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, ...

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 ...

On August 19, 1949, the scene at 1999 West Adams Boulevard was festive. Prominent Angelenos gathered in the sleek lobby of the new Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. building, a gleaming ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Schaffer Residence in the Verdugo Hills is probably best known now as the house from Tom Ford's great-looking movie, A Single Man; it's one of architect John Lautner's most understated designs, ...

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 ...

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is one of the greatest examples of film noir ever produced—a deft thriller that doubles as a spellbinding meditation on love and its limitations. Nearly as intriguing ...

It was the hot, fraught summer of 1963. Every weekend 18-year-old college students Bobbie and Renee Hodges would trek over to the boiling, treeless Torrance housing tract of Southwood Riviera Royale, ...

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

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 ...