Deep dives on cities, architecture, design, real estate, and urban planning. Part of The beginner’s guide to Los Angeles People who don’t know any better like to say Los Angeles has no seasons, but ...

In 1903, William Mulholland presented an end-of-year report to Los Angeles’s newly formed Board of Water Commissioners. “The zanja system has made its usual poor showing for the year,” he wrote. “It ...

Ask Angelenos for their most vivid memories of the 1984 Summer Olympics and they’ll likely all tell you the same thing: There was no traffic. As locals stared down the date of the opening ceremonies ...

Almost all of the above-ground parts of the 1926 Subway Terminal Building in Downtown Los Angeles were turned into fancy condos back in 2005, but the sliver of the structure that gives the place its ...

It was during the Victorian era, from 1837 to 1901, that Los Angeles transformed from a small, dusty Mexican outpost into a Gilded Age American boom town. Thousands of homes were built during this ...

The Los Angeles skyline might not be as famous as Chicago’s or New York’s. But thanks to Hollywood and the movie business, LA’s got plenty of buildings that are instantly identifiable (regardless of ...

In the past decade, the wealthy seaside enclave of Malibu has been dubbed the “Rehab Riviera” and the “Lourdes of Luxury Rehab.” People from all over the world come to the city’s rehabs, often because ...

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’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 ...

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 ...

At first, it seems like a lovely mirage, a ghostly green plantation conjured by an overactive imagination. Surrounded by small, utilitarian industrial parks, the Louis Phillips Mansion on Pomona ...