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 ...

There’s a black-and-white photograph taken in 1953 that shows a crowd of enraptured onlookers staring through the bullet-riddled windows of a Los Angeles diner, one woman cocking a painted fingernail ...

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 ...

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles. People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

There are more 50,000 streets in Los Angeles County. They are named after cult leaders (L. Ron Hubbard Way), martyred astronauts (Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street), the view of a lighthouse (Signal ...

Two stray pit bulls swaggered like old pals toward the intersection of Florence and Normandie. On the northeast corner was Tom’s Liquor, on the southeast corner sat a Unocal station, and the northwest ...