Archive: Car culture

Afternoon fire at Pick Your Part required 150 firefighters to knock down.

Lost LA's Nathan Masters curates a look at the urban carnage wrought by construction of the Hollywood Freeway in the 1950s.

All the junkyard cars are gone from U-Pick Parts and Aadlen Brothers Auto Wrecking in Sun Valley, after 53 years serving car owners and Hollywood.

The creator of the Batmobile and many other "kustom" cars for Hollywood was first a legend in the LA car culture.

AAdlen Brothers Auto Wrecking, an institution in Sun Valley for 53 years, has supplied or been in a lot of movies, TV episodes and music videos.

There used to be a car club in Los Angeles -- maybe still is -- devoted to 1957 Chevys. The hold of that model and year is now the subject of a book on the backstory of a single car.

Deep collections of photos showing the faded Wednesday night car culture tradition don't really exist. These photos by Ricard McCloskey are fun to look at.

Edwin C. Krupp, the longtime director of Griffith Observatory, bought his 1968 Chevrolet Camaro new when he was a grad student. It's got 479,000 miles and no power steering or brakes. ABC7's Dave Kunz checks it out.

Sunday's "heart of LA" CicLAvia route drew a good crowd. The Metro trains in and out of downtown were certainly hopping.

Forget Downtown. Gehry still agrees with his pitch of ten years ago: MOCA and the cathedral should be on Wilshire Boulevard and his signature Walt Disney Hall should have been built in Westwood (or further west.)

Jeffries was one of Los Angeles car culture's "preeminent automotive sculptors and engineers." He began pinstriping with Von Dutch in the early 1950s and settled into the Valley.

Starting this month, museum visitors who take a guided tour on weekends and pay an extra $25 will get to see the special cars kept out view in the garage.

The Bob's Big Boy in Torrance is set to close Sept. 3. Cause of death? "A general lack of sales," the owner says. Boy, Bob's used to be big in LA.

Robert Russell, who lives in Texas, told Los Angeles County sheriff's officials that he had never given up searching for the 1967 Austin-Healey. It was stolen from his Philadelphia home in 1970 — the morning after his second date with his future wife.

Los Angeles car culture never saw anyone like Big Willie Robinson — or needed anyone quite so much. In the mid 1960s, when baby boomers were racing hot rods and fighting each other and the cops all around town, he created the International Brotherhood of Street Racers and brought some order to the subculture. (Big Willie stood 6'6" and people listened.) I'm guessing he was the only 6'6" black man to speak at Otis Chandler's memorial service. Tributes, backstory and video

Carroll Shelby, the auto racing legend who died last week in Dallas at age 89, apparently divided his time recently between Texas and Beverly Hills. The Southern California chapters of his career, though, are a pretty important part of the story.

The cherry-red Porsche 930 Turbo reported stolen in Las Vegas in 1988 was headed to the Netherlands.