Dear readers, hate-readers, and vicious commenters, Googie. “Greenmailing.” NIMBYs. (So many NIMBYs!) Ugly buildings. Beautiful buildings. Maps. Maps. Maps ...

They arrived in sweeping evening gowns. In the cool March air of 1965, LA’s social and entertainment elite partied at the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard ...

Night of the Comet, a 1984 “B movie” about two Valley Girls navigating a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, was a minor film even in its day. Now the 35-year-old film feels more relevant than ever. The low ...

The fires would rage in pockets across the city. In the so-called “Mexican district”—epicenter of the 1924 outbreak of the ancient, dreaded plague—buildings were ripped apart, bulldozed, or simply ...

Phineas Banning, known as the “father of Los Angeles Harbor,” had been an enthusiastic operator in Southern California since he arrived via cargo ship in 1851. A native of Delaware, Banning and his ...

More than half a century after publishing the collections that established her reputation as a gimlet-eyed cultural critic—Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album—Joan Didion continues to be ...

From red Spanish Colonial rooftops to vibrant mosaics to rose pink bathroom vanities, Southern California is filled with tile. Whether big or small, monochromatic or multi-hued, tiles are commonplace ...

Los Angeles was Raymond Chandler’s muse, mistress, and his making. For his famous anti-hero, private eye Philip Marlowe, it is a torturous, nasty place filled with “tough-looking palm trees” and ...

There’s a black-and-white photograph taken in 1953 that shows a crowd of enraptured onlookers staring through the bullet-riddled windows of a Los Angeles diner, one woman cocking a painted fingernail ...

It’s Christmas Eve. As most of Los Angeles is tucked in bed waiting for Santa, hundreds of FBI and Los Angeles Police Department officers swarm around the gleaming Nakatomi tower, a half-built example ...

There are more 50,000 streets in Los Angeles County. They are named after cult leaders (L. Ron Hubbard Way), martyred astronauts (Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street), the view of a lighthouse (Signal ...

A new map of Los Angeles’s publicly owned land created by the city controller is intended to get residents thinking about how to maximize the potential of these often underutilized properties.