Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Los Angeles
JACKIE COOGAN REACHED THE PINNACLE OF SUCCESS AND STARDOM WHEN HE WAS FIVE. THEN, HE SET THE HOLLYWOOD PATTERN OF PAYING THE PRICE FOR EARLY FAME.
The cemetery where many of the greatest early movie stars are buried is returning to life.
Light rail was an attractive, economical, and environmentally sound technology until the auto companies crushed it. That, at any rate, is what a lot of people believe, and now the nation is spending billions to re-create an imaginary past.
In a crucial scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the murderous Judge Doom reveals a “plan of epic proportions” for transforming metropolitan Los Angeles.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, A HARD-FOUGHT gubernatorial campaign heralded the third great political upheaval of our century.
IT WAS A FUNERAL TO REMEMBER. The rain had been pelting for hours when the mourners gathered in St.
Once seen as a vice and now as a public panacea, the national passion that got Thomas Jefferson in trouble has been expanding for two centuries.
“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”
The great democratic art form got off to a very rocky start. People simply didn’t want to crowd into a dark room to look at a flickering light, and it took nearly 20 years for Americans and motion pictures to embrace each other.
On July 5, 1896, the Los Angeles Times greeted the imminent arrival of Thomas Alva Edison’s moving-picture projector with enormous enthusiasm: “The vitascope is coming to town.
“Why hasn't the stereotype faded away as real cowboys become less and less typical of Western life? Because we can't or won't do without it, obviously.”
Being a Westerner is not simple. If you live, say, in Los Angeles, you live in the second-largest city in the nation, urban as far as the eye can see in every direction except west.
From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past
In 1984 Los Angeles will once again play host to the Summer Olympics. It’s got to be easier that the first time. That was just fifty years ago, when, in the teeth of the Great Depression, a group of local boosters boldly set about planning
March 1925.
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