruno cavorting on the field with the football team at Birmingham High...
Posted June 29, 2009 4:30 PM
The Orange Line busway extension from Woodland Hills to Chatsworth will follow the route of old Southern Pacific railroad tracks that crossed the Valley starting in 1888. The trains carried...
Posted June 25, 2009 10:57 PM
Photographer Gary Leonard has what looks to be a very cool exhibit up in his Broadway gallery: prints made from Kodachrome slides he saved from the trash showing Pacific Outdoor...
Posted June 24, 2009 12:42 AM
My mention last night of UCLA students protesting a Rose Bowl snub on the San Diego Freeway in 1966 prompted an LA Observed reader to remember a photo he'd seen...
Posted June 19, 2009 9:34 AM
This weekend is the 40th anniversary of Newport '69, the first — and last — ginormous rock festival to be staged within a leafy Los Angeles suburb. On June 20,...
Posted June 17, 2009 12:01 PM
News reports of a Crips gang party in Studio City on Wednesday night made me smile, if only because of the location. The stories gave the club's name as Platinum...
Posted June 12, 2009 11:49 PM
Seven Los Angeles buildings considered important in African American history — including three designed by architect Paul Williams — have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. They...
Posted June 12, 2009 8:45 AM
Coming up on 40 years since the Sharon Tate murders in Benedict Canyon, any mention of the Charles Manson family still generates a predictable surge of traffic on this website...
Posted June 5, 2009 8:59 AM
The myth of the lizard people who dug tunnels under Downtown gets a new retelling on Fox 11 News' "fringe segment," featuring Los Angeles Public Library maps expert Glen Creason....
Posted April 15, 2009 9:17 AM
For some reason, Los Angeles airfields used to open almost next to each other. There were three or four in and adjacent to Burbank, another in Glendale, and another on...
Posted April 3, 2009 12:48 AM
Cool event on Saturday for lovers of the city and its roots: MYhistoricLA, the public kickoff to SurveyLA, the first-ever comprehensive survey of L.A.'s historic buildings and resources. Time constraints...
Posted April 3, 2009 12:21 AM
Charles Manson is now 74 years old and has been in state prison for almost 40 years — this time around. Manson had been locked up before he moved to...
Posted March 18, 2009 9:02 PM
Ron Dickson, who writes about the aviation history of the San Fernando Valley, sends along this photo of the terminal and tower at Burbank before Lockheed took over and stucco-ized...
Posted March 18, 2009 12:42 PM
The Burbank Times did a nice job with the 1959 photographs that were recovered from a time capsule dug out of a bridge in Burbank last month. The publication put...
Posted March 17, 2009 5:49 PM
James Caughey "Coy" Watson, Jr. was the eldest of the Watson offspring — six boys and three girls — who made a mark in Los Angeles first as child actors,...
Posted March 16, 2009 11:15 PM
I'm not sure that I've seen color photos of the wartime aircraft workers, and certainly not any like these from the Library of Congress stash on Flickr. That's been a...
Posted January 21, 2009 12:53 PM
Former president Richard Nixon began his memoir with the line "I was born in the house my father built." Well, in 1959 his mother told the Los Angeles Times he...
Posted January 12, 2009 11:39 PM
The Great White Steamer that ferried visitors from San Pedro to Catalina Island for a half century has taken its last voyage. Mexican crews have begun demolishing the partly sunken...
Posted December 29, 2008 12:37 AM
Ken Gonzales-Day, a photographer and Scripps College professor, wrote the book "Lynching in the West: 1850-1935." He has traveled California trying to locate the actual trees used by lynch mobs....
Posted December 5, 2008 12:57 AM
Two pieces in the current Jewish Journal — by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky — frame the Proposition 8 battle and the ascent of Rep. Henry...
Posted November 28, 2008 7:04 PM
Owner Robert Bucksbaum, who saved the Crest Theatre on Westwood Boulevard and turned it into one of the most fun movie venues in L.A., has listed it for sale after...
Posted November 21, 2008 3:57 PM
For a couple of years I've been anticipating the biography of Isaias Hellman, who had a hand in so much early Los Angeles history as the power behind Farmers and...
Posted November 18, 2008 11:21 PM
President Harry Truman spoke to the Los Angeles Press Club on June 14, 1948 — yes, the Press Club was apparently a bigger deal then — and he received a...
Posted November 18, 2008 12:39 AM
I asked readers to update me on what's in the Sherman Oaks space at 13359 Ventura Blvd. where mafia hangout Rondelli's was located in the 1950s. Le Fondue Bourguignonne recently...
Posted November 3, 2008 1:12 AM
I enjoy Los Angeles history as much as the next guy, and probably more than the guy beside him. Yet I haven't felt motivated to read the L.A. Times' seven-part...
Posted October 31, 2008 1:58 AM
I put together a four-minute video from the weekend's Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at USC on the two documentaries I caught up with — "Chicano Rock" and "The Eastsiders" —...
Posted October 28, 2008 11:38 PM
Los Angeles is fortunate to have as many historical archives as it does. For the third year, dozens of them are strutting their stuff today for the enlightenment and entertainment...
Posted October 25, 2008 9:18 AM
Lloyd Thaxton created and hosted a popular dance show for teenagers in the 1960s, later produced segments for NBC's "Today" and directed “Fight Back! With David Horowitz,” and most recently...
Posted October 7, 2008 5:42 PM
"Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles" will be published Thursday by The Overlook Press/Penguin U.S.A. The book, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, looks like it...
Posted September 30, 2008 9:58 AM
A 1941 Richard Neutra house was recently moved from Brentwood to Angelino Heights. Photographer Brian Thomas Jones has a slide show up at LATimes.com. Though it's rarely seen now now,...
Posted August 28, 2008 9:37 AM
This weekend I saw the recently finished Belmont Station apartments on the old soccer field at 2nd Street and Beverly near Belmont High and wondered if the subway tunnel opening...
Posted August 21, 2008 9:20 AM
A generation of Los Angeles kids grew up watching cartoons on Channel 9 and drinking their milk when Engineer Bill or his announcer said "green light" — and stopping...
Posted August 14, 2008 11:44 PM
Unfortunately, the Daily News this morning bannered Dana Bartholomew's story saying the hotel and banquet center in Studio City would close. It's still big on the website. Miscommunication — but...
Posted July 16, 2008 4:41 PM
The quirky Sportsmen's Lodge hotel on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City will shut down Dec. 31, the Daily News says. [* But the paper was wrong. See below.] The 11-acre...
Posted July 16, 2008 9:25 AM
District Attorney Steve Cooley sent a letter to the chairman of the state Board of Parole Hearings strongly opposing the compassionate release from prison of Manson family killer Susan Atkins....
Posted July 14, 2008 11:10 AM
Fifty years ago this week, Los Angeles voters narrowly OK'd a ballot measure approving the city's gift of land near Chavez Ravine for the Dodgers' Walter O'Malley to build his...
Posted July 4, 2008 12:28 AM
Tygiel, a professor at San Francisco State, was the author of "The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal in the Roaring Twenties," the fascinating story of C.C Julian...
Posted July 3, 2008 11:34 PM
Frank Girardot, city editor at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, also posted his paper's original 1958 coverage of the murder of writer James Ellroy's mother. In the post Girardot describes...
Posted June 24, 2008 11:12 PM
Today is the 50th anniversary of a story hitting the Los Angeles papers that would become iconic in local literature. On June 22, 1958, 10-year-old James Ellroy came home in...
Posted June 23, 2008 7:23 PM
I really like this photo of Venice from 1957, showing the lineage of the ocean-front condos and converted beach shacks that are now so desirable. It's by Charles Brittin, the...
Posted June 19, 2008 9:12 AM
Susan Atkins, center, did the stabbing of actress Sharon Tate during the August 1969 murders in Benedict Canyon that are popularly blamed on Charles Manson. Atkins was the killer who...
Posted June 12, 2008 11:41 PM
Brittin was the in-house photographer of the Los Angeles avant-garde artists who made the Ferus Gallery legendary in the 1950s and 1960s, then he faded from view. Now the Getty...
Posted June 2, 2008 11:53 PM
Jennifer Lerew, an animation artist who blogs at The Blackwing Diaries, has posted some photos of women who worked during the Depression at Disney's old Hyperion studio. in what I...
Posted May 21, 2008 9:15 AM
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 crime scene shots that the...
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 appear to show that L.C...
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 Stadium. He was "the top...
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 hiding, she pleaded guilty 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 with the Delfonics and on...
Posted February 27, 2008 7:35 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 old Los Angeles Examiner. USC...
Posted February 25, 2008 1:08 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 Estates neighborhood. Turns out it...
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 1925 by Henry Lion recently...
Posted February 15, 2008 4:45 PM
Crews are on hand today at the old Ambassador Hotel site on Wilshire Boulevard, taking down the Cocoanut Grove, ballrooms and last remaining remnants. The Los Angeles Conservancy recently gave...
Posted February 12, 2008 1:43 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 $125 million. The familiar landmark...
Posted January 30, 2008 3:59 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 corner of Wilshire and Highland...
Posted January 7, 2008 1:24 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 of being torn down. The...
Posted December 23, 2007 4:53 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 at that spot. (It's where,...
Posted December 16, 2007 9:22 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) by Carolyn Kozo Cole. The...
Posted November 19, 2007 9:01 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 by an owner intent on...
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 old Carthay Circle Theater, where...
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 Los Angeles" at the Central...
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 researchers pored through the municipal...
Posted September 26, 2007 9:32 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 year, 1957, is a big...
Posted September 24, 2007 8:26 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 or can be heard online....
Posted August 14, 2007 3:36 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 Michael Walker blogs. The hotel...
Posted August 6, 2007 8:56 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 supported them. Places like Santa...
Posted August 1, 2007 9:06 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 of his most admired images...
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 the civil rights era at...
Posted July 12, 2007 3:31 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 viewed from a car heading...
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 on stage at Devonshire Downs...
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 two other farm towns —...
Posted June 20, 2007 4:25 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 is adding a couple of...
Posted May 7, 2007 9:01 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. The Cinerama's super-wide curved screen...
Posted April 9, 2007 8:45 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 dad's garage and in 1947,...
Posted March 24, 2007 9:42 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 letters, smuggled directives from Moscow,...
Posted March 20, 2007 8:51 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 1969, as a senior 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, 1976, the Cal State Northridge...
Posted January 25, 2007 2:35 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 spend some time. His pages...
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 had been issued, activists say,...
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 a sermon on Feb. 26,...
Posted January 4, 2007 4:47 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 the street scene in the...
Posted January 3, 2007 2:00 PM
One thing I can add to the Times' appreciation today of It's a Wonderful Life, the film classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed: all that fake snow was created...
Posted December 23, 2006 1:27 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 track (even Demi Moore crooning...
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 some giant tanks that as...
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 the incident has prompted "outrage...
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 a list: 225 places of...
Posted October 9, 2006 5:30 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 South-Central after they turned African...
Posted October 8, 2006 1:41 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 father Richard Neutra, who died...
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 the theory in his introduction...
Posted September 5, 2006 2:48 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 mystery sites later this year....
Posted August 30, 2006 8:52 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 a contributor in the early...
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 crumbling buildings will be dismantled...
Posted July 20, 2006 9:26 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 and somewhat historical connection between...
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 of the past. Several readers...
Posted July 13, 2006 1:33 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 term. The caption info identifies...
Posted July 11, 2006 5:46 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 Beverly pony rides. Mark Paul...
Posted June 28, 2006 1:09 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 at 5209 Wilshire Boulevard, just...
Posted June 21, 2006 1:05 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 Angeles’ history and landscape." Sites...
Posted June 12, 2006 8:45 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 over. "It's always been such...
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, the so-called port of Los...
Posted June 2, 2006 8:15 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. (I'd say this even if...
Posted June 1, 2006 7:05 PM
♦ Just how capriciously does the county apply its practice of releasing jail inmates early? Quite, according to DA Steve Cooley. ♦ The Daily News endorsed Cindy Montañez in the...
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 Los Angeles National Cemetery. Boy...
Posted May 29, 2006 1:09 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 Westwood Boulevard, Kinross and Broxton...
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 move over to the NuWilshire....
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 Bradley in 1973. At a...
Posted April 20, 2006 4:28 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: The Mob, the Mogul and...
Posted April 14, 2006 9:27 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 is a senior editor and...
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 how, when he was the...
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 banners for the Korean-oriented Western...
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 the federal government razed the...
Posted March 15, 2006 3:12 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 life in Boyle Heights from...
Posted March 12, 2006 4:11 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 getting a $20 million makeover...
Posted February 14, 2006 1:11 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 and other long-gone amusements show...
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, people still can't agree on...
Posted February 9, 2006 3:30 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 busy morning here at the...
Posted February 9, 2006 2:17 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 scene are Union soldiers and...
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 a comic, more bad news...
Posted February 3, 2006 8:56 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 pictures later, but he threw...
Posted January 16, 2006 5:21 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 on Los Angeles car chases...plus...
Posted January 16, 2006 3:43 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 from someone watching over my...
Posted January 15, 2006 6:43 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 there were active gray whale...
Posted January 11, 2006 3:15 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) is where the Pentecostal movement...
Posted January 8, 2006 1:12 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 historic significance to Los Angeles...
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: Today's Papers ♦ Unless the L.A....
Posted January 4, 2006 2:23 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 See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register...
Posted January 3, 2006 3:02 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 streets. The answer was no:...
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 long romance with Linda Ronstadt...
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 speedway that stood where the...
Posted December 18, 2005 3:25 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 he likes where Koreatown is...
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. I've scoured the L.A. mountains...
Posted December 14, 2005 3:06 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 a spirited but unsuccessful salvage...
Posted December 13, 2005 2:55 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 be missed when if they...
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 pols: two Congress members, two...
Posted December 1, 2005 1:16 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 big mansion in Pasadena, and...
Posted November 30, 2005 1:45 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 to Pasadena, the NYT says....
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 down to the January 15...
Posted November 22, 2005 2:56 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 interior and removed nearly all...
Posted November 11, 2005 6:25 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 education campaign to convince Valley...
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 of children told amazing stories...
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 made it into print. Rubén...
Posted October 21, 2005 1:12 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 years after California became a...
Posted October 17, 2005 7:09 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 award for nonfiction on Saturday...
Posted October 16, 2005 2:33 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 temple in L.A. on Friday...
Posted September 20, 2005 1:54 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 the way, he saw an...
Posted September 12, 2005 6:36 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 where that is, well, it's...
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 to donate $4.9-million toward conserving...
Posted August 30, 2005 2:37 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 of high-rise towers designed by...
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, grassy Spanish rancho that is...
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. Between there and Madame Wong's...
Posted August 17, 2005 8:12 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 be tossed from a game....
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 Derby Coalition doesn't have a...
Posted August 11, 2005 5:26 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 L.A. Conservancy announced Wednesday. A...
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 Watts "was a mass political...
Posted August 9, 2005 1:50 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 Grand Olympic—has been sold to...
Posted August 1, 2005 1:50 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 other groups had sued to...
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 uploaded features the "new" Alexandria...
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 and practiced law here for...
Posted June 6, 2005 2:40 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 inspired by Don Normark’s book...
Posted June 2, 2005 1:28 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 Westwood. It's not clear whether...
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 more than 85,000 veterans and...
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. Barris became world famous for...
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 (or a school or store)...
Posted April 18, 2005 1:39 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 been razed. Knew it was...
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 of honor on the main...
Posted April 14, 2005 4:42 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 photographed visits to the scenes...
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 books blogger at Ghost Word...
Posted March 23, 2005 8:59 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 of a stickler about the...
Posted March 23, 2005 6:06 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 "From the Left Coast" column...
Posted March 10, 2005 4:57 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 in preparation for its eventual...
Posted March 5, 2005 2:11 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 and mud damage has already...
Posted March 1, 2005 2:12 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 to be annexed into Los...
Posted February 11, 2005 2:10 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 Wilshire Boulevard hotel's fate as...
Posted February 2, 2005 4:15 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 Theatre in time for the...
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 of Case Study House #22...
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 Angeles (including in the expedition...
Posted January 18, 2005 5:58 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 came to L.A. to teach...
Posted January 9, 2005 7:11 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, the historian and granddaughter of...
Posted January 7, 2005 2:22 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 Avenue. It was designed by...
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 station website has video of...
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 members in the mayor's race—ahead...
Posted January 3, 2005 4:41 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 and Mexican ranchos. Bob Pool...
Posted January 3, 2005 2:49 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 Franklin, a recent L.A. arrival,...
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 B. Sirhan, has sued the...
Posted December 10, 2004 4:43 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 writer, that we reported on...
Posted December 6, 2004 2:26 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 Angeles society included the Reagans...
Posted December 3, 2004 9:20 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 locales in the West. Snippets...
Posted November 28, 2004 3:47 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 raze the Ambassador Hotel. Their...
Posted November 24, 2004 1:35 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 are welcome, as are signed...
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 mentions me). Patricia Ward Biederman...
Posted November 23, 2004 1:56 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 so-called Black Dahlia. His book,...
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 a lengthy 1986 profile in...
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 of Los Angeles streets. From...
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 onto the subject of old...
Posted November 9, 2004 9:12 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 of the World Series playing...
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 MTM writers turned out sitcoms...
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 and (more interesting to me)...
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 seeing a yellow glow light...
Posted October 21, 2004 1:59 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 Los Angeles Conservancy. They are...
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. In its place will be...
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 that he says could spare...
Posted October 11, 2004 2:41 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. I included a so-so photo,...
Posted October 7, 2004 2:19 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 Aquarius." It's about "the impact...
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 six of his siblings want...
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 house in Beverly Hills. It's...
Posted September 30, 2004 1:11 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 or live on the web)....
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 is a recurring Los Angeles...
Posted September 17, 2004 1:31 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 for a new housing development...
Posted September 16, 2004 1:20 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 wasn't included. His Huntington 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 on Roscoe Boulevard. Later this...
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. Grand Avenue downtown got its...
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 Hall hearing today about the...
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 couple of Democrats steeped in...
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 USC, is the director. Seminars...
Posted July 19, 2004 8:42 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 back in 1991. A rookie...
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 visits to favorite spots. He...
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 notable abut this 1950 film...
Posted July 2, 2004 9:45 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 (in the event of nuclear...
Posted June 21, 2004 3:56 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 Johnnie Cochran world famous. In...
Posted June 6, 2004 1:57 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 lexicon. Loyd Sigmon, who created...
Posted June 3, 2004 3:44 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. After that, it's curtains for...
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 trucker's paradise: $10 for the...
Posted June 1, 2004 1:44 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 Edna Lillich Davidson, who hosted...
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 for Kato Kaelin during the...
Posted May 19, 2004 2:36 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. In the 1970s and '80s,...
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 lot at the corner of...
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 John Muir of our times....
Posted April 13, 2004 2:12 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 Dance Theatre, the troupe that...
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, who is moving over from...
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 Singleton and others will open...
Posted March 15, 2004 1:02 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. When his practice took off...
Posted February 25, 2004 4:10 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 hall is where big trials...
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 desire for fondue, she got...
Posted February 13, 2004 1:04 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 show at the shuttered Perino's....
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 accompanying CD-ROM called Bleeding Through:...
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 The Jail in Silver Lake...
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 came out Thursday for razing...
Posted November 21, 2003 1:49 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 California." Organizer Christopher Hetzel writes...
Posted November 18, 2003 2:21 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 the L.A. Times in the...
Posted November 10, 2003 1:01 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 brought major league baseball to...
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 where Simpson began his notorious...
Posted October 1, 2003 6:39 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 were bothersome even earlier: I...
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 its day Perino's was perhaps...
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 stumbled into marvelous online troves...
Posted August 14, 2003 4:42 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 from obtaining the homicidal duo's...
Posted August 14, 2003 1:34 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 "Cheyenne" were filmed. Laramie Street...
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 of no other city." The...
Posted August 12, 2003 1:30 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 first hugely popular on television....
Posted June 4, 2003 8:12 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, 1968, is now a 53-year-old...
Posted June 1, 2003 1:04 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 Stillman, a Los Angeles author...
Posted May 28, 2003 11:30 PM
