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Save the Parrot Tree at Santa Ana Main Library

Something worrying has been happening in the City of Santa Ana: bureaucrats, rushing to spend a $9.3 Million critical maintenance and infrastructure grant from the California State Library “Building Forward” program before the March 31, 2026 completion deadline and...

The Literary Map of Los Angeles

In 1985, the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Silverman and Molly Maguire published the first of what the Library of Congress would later call “the decade’s most exciting American maps,” The Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Los Angeles. This was soon...

Bungalow Court Housing in Los Angeles Mapped

Bungalow courts are a distinctive, desirable and unfortunately endangered early 20th century form of workforce housing. These modest double (or sometimes single) rows of small cottages with shared community green space are usually under rent control, and are much...

Los Angeles Air Raid Siren No 184 Falls

Q: If a 1950s air raid siren falls in South Los Angeles, will anybody come and get it? Obsolete infrastructure can be beautiful in its decay, but not when it fails, spilling potentially deadly hunks of steel onto private property. When Siren No. 184 came down, we got...

Raymond & Cissy Chandler in the 1950 census

Happy 1950 U.S. Census release day! It’s 72 years since enumerators with cute little clipboards and mechanical pencils fanned out across post-war America and asked every soul they could buttonhole for their stats. A decade ago, I blogged about the 1940 Census...

Save Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak

Contrary to the story reported by CBS Saturday Morning on February 18, 2023, Cornelius Johnson’s Olympic Oak and family residence was not yet a protected Los Angeles landmark! On May 10, 2023, City Council finally voted to declare it a protected site. We hope...

The Leland Hotel, Empty No More

There’s something wonderful happening on “The Nickel,” the portion of Fifth Street that connects the gritty Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles with the business district to the West: the early 20th century residency hotels whose owner Izek...

Monastery of the Angels Advocacy Campaign

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 9/25/23 – With the announcement that the Monastery of the Angels is now being pitched to market rate developers as a clean slate that can be 100% demolished, we call for a halt to the RFP process directed by a commercial real estate agent...

The Hotel Barclay, Empty No More

UPDATE, JUNE 2023: Welcome, Ghost Adventures fans! You might remember seeing our Kim Cooper on the Black Dahlia episode in 2016, where she tried to teach Zak how to say “Figueroa,” or in Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. We love the Hotel...
Big John Maljevic, 1927-2021

Big John Maljevic, 1927-2021

Yesterday we lost Big John, our dear friend who was the most extraordinary portal to the weird, creative, anything-goes Los Angeles that used to be. John was a master craftsman, a builder of car washes, a teetotaler nightclub owner, designer of crooked gambling...