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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 history of Hotel Barclay is filled with stories of deaths—and near-deaths. In 1911, there was a minor car accident in front of the grand Van Nuys Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. As a result, a ...

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 ...