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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It was the hot, fraught summer of 1963. Every weekend 18-year-old college students Bobbie and Renee Hodges would trek over to the boiling, treeless Torrance housing tract of Southwood Riviera Royale, ...

The Forest of Arden in Orange County’s Modjeska Canyon, where a Queen Anne revival-style cottage is surrounded by palms, white lilac, and crown of thorns planted during the Modjeska era. Los Angeles ...

In 1969, a banner year for counterculture, the casual use of the term “hippies” in a letter penned by Dr. Philip Lovell seemed appropriate for the time. But this correspondence between Lovell, an ...

Los Angeles can be a tough city to navigate using public transportation alone, but it wasn’t always that way. A new map created by amateur cartographer Jake Berman details Pacific Electric’s sprawling ...

The underground portion of the soon-to-open Crenshaw/LAX Line is located in a liquefaction zone, where engineers must contend with damp, sandy soil that can destabilize in an earthquake. By Liz Kuball ...

Nothing transformed or defined 20th-century Southern California more than the automobile, and nowhere was this more apparent than the San Fernando Valley. The Valley’s explosion of development was ...

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 ...

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 ...