Los Angeles Urban Revival

April 30, 2006

Los Angeles' literary landscape

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.

April 30, 2006

Now those were go-go '80s

THIS was a boom you could actually hear.

April 30, 2006

Call us crazy; you'd be right

MICHAEL Visbal's home is a three-bedroom, three-bath monument to denial.

April 30, 2006

What were they thinking?

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.

August 19, 2005

Grand Ave. Questions Raised

When Los Angeles County supervisors voted to approve a $1.8-billion project to revitalize downtown's Grand Avenue last week, they did so despite their own analyst's warnings that the project poses several financial risks for the county.

January 30, 2005

TRAVEL INSIDER: LIGHT RAIL TO LAX

Jane Engle: LAX-downtown rail plan may finally be leaving the station

They heaped scorn on Angelenos in 1995 when we introduced a light-rail route that bypassed the region's biggest airport. MTA's Green Line trains, originating in Norwalk, pulled up two miles shy of LAX before veering south toward Redondo Beach.

October 16, 2003

DOWNTOWN LIKE NEVER BEFORE

The nine neighborhoods

The area's renewed vitality ricochets from the well-established ethnic enclaves of Little Tokyo and Chinatown to the Fashion District's bustling streets lined with restaurants and stores to the Financial Core's commerical high-rises.

October 16, 2003

DOWNTOWN LIKE NEVER BEFORE: BREATHING ROOM

A soothing water and stone alliance

Between. That's how you feel on the Bunker Hill steps, a vertiginous rise — or fall — that links a hushed Hope Street hilltop with the clatter of 5th Street below. They curve like a sine wave, 103 of them, a symmetry of cement and steel, space and stone. And water. Running water that starts small, pools to cool the air and soothe the ear, then becomes a brook that falls five stories, falls down the center handrail where a rocky bed guides its path.

October 16, 2003

DOWNTOWN LIKE NEVER BEFORE

L.A.'s answer to the doorman

New York has its doormen, ready to assist city dwellers at a moment's notice. Downtown L.A. has its concierges.