Archive: Wilshire corridor

Westwood Village, once the place where big films opened, is about to be down to just two remaining movie houses.

Magdi Hanna never saw a jukebox growing up in Egypt. Now he is one of the last to repair the icons of 20th century America.

The Fine Arts movie house on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, dark for five years, reopens Sept. 18. Opened in 1937 as the Wilshire Regina.

The 13-0 vote allows construction to begin soon at the former May Co. building at Wilshire and Fairfax.

My post for Memorial Day includes a book excerpt and a visit to Los Angeles National Cemetery.

Wayne Ratkovich says that getting a historic designation on a building can be a good thing. He should know.

Obamajam potential looks to be centered in Hancock Park and around the Four Seasons Hotel this afternoon and evening, then tomorrow in Brentwood and downtown at Trade-Tech.

Peter Zumthor's new design spares acreage around the La Brea Tar Pits and has the initial blessing of Mayor Eric Garcetti, LACMA director Michael Govan and Jane Pisano of the Natural History Museum.

Garcetti, Yaroslavsky and others witnessed the signing of papers this morning in Washington. "As public transit milestones go, they don’t get much bigger than this," Yaroslavsky blogged.

The restaurant at Wilshire and Doheny has met a need through the years: open late, big menu, long counter and a few dishes to come back for. It also has an LA Observed connection.

The long-closed Robinsons store beside the Beverly Hilton near the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards is being razed (but apparently not today) to make way for a big new development called 9900 Wilshire. This mid-century modern Robinsons had a lot of fans.

They had a huge turnout last year when the route followed Wilshire and it's the same course — between Grand Avenue downtown (in front of the One Wilshire telecom switching building) and Fairfax Avenue. Here's my guide to interesting sights again.

Restructuring Occidental Petroleum will give up its longtime home at the busiest intersection in Los Angeles. “Energy companies feel very welcome in Houston and in Texas,” says the head of the LA Chamber of Commerce.

Barbra Streisand and Mayor Eric Garcetti were among the attendees at the Fremont Place home of "Everybody Loves Raymond" creator Phil Rosenthal.

Architects Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali have unveiled plans to adapt the old May Co. department store into the motion picture museum Hollywood (and Los Angeles) have never had.

The Miracle Mile office tower formerly named for Variety (and before that for People's Bank) is getting a new top-floor occupant: SBE, the lifestyle and hospitality company headed by Sam Nazarian.

Senator John F. Kennedy's helicopter lands on the front lawn at the Ambassador Hotel, possibly in 1960. (The Ames Brothers are on the marquee at the Cocoanut Grove.)

You might remember a couple of years ago when we posted a video featuring two throwback businesses that have survived in the Westlake neighborhood: McManus and Morgan, purveyor of fine art papers, and its neighbor on 7th Street, Aardvark Letterpress.

The way the online world, the media and local institutions abuse both the subject of LA history and the generally lazy news trope of anniversary stories, it's surprising this doesn't happen more.

Soon after work wraps up in January on the new freeway ramps where the 405 crosses over Wilshire Boulevard, crews will begin tearing up Wilshire all over again — this time to add a dedicated bus rapid transit lane west of the freeway.

Boyle Heights, Wilshire Boulevard Temple and Gov. Jerry Brown all come in for some East Coast observation. Brown at 75 "is the oldest governor in the nation and about to become the longest-serving governor in the history of California."

Rather than abandon Koreatown for the Westside, the temple leadership decided to stay and fix up the fading synagogue, under the guidance of architect Brenda Levin. Jewish Journal editor Rob Eshman is glad they did.

Maurice and Paul Marciano of the Guess Inc. jeans empire paid $8 million for the Millard Sheets-designed venue. They plan to renovate and use it to collect their art, with occasional public showings.

it's surprising and unsettling when LA institutions, even the unofficial ones, suddenly vanish from the scene. The Irish-style tavern announced today on its Facebook page that it will close at the end of business on Sunday.

You might remember that after the recent Ciclavia event from Downtown to the beach along Venice Boulevard, USC professor Clifford V. Johnson had some constructive criticism — some advice to help the organizers of Ciclavia regain some of the day's mojo. Well, Sunday's event was "almost perfect," he says. With photos.

Going to Ciclavia today? I suggest some of favorite hidden gems and lesser-known spots to take in while you are out exploring. Some are taken from my Wilshire Boulevard book.

Preparations for Sunday's Ciclavia are visible everywhere along the route between Downtown's Grand Avenue and Fairfax Avenue at the west end of the Miracle Mile district. On Saturday afternoon, a city crew filled a large pothole at Wilshire and Mariposa Avenue in the Wilshire Center stretch of Koreatown.

Wilshire Boulevard will be closed two extra hours for this Ciclavia. On Thursday evening, I will take part in a panel put on by Ciclavia and Hidden LA for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA.

LAPD Sgt. David Mascarenas dove in the murky, bubbling, smelly pool at the La Brea Tar Pits on Thursday looking for evidence in a 2011 murder case. It's not anywhere you would want to go.

The piece of progammatic architecture in East LA known as the Tamale was listed for sale this week: $459,000 with adjacent house.

From 1909 until 1919, a big winter road race was held in Santa Monica that attracted top drivers and thousands of spectators. Former Huell Howser producer Harry Pallenberg is posting a series of video documentaries on SoCal's racing history, and right now his website features the Wilshire Boulevard races.

I moderated a town hall of the five leading mayoral candidates on Sunday in Hancock Park, and their plans for Getty House — the official city residence — became an issue. Plus the cost to Wendy Greuel of her half-baked LAPD expansion plan, the Times endorses Galperin and more campaign coverage from the weekend.

Billy and Audrey Wilder lived for decades in the Wilshire Terrace co-op building in the Platinum Mile stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Westwood and Beverly Hills. The apartment is on the market for $1.049 million, with monthly homeowner dues of $2,812, says Curbed LA.

The Wilshire Christian Church, built from 1925-27 on the northeast corner of Wilshire and Normandie, will become the new home of Oasis Christian Church.

In 2006, an LA Times and Paramount promotion for "Mission: Impossible III" went awry. They settled with the federal government for $75,000.

Out are short ribs, canned salmon, a triple-decker sandwich with tongue, macaroni salad and peppered beef. In are panini wraps, more salads, more breakfast choices and a cocktail menu.

Artist Chris Burden used to see the Helmut Jahn-designed Tower building at Wilshire and Midvale Avenue on his trips to and from UCLA, where he taught for 26 years. It's a "visually complex and satisfying office building" that gives him pleasure, as he explains.

Fun and informative history piece on Los Angeles' first freeways by Nathan Masters on the KCET website. The very first freeway was not the Arroyo Seco Parkway from Pasadena to almost downtown, as many believe. Have you ever seen the Ramona Boulevard freeway?

Starting sooner than expected, the condition of the roadway on Wilshire Boulevard may no longer be LA's own inside joke. Repaving of the curb lanes between Wilton Place and Fairfax Avenue will begin this month, says a report.

Sonic Trace, a radio storytelling project from KCRW and Localore — which is a nationwide initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — spent a morning talking to servers and other staff at Restaurante Guelaguetza before the venerable Oaxacan eatery in Koreatown opened for the day.

Ana Garcia, the investigative reporter on NBC 4, tweeted to her neighbors in the Larchmont area that she needed assistance with an injured hawk on Windsor Boulevard. The help was forthcoming and all is well.

Just 48 seconds — kind of fun to watch the transformation of LACMA's back lawn into the city's newest outdoor gathering spot.

Cassell's has been on 6th Street in what is now Koreatown for a long time, though not so long in its current location. Soon the place christened a couple of media generations ago as the home of LA's best burger will be moving again — and after many months of darkness, perhaps rebooting again with a new menu.

If you plan to visit the galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, you better start thinking about going earlier in the day. The museum, currently open until at least 8 p.m. every night except Wednesday (when everything is dark), is shifting to an earlier schedule.

The payoff for all that excitement and disruption involved in moving a 340-ton hunk of rock from Riverside County to Wilshire Boulevard comes June 24. That's the day the Levitated Mass exhibit will debut at a dedication ceremony on the back lawn of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Free admission if the rock passed through your Zip code.

The Metro board of directors today certified the Westside Subway Extension’s Final Environmental Impact Statement/Report, approving the route and station locations for the first phase out to La Cienega Boulevard.

The artist and his wife are staying in an Airstream trailer at LACMA during the installation of Levitated Mass. He gave architect Frank Gehry a tour of the site this week.

KCRW's Saul Gonzalez has aired his report inside the renovation of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple that I gave a little advance look at a couple of weeks ago. "While driving down Wilshire Boulevard early one morning about a month ago, I spotted a beautiful combination of form, function and construction-an exo-skeleton of scaffolding enveloping one of L.A.’s most treasured architectural monuments."

KCRW reporter Saul Gonzalez took this shot of the inside of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple synagogue during rehab of the National Register of Historic Places site.

An op-ed piece protests the plan by Metro to raze the Wilshire Boulevard buildings that house the A+D Architecture and Design Museum and nearby galleries in order to stage construction of the Purple Line stop at Fairfax Avenue.

The DWP says that the portion of 3rd Street east of Fairfax reopened about 6:30 p.m. after crews plugged this morning's water main break and repaved the street.

Police say a safe taken out of an upstairs closet in a home in the 200 block of South Highland Avenue contained cash, jewelry and valuables worth $10 million.

Dulce Vasquez, the managing director of Zócalo Public Square, says hello and defuses the situation.

She was leaving the museum when struck by a black BMW with no plates that did not stop. Friends say the woman faces months of recovery.

Metro recommends that the Century City station be at Constellation Boulevard and the Westwood station at Wilshire and Westwood boulevards.

Curbed LA revisits ten things said about The Grove when it opened ten years ago today. Plus: Seibu department store.

Total gallons of diesel fuel burned: 2,250. Cars towed on Wilshire: 10, including six Hondas.

* Update: The megalith arrived at its final home at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art about 4:30 a.m. ths morning. Gary Leonard was there when it passed...

What you need to know to see the LACMA boulder arrive early Saturday morning, but plus more notes.

The "slot" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where the Levitated Mass boulder will go on display. The rock arrives Saturday. More...

The plan is for the Levitated Mass convoy to enter Los Angeles on Thursday night — in hopes of reaching the museum on Saturday morning.

The 340-ton boulder that's headed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is attracting crowds of fans — and potential new visitors to the museum — as it rolls...

The 340-ton boulder that is destined to sit on the lawn behind the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began its long-delayed trek last night, after suitable festivities at the Stone Valley Materials quarry in Riverside County.

Photographer Gary Leonard is really looking forward to the move of that 340-ton boulder to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The secret City Council district maps were released publicly today, revealing whose ox is being gored. As she foreshadowed, Councilwoman Jan Perry is among the gored.

Celestino Drago has decided not to renew the lease for Drago on Wilshire Boulevard.

Ink and Paper spends nine lovely minutes at adjacent shops out of another time in the Westlake district, near MacArthur Park.

L.A. Creek Freak pretty much destroys the official notion that an oily sheen on the runoff in Ballona Creek comes from overflows at the La Brea Tar Pits — or is even a problem at all worth spending millions to fix.

The 28-story condo tower once proposed for the vacant northeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Barrington Avenue has been downscaled to a six-story apartment building.

L.A. gets acquainted with a new level of Obamajam while President Obama himself stops for takeout and politics at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive at LAX on board Air Force One between 4:30 and 5 p.m. on Monday, the White House just announced.

For a lot of us, the future (or potential fate) of Johnie's Coffee Shop was one of the first questions to come to mind after the news broke that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would buy the former May Company across the street for a film museum.

President Obama will be the featured guest at a second Hancock Park-area fundraiser on Oct. 24, this one at the home of producer James Lassiter.

After some delays, the 340-ton boulder destined to be part of an exhibit at LACMA is now scheduled to leave the Riverside area quarry on Oct. 25. Wait until you see the route map.

When President Obama returns to Los Angeles Oct. 24, the Futuro Fund event will be held at the Hancock Park area home of actors Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas.

The historic landmark former May Company department store at Wilshire and Fairfax could become the major movie museum that L.A. lacks under a memo of understanding agreed to tonight between the boards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The LAPD says the officers were working undercover near Vermont Avenue and Leeward about 9:15 p.m. when they saw a gang-related shooting and intervened.

Check out the car hanging over the edge of a parking structure on Wilshire Boulevard near Veteran Avenue in Westwood.

The La Brea Avenue video rental store will stop renting Saturday and put everything on sale. Doors close at the end of the September.

You don't see this every day, even in Los Angeles. A big ol' yellow For Sale sign on a church, and not just any church.

The proposed Gayley at Wilshire would be wedged into an irregular-shaped-lot at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Gayley Avenue formerly occupied by a video store and gas station.

Writing today at The Awl, Eric Spiegelman is amused by the cacophony of Los Angeles place names — some more valid than others.

This one sounds like fun - a walking tour along the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that was designed to rival the great boulevards of Europe.

Chris Nichols of Los Angeles magazine has the story behind a Jacques Overhoff sculpture that was hidden behind a medical building near Wilshire and Bixel.

An architecture critic says don't build that wall, while an artist envisions a revenue opportunity.

A zoning variance will allow Getty House to add a six-foot wall.

The MTA board passed its largest annual budget ever, held fares at current levels, gave support to — but declined to fund — a Crenshaw rail station at Leimert Park, and approved 7.7 miles of interrupted peak-hour bus lanes on Wilshire Boulevard.

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better — and be prepared for two years of disruption near the busiest intersection in Los Angeles.

The streetscape landmark on 3rd Street "exists outside the normal boundaries of space, time, and interior decorating," says Curbed LA.

LACMA is beginning prep work for a major new art installation that will open to the public in November.

The proposal to dedicate a lane each way of Wilshire Boulevard to Bus Rapid Transit during the hours when the street is already at its most packed has picked up a new obstacle in Westside Councilman Bill Rosendahl.

Journalism students at USC Annenberg have put together a website exploring the two blocks around MacArthur Park, with one focus on the Park Plaza hotel at Park View and 6th Street.

This might be the biggest thing to help Westside traffic congestion that is in the works.

The busboy who comforted Robert Kennedy in a pool of blood on the Ambassador Hotel pantry floor in 1968 visited his grave at Arlington for the first time.

Councilman Tom LaBonge, with a football in the orange jacket, and organizer Michael Schneider posed for a pic this morning before kicking off the Great Los Angeles Walk on Wilshire Boulevard.

"James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons" debuts Jan. 19 on the Investigation Discovery channel.

We're doing another LA Observed night on the world-famous Neon Cruise on Saturday, October 16.

Google Maps' label on a section of the Wilshire district as Sandford is a typo, but a bigger mystery remains.

At a City Council committee gathering today, leaders from Koreatown and the newly nascent Little Bangladesh agreed on official boundaries of their respective communities.

The Beverly Hills PD cracked down on drivers failing to yield to a plainclothes officer crossing Wilshire Boulevard at Palm Avenue, the intersection where the city says it gets the most complaints.

Immigration rights protesters in chains have blocking the intersection for several hours, but the LAPD has issued a dispersal order. Media reports have the cops moving in to cut chains...

This photo isn't actually old. It was shot the other day inside LACMA West, showing a remnant of the circa-1940 May Company department store.

Reaction to the Israeli raid on a flotilla of ships headed to Gaza, leading to nine deaths, was sufficiently strong that Jacob Dayan, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles, held a Monday afternoon news conference at his home.

Twitter has erupted with rainbow images from across Los Angeles.

n the February issue of Vogue, writer Amy Ephron talks about befriending (when she was a child in Beverly Hills) the man next door who she knew as "Samuel Clemens." Only recently did she learn it was Stiles O. Clements, one of the most under-appreciated names in Los Angeles architecture.

British author Lucy Broadbent writes in the U.K.'s Times on how living in Los Angeles for a dozen years has turned her into a churchgoer.

Pretty clever use of Flash by the folks at dineLA as part of the upcoming Restaurant Weeks.

The new episode of Vista LA that airs Sunday at 11:30 a.m. on Channel 7 focuses on recent improvements to MacArthur Park — led by the Levitt Pavilion — and...

Photographer Iris Schneider enjoyed spotting people having picnics on the lawn at MacArthur Park so much that she began taking pictures. Her audio slide show from the park's new Levitt...

After the U.S. waived the visa requirement for South Korean tourists, and Seoul loosened controls on foreign investment, Koreatown was expected to take off. Instead, the Los Angeles Business Journal...

A three-year federal investigation into the Mara Salvatrucha gang's activities near Lafayette Park produced a bunch of indictments unsealed today, including that of Alex Sanchez, executive director of Homies Unidos....

For the last installment of NPR's This I Believe series on "All Things Considered," Muhammad Ali talks about his life with the help of his wife Lonnie. Ali is now...

For some reason, Los Angeles airfields used to open almost next to each other. There were three or four in and adjacent to Burbank, another in Glendale, and another on...

Some Koreatown leaders are miffed over a push to officially carve out a Little Bangladesh section of the community. "There is a pride in calling this Koreatown," said Chang Lee,...

Researchers at the George C. Page Museum have excavated a major new deposit of Ice Age fossils adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits — found under the former May...

Anti-Zionist protesters blocking the entrance to the Israeli consulate on Wilshire Boulevard today broke up after LAPD chief William Bratton showed up and intervened. The Jewish Journal posted video and...

Ted Soqui at LA Photo has images from the scene, which closed Wilshire Boulevard at rush hour tonight....

I can now reveal* the answer to last week's first Where in Los Angeles am I? LA Observed Quiz. It's the statue of Harrison Gray Otis, the former Times publisher,...

When a foot-long chunk of plaster fell from the dome over the sanctuary, temple officials decided to suspend services, says a Jewish Journal story that raises the specter of possibly...

The Variety name went up in giant letters today on the former People's Bank tower in the Miracle Mile stretch of Wilshire. The Hollywood trade moves into the top floor...

I reported last weekend that Variety would move down Wilshire Boulevard to the former People's Bank tower across from the new entrance to LACMA. Today's Times adds the news that...

Now in the anchor chair at Fox 11, Carlos Amezcua blasts his former station in the May issue of Tu Ciudad. "When Hal Fishman died, so did the KTLA News,"...

Crews are on hand today at the old Ambassador Hotel site on Wilshire Boulevard, taking down the Cocoanut Grove, ballrooms and last remaining remnants. The Los Angeles Conservancy recently gave...

Downtown blogger Angelenic has the scoop (and some nice photos): Wilshire Boulevard institution La Fonda will reopen on Valentine's Day. The new version won't appeal to Japanese tourists or homesick...

One of the most unusual, and storied, commercial buildings on Wilshire Boulevard is back on the market. The one-story, ranch-style office complex at the southeast corner of Wilshire and Highland...

In a post over at Native Intelligence, Denise Hamilton goes for a sidewalk adventure in the city with Judith Freeman, author of the new book The Long Embrace, Raymond Chandler...

The free monthly from Southland Publishing (CityBeat, Pasadena Weekly) is "devoted to the revival of Downtown and the 'New' Eastside." Inside New Angeles are an interview of historian Mike Davis...

Last month we posted on Southland Publishing's forthcoming debut of Los Angeles New City Monthly — you remember, the magazine that would "celebrate the intellectual and cultural 'renaissance' of L.A.'s...

Los Angeles New City Monthly, from the company behind CityBeat, will "celebrate the intellectual and cultural 'renaissance' of L.A.'s Eastside, from Hollywood through Silver Lake and Los Feliz and into...

Variety and the other occupants of 5700 Wilshire Boulevard have been alerted to a funky odor in the neighborhood almost across from the La Brea Tar Pits: The building management...

According to Amy Wilentz in today's West magazine, creationists have a theory that's wackier than anything they can pin on Darwin. In this theory, the thousands of fossils extracted from...