Don Shirley: Pianists make history
Iris Schneider on Annie Leibovitz
In this map, it's the mountains and the relationship of the ranges and rivers that make it special.
Archive: Physical Los Angeles
In this map, it's the mountains and the relationship of the ranges and rivers that make it special.
New series about Los Angeles and history hosted by Nathan Masters is a co-production with the USC Libraries.
The site provides information on and mapping of hundreds of City Hall-designated historic-cultural monuments and other places that might be designated someday.
Noah Sheldon is a New York photographer with a show currently at the Cherry and Martin gallery on south La Cienega. While here this month, he made some nice photographs...
Weird story. Melanie Patton Renfrew, a geography professor at Harbor College, has pleaded no contest to violating a judge's order to stop harassing KNBC weather caster Fritz Coleman. That, as...
The Amateur Enthusiast is a blog devoted to drinking and dining in Downtown by political strategist Glenn Gritzner. In today's post, he struggles to bring his fellow Enthusiasts around on...
My four-minute segment today (back after two weeks off) veers from a weekend train trip up to Santa Barbara to confess why I don't care whether the Century Plaza Hotel...
Investor Charles T. Munger's latest plan for the Barry Building in Brentwood is to tear it down, build underground parking, then put in a shopping center that shares the courtyard...
"Forget the exterior," Gehry says in this recent interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival, via Curbed LA. Covering the interior in wood cost an extra $5 million, and was...
Now that the owner of the Century Plaza wants to tear down the hotel, Dakota Smith at Curbed LA dug up what developer Michael Rosenfeld's release said when he bought...
John Stodder grabbed this image of the smoke that belched from the Redondo Beach power plant near King Harbor as generators cranked up to meet today's demand for air conditioning....
This stormy President's Day is when the 2009 Los Angeles Marathon would have been run under one of Frank McCourt's schedules. The race was postponed until Memorial Day, and at...
The reader who sent this photo into LongBeachReport.com said it was the last of three water spouts seen descending offshore before 9 a.m. Story there....
New York officials think they have figured out the source of the Westside maple syrup aroma that, as one writer put it back in 2006, "spread faster than warm Aunt...
Heal the Bay says its staff spent the past year reviewing eight years of records on wastewater discharges kept by the Los Angeles Water Quality Control Board. The findings: "A...
Look up between 5:21 and 5:27 pm. The International Space Station will be passing overhead. Long Beach Report...
Kevin Fry, the president of Scenic America, was interviewed in The Planning Report about the Los Angeles billboard situation. Excerpt: The city of Los Angeles has surrendered its built environment...
The current president of Heal the Bay posted a personal tribute to the death earlier today of the organization's founder and inspiration. Mark Gold calls his blog post "the passing...
Heal the Bay founder Dorothy Green has passed away, according to a release from Mayor Antonio Villarigosa's office. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued the following statement today on the passing of...
"Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles" will be published Thursday by The Overlook Press/Penguin U.S.A. The book, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, looks like it...
Last time I was at LAX I wondered aloud, momentarily disoriented, what the big skeleton-like structure was looming over the traffic loop. "Uh, the Theme Building," my companion said, as...
Today's high of 109 degrees set the local record for a June 19. AP...
The Planning Report, the monthly about Los Angeles and So Cal planning and development published by David Abel, is letting its readers vote online on which of the following "in-progress...
Rafting (or canoeing, kayaking, etc) the Los Angeles River is one of the old standby L.A. feature stories that some journalist will propose every few years, thinking it's a fresh...
As a reporter, I liked to write about L.A's infrastructure — freeways, water, refuse. I always thought there was a book in the history of the Los Angeles sewer system,...
Demolition didn't take long. A crew took down the scaffolding yesterday, leaving a bare lot at the corner of Gayley and Lindbrook where the newest, most modern single-screen in Westwood...
A San Marino home has about a million bees buzzing around it — in the walls and in the house — and honey is oozing out of the walls in...
Donna Barstow takes some pics and blogs her thoughts about the Department of Water and Power....
High waves are pounding the coast and rip currents are making the sea more treacherous than usual. Piers at Manhattan Beach and Seal Beach were closed yesterday due to the...
With seven residential projects containing 900 units already under construction — and another two dozen projects approved — the most upscale shopping street across the Valley is evolving. But the...
One of my favorite quirky L.A. public sculptures — the gold panner of Carthay Circle — has been stolen and recovered. The bronze cast in 1925 by Henry Lion recently...
The first of hundreds of stores to get a toned-down design hoping people will stick around is located off the 60 freeway in Hacienda Heights. Eater Los Angeles digests the...
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...
Jay Babcock at Nature Trumps: An L.A. River Blog posts this scene from November, looking upstream from the footbridge toward Los Feliz Boulevard and the burned Griffith Park hills. Click...
Mayor Villaraigosa announced some road closures in the park as the rains continue. "The park has experienced some minor to moderate debris flows and flooding on several of its main...
Spotted in the Daily Breeze, by staff photographer Robert Casillas....
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...
The DWP has decided to dump all the water in Silver Lake and the Elysian reservoir because of unusually high traces of the carcinogen bromate, which formed in the water...
Editorial judgment or just luck? I dunno, but the big story on the cover of the November issue of Los Angeles (ignore John Cusack) is Dave Gardetta's post-mortem on last...
It's going to be windy in a big way this weekend. The National Weather Service this morning posted an upgraded high wind warning for the whole area through Monday, with...
The newest feature on the Los Angeles skyline is something old. Congratulations to Amy Inouye, the artist whose years-long project to reunite L.A. with Chicken Boy became reality this morning...
Westwood Village's Mann National closed in April, reopened a little later as an indy screen and apparently locked the doors again on Oct. 7. Not that anybody noticed. Cinema Treasures.org...
La Fonda de Los Camperos has been fighting eviction from its historic building at Wilshire and Carondelet, but the restaurant and its world-famous Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano are...
The band will headline a benefit concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre on Oct. 14 to raise money for rebuilding the Garfield High School auditorium that burned down this year. A...
Emily Banneker at Blogging.la is bummed that L.A. Freeway Kids, the 1984 Olympics-era mural that adorned a south wall of the Hollywood Freeway (or Santa Ana, depending on your interpretation)...
In his talk today at Town Hall Los Angeles, Times publisher David Hiller said he may launch a free tabloid patterned after the Tribune's Redeye in Chicago. The Reuters story...
Oh my God. Spotted in Valencia (also seen over the weekend in malls all over the Valley.) Photo: Daily News / David Crane...
A three-judge panel of the state's Second District Court of Appeal sided with local groups and the city of Santa Monica and ordered that construction activity stop on phase two...
The largest pre-industrial metropolis in the world, in today's Cambodia, relied on elaborate waterworks — and died away in the 16th century after "overpopulation and deforestation filled the canals with...
Retired L.A. Times garden editor Robert Smaus has moved to the Pacific Northwest and says goodbye to the soil of Rancho Park in a piece today. He's probably advised more...
David Markland posts at Metroblogging L.A. that the circa-1925 Rialto Theatre on Fair Oaks Avenue will be shuttered by its operator, Landmark Theatres. It's a single-screen theatre listed on the...
Nice of a little overnight rain to clean the sky. This time of year our murky air is mostly old-fashioned smog, stuck in the basin and cooked by the summer...
It's not as classic as Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, but a YouTube user named Meadowlawn has posted a video of downtown's Broadway district as viewed from a car heading...
Amy Alkon, the syndicated Advice Goddess and blogger, was the first reader to identify Charles Dickson's Martin Luther King Memorial in Watts. The sculpture bears the text of King's August...
There's a cool story behind this piece of street art located somewhere in Los Angeles. Be the first to email with the location and win an LA Observed Insider subscription,...
A tribute to the history of the gardeners — Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden — opens on Sunday at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. This multimedia...
Andrew at Here in Van Nuys blogs about a home in Studio City where the front exterior has been completely sheathed in 16-by-16 inch marble squares. It strikes him like...
The L.A. Weekly's David Zahniser is out with a cluster of stories on one of the least talked-about big stories in Los Angeles: the push by planners, pols led by...
Veronique de Turenne at Here in Malibu says signs are posted everywhere about the year-old German shepherd taken by a 50-ish overweight woman with bleached blond hair who drove a...
Our long reptilian nightmare is over — they caught Reggie this afternoon. The alligator dumped in Machado Lake way back in ought five — and originally thought to be a...
Environmental rehab of the Santa Susana Field Lab site in the West Valley has been inadequate, U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti ruled. He told the Department of Energy to...
It's retro month at LA Observed. First Sharon Tay returns, now Reggie the wayward alligator has apparently been spotted at Lake Machado in Harbor City for the first time since...
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's opposition on behalf of neighbors posed too great an obstacle and the FBI will look for another location to build its new L.A.-area headquarters. The feds had...
That was a little 3.1 earthquake at 12:30, centered just northwest of San Fernando. Here in Westwood, some in the same office did feel it and some (me included) didn't....
Curbed LA designates the off-putting, easily ignored mall known as Hollywood & Highland: It's not based purely on aesthetics, that we can all agree. There are other factors - the...
There has been at least one home heavily damaged and roof fires are reported on others along North Beverly Drive in the Franklin Canyon area above Beverly Hills, where a...
Times columnist Steve Lopez, looking for an angle, went out to Malibu to check out the hard-to-reach public beach near Tribune buyer Sam Zell's estate. After Lopez knocked on the...
Needing to escape Los Angeles for a few hours, Judy and I took the Amtrak Surfliner to San Diego and back on Saturday. During a break from walking the Gaslamp...
Inspectors poking around to find out why a big piece of plaster fell off the Theme Building at LAX discovered pervasive rust damage. Encounter, the restaurant that occupies the landmark,...
Designer and blogger Marc Grobman (the guy campaigning to de-uglify Donald Sterling's Times ads) became so curious about the crows invading his Santa Monica neighborhood each winter that he went...
TJ Sullivan catches it over Century City last evening. Full size here. Photo: TJ Sullivan...
Results are in for The History Channel’s City of the Future design competition. On-line voters selected Chicago the winner. New York came in second. The Eric Owen Moss design for...
Still only moderate by the way the National Drought Mitigation Center classifies things, but that darker brown shade to the east and south of us marks "severe drought." Yellow on...
If you are waiting for some big rain to come along and deep-soak your trees, don't. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just cancelled its forecast of a majorly wet...
Kim Masters writes in Slate that the I.M. Pei-designed former Creative Artists Agency home on Wilshire is nothing but trouble. First, co-owners Michael Ovitz and former partner Ron Meyer are...
Children who grow up close to busy highways "have significant impairments in the development of their lungs that can lead to respiratory problems for the rest of their lives," the...
Back in the middle of last week I received a prophetic email from Beverly Hills lawyer Eric Spiegelman. From: Eric Spiegelman Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 4:49 PM To: 'Kevin...
Not just a little bit either. There was a snow plow working on Kanan-Dume Road this afternoon, and lots of school kids at play beside the road. Also, Channel 4's...
There's been some in the Santa Clarita area, apparently. (SCVTalk says it's hail.) The National Weather Service at 9:30 issued a winter weather advisory for the local mountains and the...
Some lovely holiday finds around the LA Observed blogs: On old Mulholland: Veronique de Turenne ventured into the hills above Malibu in search of The Old Place, a mythical spot...
Regarding the bad smell on Wilshire, an employee of KNX NewsRadio emails that it's definitely coming from the excavation at Wilshire and Hauser. In this Google Earth pic from before...
"Potentially record-setting cold conditions," the National Weather Service says in a special weather statement for the Los Angeles area — and not just in the mountains. "Widespread hard freeze possible...
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...
Climatologists say the odds are that this year will be the hottest on record, based on a resurgent El Niño in the Pacific and global warming. Considering that a new...
Yesterday's New York Times offered some backhanded praise of Los Angeles architecture, with writer Robin Pogrebin taking the position that L.A. design is leaving the dark ages and finally starting...
Greg Goldin, the architecture critic for Los Angeles magazine, thinks outside the box in today's West and defends the McMansions that have been altering Los Angeles neighborhoods for awhile now....
Curbed LA has the skinny and the renderings of the proposed new Midtown Crossing where Pico, Venice and San Vicente come together. Lowe's will anchor. Lots of comments on what...
From Eric Lynxwiler at LottaLiving.com I learned that this classic-style, fully functioning neon sign on the Rose Motel in Harbor City was taken down before Thanksigiving. It was thrown in...
Dockweiler State Beach and the northern half of Manhattan Beach — from Ballona Creek south to the Manhattan Beach Pier — will be posted with closed signs Tuesday though Thursday,...
Jenny Price's detailed directions on how to find and get into Malibu's less-well-marked beaches pretty much nixes any chance that David Geffen would give up his quixotic quest to buy...
Around the grassier neighborhoods of Los Angeles, November means the unpleasant aroma of lawns being fertilized, Native Intelligence contributor Denise Hamilton writes on today's Times op-ed page. It's a rite...
This was the warmest November 6 in downtown Los Angeles since 1898. It was 91 by the ocean at LAX and 90 in Westwood — remember, in these kind of...
If I had the power, I would fly Martin Schall to Los Angeles and present him a key to the city. Herr Schall, as LA Observed long-timers know, is the...
Mayor Villaraigosa returned to City Hall today almost giddy from his fortnight in Asia. Flanked by twenty fellow travelers, the mayor met the media this morning and talked about the...
Check out Veronique's photo of a monarch butterfly and sunflower at Here in Malibu....
The Daily Breeze gathers together all the reports of big cat sightings through the years on the Palos Verdes peninsula — and official assurances that nothing has ever been confirmed...
It's been awhile since those mysterious smells wafted over Los Angeles, but Long Beach firefighters were dispatched this week to look for the cause of an unexplained "foul odor" that...
Blogger Tim McGarry at Angels and Vagabonds captures the trees in Windsor Square, near the mayor's official residence. "The camphor trees along Sixth, among the largest and most beautiful in...
There's no denying that palm trees are an iconic feature of the Los Angeles landscape, despite being non-native and ecologically almost worthless. In this week's CityBeat (out today), David Davin...
It's a lazy Friday in July so why not post a little travel writing, even if it is about home. Notes from the Road calls itself "a project in experimental...
This morning on KPCC's "Airtalk," Prof. Robert Bruegmann will explain and probably defend his thesis that "sprawl is not the worst thing that ever happened to the nation's cities. In...
Good guesses on the corporate name that used to adorn (or despoil) the Wilson Building before Mutual of Omaha, Asashi and Samsung: it was General Insurance. I misspoke yesterday, though....
At one time Wilshire and LaBrea was the most heavily traveled intersection in the city. It's still plenty busy, as marketers for Asahi Beer learned when their neon sign perched...
If it's clear tomorrow night, start eyeing the western sky after 7 pm. Vandenberg has scheduled the launch of a Delta IV rocket between 19:00 and 21:00 PDT carrying a...
Since we're talking cats this week, a reader in Glendale passes along more sightings: No photographic evidence; but up here on the shoulder of the Verdugo Hills (right across the...
New at LA Observed
Clinton fundraises in LA
Jim Henson Studios on La Brea became a presidential campaign stop on Thursday.
Brown declares disaster area
The natural gas leak above Porter Ranch now qualifies for various government actions. Story
Performing arts with cheer
Donna Perlmutter closes out 2015 with productions downtown and on the Westside.
