Restoration Near Belmont Station

Click image for maximum panoramification The extensive clean-up and return of this mural  — “La Ofrenda” by Yreina Cervantes — to its 1989 glory isn’t new. It’s been minus the layers of tags that obliterated its lower half and back to its original self for well over a month now (at least). I would have …

Circa 1890s: Sunset & Castelar

I’ve had this image for several weeks, found in one of my swims through the LA Public Library’s digital archives, but I’ve refrained from posting it because the information packaged with the image is sparse. It lists this is street scene as Sunset and Castelar in 1890, but I’d never heard and could find on …

The Serendipitous Roundabout Way In Which You Learn Things Like That John Steinbeck Lived For A Time In Los Angeles

I’m not much on absolute favorites. I’m much more a “Top 5” or “Top 10” kind of guy — the sort who always qualifies his appreciation of things, inserting “one of” into anything I’m glowing and crowing about. “That is one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright residences.” “My 19th birthday? One of the best …

Those Were The Days, My Friend

Click image for the bigger picture Next in my occasional trippings down memory lane through the Los Angeles Public Library’s digital archives, I share with you this blast from the past. Undated, but if the visible vehicles are any indication probably taken somewhere around the late 1920s to early ’30s, we find Carpenter’s Drive-In that …

Where The There Is More Relevant Than The Getting To It

Rush hour on Western Avenue just south of Sunset Boulevard in 1906. The same year,  two miles east on Sunset, construction began on our house. (Photo: Los Angeles Public Library) Armchair LA historians like my native self will always helplessly suffer from the malleable clay that underlies our city’s shifting landscape. That’s what happens when …