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, ...

The 2.7 square miles known as Koreatown is a happy mix of flashing neon lights, nondescript office buildings that house innovative restaurants and dark nightclubs, and eclectic shops in old Art Deco ...

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 ...

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 ...

Googie. Mission Revival. Midcentury modern. Eastlake Victorian. Chateauesque. Streamline Moderne. Art Deco. Spanish. Spanish-Moorish. Spanish Colonial Revival ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The "unique" Mediterranean-style house owned by orotund-voiced metalhead Maynard James Keenan (frontman of Tool and A Perfect Circle, soundtracks to your post-grunge, late-nineties angst) was sent to ...

It was November 12, 1966. The intersection of Sunset and Crescent Heights boulevards teemed with hundreds of young people—fighting for their right to party past 10 p.m. The gathering, which began as a ...

Before the proliferation of air conditioning, designers devised lots of clever ways to keep buildings cool: cupolas, external blinds and awnings, transom windows. But none were as useful 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 ...