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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is one of the greatest examples of film noir ever produced—a deft thriller that doubles as a spellbinding meditation on love and its limitations. Nearly as intriguing ...

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 ...

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 ...

On some nights, the small islands off the shore of Long Beach shine with bright Vegas-style lights: orange, yellow, red and blue. Rising around a quarter mile off the coast, they feature colorful ...

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 ...

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 ...

It was the early morning of July 19, 1949. Mobster Mickey Cohen was hanging out at Sherry’s, his favorite after-hours haunt at 9039 Sunset Boulevard. Dapper and dangerous, Cohen was holding court in ...

On August 19, 1949, the scene at 1999 West Adams Boulevard was festive. Prominent Angelenos gathered in the sleek lobby of the new Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. building, a gleaming ...