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 ...

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 ...

The Forest of Arden in Orange County’s Modjeska Canyon, where a Queen Anne revival-style cottage is surrounded by palms, white lilac, and crown of thorns planted during the Modjeska era. Los Angeles ...

In 1978, Los Angeles agreed to host the 1984 Summer Olympics and, as described in the official report of the games, a small, secretive organizing committee formed to oversee the delivery and ...

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

Two stray pit bulls swaggered like old pals toward the intersection of Florence and Normandie. On the northeast corner was Tom’s Liquor, on the southeast corner sat a Unocal station, and the northwest ...

As a child, Glen Norman had a streetlight directly in front of his family’s house in Westchester. It was a simple concrete post-top model, crowned with an acorn-shaped luminaire. He remembers how, ...

It was the early morning of July 19, 1949. Mobster Mickey Cohen was hanging out at Sherry’s, his favorite after-hours haunt at 9039 Sunset Boulevard. Dapper and dangerous, Cohen was holding court in ...

Picture this: You arrive in Los Angeles on a shiny, newfangled train that never blows smoke. As you look out the window, you pass by vistas of vineyards and orange and lemon trees ringed by snowcapped ...

It was November 12, 1966. The intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards teemed with hundreds of young people—fighting for their right to party past 10 p.m. The gathering, which began as a ...

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 ...