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 ...

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 ...

Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is one of the greatest examples of film noir ever produced—a deft thriller that doubles as a spellbinding meditation on love and its limitations. Nearly as intriguing ...

The 2.7 square miles known as Koreatown is a happy mix of flashing neon lights, nondescript office buildings that house innovative restaurants and dark nightclubs, and eclectic shops in old Art Deco ...

A common, frequent complaint about Los Angeles is that it’s so big and so sprawling that it feels like it goes on forever. Is it really? Does it really? To get a better grasp of LA’s relative size, ...

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 ...

Sun in your face and cold drink in your hand, singing along to Creedence Clearwater Revival: Who doesn’t love a road trip to the desert? But for many 19th- and 20th-century pioneers, the desert wasn’t ...

Early in Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown, private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) sits across from widower Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) in a dark LA restaurant with blood-red ...

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 ...

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 ...

The interior of the Chocolate Shop (which does not usually have a red carpet). Photos by Elizabeth Daniels. On the ground floor of a run-down, four-story building at 217 West Sixth Street in downtown ...

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 ...