A couple of the chapters in my 2001 book, The San Fernando Valley: America's Suburb, deal with the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and how abundant water changed the city and the valley. It holds ...

Sandstone Retreat was a clothing-optional refuge in Topanga Canyon that began in the late 1960s and survived efforts by the county to shut it down. John Williamson opened the retreat with his wife, ...

There was a time — several decades actually — when cruising Van Nuys Boulevard at night to see and be seen was a major youth culture tradition in Los Angeles, and especially for teenagers (the real ...

The boys on Larchmont in "False Alarms," with an LA Railway yellow car passing by. What is it about non-Angelenos becoming so obsessed with old filming locations that they spend years tracking down ...

John Dominis photo of publicity-averse actor Steve McQueen and wife Neile Adams soaking in a sulphur bath at Big Sur in 1963. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image. In the exalted circle of Life magazine ...

Claud Beelman was one of those Los Angeles architects whose work spanned eras and dramatic changes in style. He encompassed noteworthy LA examples as different as the Eastern Columbia building ...

Fun item from historian Michael Beschloss: In 1962, Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax invested in a West Hollywood motor inn, which was renamed Sandy Koufax’s Tropicana Motel. Down Santa Monica Boulevard ...

Westwood Village gained a new big store this week — one of the scaled-down urban Targets opening under the City banner. Its doors opened quietly on Tuesday, in the former Bullock's department store on ...

Henry lived in a quiet, upper-middle-class residential neighborhood in Pacific Palisades. Tacked to the front door beside the brass knocker was a weathered quotation from some oriental mystic advising ...

Downtown chronicler Ed Fuentes blogs at View from a Loft that the sign for Gorky's Russian cafe still hangs over the corner of 8th and San Julian streets. It's kind of like looking back in time at the ...

Freelance videojournalist Abraham Riesman was sent in 2012 to do a story for Punch on Paul Mazursky's morning gathering of old Hollywood hands (and a few younger ones) at Farmers Market. The table ...

Two decades ago, a Los Angeles Public Library librarian named Carolyn Kozo Cole assumed responsibility for the library's treasured photograph collection. She found, time and again, that vast swaths of ...