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 INTERACTIVE FEATURE: Visit 27 of the lesser-known hotspots in local real estate history on our interactive map with audio highlights by reporter Thomas Curwen.
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Scattered throughout the sea of rooftops and tangle of freeways that is Southern California, our experts find a bit of paradise.
It may have started as a Bauhaus trademark, but it became L.A.'s signature. Glass is the city's cornerstone.
Since the heady, speculative 1880s, the scenario repeats itself: Real estate prices go berserk.
We have felt the earth tremble, seen it fall away from under our feet and felt fire hot on our faces. Yeah, so? Don't you just love the view!
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I'M thinking of a dark wood dining table, highly polished, adorned with a bowl of gleaming fruit. Outside the bright sun glares, but the room itself is cool and dim; the fruit appears to float in twilight.
THANK goodness for real estate. How could Southern Californians manage without it?
The weekly column takes a spin through 125 years of celebrity transactions.
Urban sprawl is an L.A. concept. We should've trademarked it. Supersized housing? Ditto. Forget the scant skylines of downtown, Century City and the few pockets of verticality scattered about, the architecture of Los Angeles lies low and long.
Los Angeles is famously a city of today and tomorrow. Even though preservationists have been busy since 1894, the city tends to let go of its past. Dusty spaces are paved, wooden Victorians are turned to splinters, childhood haunts become mini-malls and whole neighborhoods disappear in the sweep of our freeways. Progress leaves little room for nostalgia, and often we don't know what's been lost until we stumble upon an old photograph.
Nine bedrooms and a notorious past--some houses are just a celebrity magnet.
From 1919 to the mid-'80s, The Times' home magazines tracked Southern California's evolution from farm region to sprawling metropolis.
You're flying into Los Angeles, you look out the window, what do you see?
In "Ramona," her 1884 novel of Southern California, Helen Hunt Jackson did more than tell the story of the illicit romance between a mestizo orphan and an Indian sheepherder. Caught in the pages of her famous melodrama is a picture of the land that is perhaps more timeless than the tale itself.
Orange groves? Poppies? Palms? If there was ever a living symbol of Southern California, it's the live oak.
Chalk it up to climate or to pride of ownership, but Southern California has exceptionally vibrant home, garden and architecture tours. At movie palaces in downtown Los Angeles as well as wildflower patches in our farthest-flung suburbs, doors and gates are open for visitors' admiration and critiques.
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