Search

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] January {I SEE BIRDS EVERYWHERE} WEST HOLLYWOOD'S Plummer Park is like a lot of man-made green spaces in Los Angeles: a scratchy lawn, a few trees for shade, […]

The pin-striped button-down shirts Kenneth H. Smith wears to work bear the motto of the plumbing company founded by his father in 1949. COMPLICATED JOBS, the right side of his […]

L.A.'S BELOVED EUCALYPTUS TREES DO BATTLE WITH A BUG FROM DOWN UNDER THE MOST ANNOYING AUSSIE PHENOMENON TO INVADE THE West Coast since Natalie Imbruglia is also turning out to […]

EL NINO, LA NINA, MONICA LEWINSKY--WHAT'S NEXT ON L.A.'S PARADE OF ANNOYANCES? TRY CROWS. THEY'RE LOUD. THEY'RE SMART. THEY WEAR BLACK. THEY HAVE an insufferable sense of entitlement. And this […]

ETWEEN LOS ANGELES and its citizens there is a social contract. Or rather an unspoken socio-meteorological understanding: We endure the snarling traffic, the restaurants that don't serve food after 9 [...]

WAS WALKING MY dogs recently, an early evening stroll around my Westside neighborhood, when a woman standing in her driveway stopped me. 'You need to be careful,' she said with [...]

AS LAST WINTER'S RAINS kept falling and Los Angeles's collective psyche grew ever more waterlogged, the tone of the city's weather coverage--both on television and in the Los Angeles Times--began […]

MY DRIVE HOME on the Night of the Winds, as I have come to call that evening late last year when all hell broke loose in the sky, started off [...]

On the Devil s Backbone Trail, 7,ooo feet up in the San Gabriel Mountains, is a spot where you can look down on the Antelope and San Gabriel valleys. It […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Q: In the '60s, the north Valley had lots of lizards, toads, and salamanders. but they disappeared, I've begun seeing them again. What happened? A: Your childhood years […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Q: What can you tell me about at barrel-shaped budding on Vineland Avenue in the Valley? A: Los Angeles was once dotted with whimsical programmatic architecture like this […]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Q: Is L.A. really more densely populated than New York? Sounds incredible. A: Incredible, but technically true. The U.S. Census Bureau says 7,009 people live per square mile […]

LIKE MOST ANGELENOS, I WAS ASLEEP WHEN THE 1994 Northridge earthquake hit. As soon as the house started shaking, I knew--the surge of adrenaline was so intense--that this was the […]

WHEN SOMEONE WANTS TO DISMISS LOS Angeles, they invariably claim that we have no seasons, and by the standards of most of the country, they're right. We have few native […]