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, ...

From red Spanish Colonial rooftops to vibrant mosaics to rose pink bathroom vanities, Southern California is filled with tile. Whether big or small, monochromatic or multi-hued, tiles are commonplace ...

It’s Christmas Eve. As most of Los Angeles is tucked in bed waiting for Santa, hundreds of FBI and Los Angeles Police Department officers swarm around the gleaming Nakatomi tower, a half-built example ...

In 1956, an athletic 15-year-old from Brentwood named Kathy Kohner wandered down the quiet beach in Malibu. She had escaped the stuffy cultural confines of a beach house where her parents, ...

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 ...

Los Angeles was Raymond Chandler’s muse, mistress, and his making. For his famous anti-hero, private eye Philip Marlowe, it is a torturous, nasty place filled with “tough-looking palm trees” and ...

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 ...

A common, frequent complaint about Los Angeles is that it’s so big and so sprawling that it feels like it goes on forever. Is it really? Does it really? To get a better grasp of LA’s relative size, ...

They arrived in sweeping evening gowns. In the cool March air of 1965, LA’s social and entertainment elite partied at the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard ...

Ask Angelenos for their most vivid memories of the 1984 Summer Olympics and they’ll likely all tell you the same thing: There was no traffic. As locals stared down the date of the opening ceremonies ...

Moving to a new city can be hard, especially an unwieldy, disjointed, sprawling metropolis like Los Angeles. One thing that helps ties all Angelenos together? Talking about things we know! We talk ...

The fires would rage in pockets across the city. In the so-called “Mexican district”—epicenter of the 1924 outbreak of the ancient, dreaded plague—buildings were ripped apart, bulldozed, or simply ...