Heading south, it always surprises me how quickly downtown Los Angeles gives way to raw industry. The average building height drops precipitously as the average building width expands enormously, into proportions befitting warehouses, factories, cold storage facilities, and “suppliers” of every kind. Such a streetscape may appeal only to the sort of urban photographer inclined […]
The homes of Hancock Park, while nostalgic, didn’t set off Los Angeles’ interest in architectural revival. Some builders looked backward here even as others looked most enthusiastically forward, and their collective effect on the environment remains in the hills of Los Feliz, five miles to the northeast. There you find examples of Beaux-Arts, Art Deco, Spanish, […]
When I arrived in Los Angeles, I conducted my daily exploration of the city on a bicycle, which remains, as a result, my primary mode of transportation. (The trains rank second, then, when it comes down to it, the buses.) Many an Angeleno, so I’ve gathered since first setting out on two wheels, would have expected me to […]
“So many people wanna cruise on Crenshaw on Sunday,” raps Skee-Lo on his 1995 hit “I Wish”. “Well then, I’mma have to get in my car and go.” He even gives directions: “You know I take the 110 until the 105” — from the relatively venerable Harbor Freeway to the then-brand-new Century Freeway — “get […]
We must make peace with the fact that some people arrive in Los Angeles expecting to spot celebrities. Nine times out of ten, though, they board the plane home disappointed; this city fosters a secretive, detached celebrity culture, the uppermost sector of which somehow walls itself off completely from open society. Public figures of slightly […]
The stories of certain Los Angeles neighborhoods seem easy to tell. Sometimes their geography, architecture, and apparent population practically tell it for you. Boyle Heights, for instance, located just east of downtown over the river, looks and feels like a district that has drifted far from its original purposes. Like Westlake, the neighborhood around MacArthur Park, […]
The Expo Line may not come to stop in the middle of Sawtelle, but it can already carry you somewhat closer to the center of an even better-known west-side neighborhood: Culver City, which — the name doesn’t lie — actually counts as a city on its own. People seem, generally, to know that it enjoys this […]
In 1965, the New Yorker published a series of articles on Los Angeles by “far-flung correspondent” Christopher Rand, then known by the magazine’s readers for his dispatches from other such exotic locales as Greece, India, Hong Kong, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two years later, these became the book “Los Angeles: The Ultimate City,” which, despite its […]
People turn up in Watts with all kinds of expectations, most of them fearful. Not-so-recent films and even less recent news stories having prepared them for the worst, they still find themselves unready for the most unsettling quality of all: the way that, despite living under the burden of such a loaded place name, it […]
Downtown’s skyline appears to rise suddenly, due in part to contrast with the many low-rise miles surrounding it. But a handful of these skyscrapers look even taller, as I explain to visiting friends already vaguely familiar with them from countless establishing shots, for the simple reason that they stand on a hill. Sometimes I get […]