It's a Tuesday night at the Clubhouse, a black-box theater on the second floor of a condo located down an alley from the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and El Centro Avenue. At the weekly improv show TNT, the group Call Waiting, comprised of Upright Citizens Brigade alums Mark Rennie, Ryan Rosenberg and Drew Tarver, are finally getting stage time after waiting four months, and they're starting off with the one-word audience suggestion "crown." As its name suggests, the group's angle is creating three-way phone conversations.
That Friday, not too far away, at the corner of Melrose and La Brea, an audience is packed up against the windows at the Neon Venus Art Theatre, reveling in the weekly improv show headlined by the tri
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The intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue becomes a new art district
"I can’t wait for it to be perfect,” says Shaun Caley Regen, who has just led the way down from the roof of her still-unfinished new building at 6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
For more than 20 years, Regen has run Regen Projects, a gallery that melds smarts and style in a way that feels definitively L.A. but has an international reputation, in West Hollywood’s modish design district. But she has never owned any of the Almont Street buildings she’s occupied. Rent was month-to-month on one building, and her staff barely fit into the offices it had. She had been looking for a building to renovate when, in 2010, she found this one, a spacious former production complex
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The intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue becomes a new art district
"I can’t wait for it to be perfect,” says Shaun Caley Regen, who has just led the way down from the roof of her still-unfinished new building at 6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
For more than 20 years, Regen has run Regen Projects, a gallery that melds smarts and style in a way that feels definitively L.A. but has an international reputation, in West Hollywood’s modish design district. But she has never owned any of the Almont Street buildings she’s occupied. Rent was month-to-month on one building, and her staff barely fit into the offices it had. She had been looking f
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In many movies, downtown Los Angeles is a stand-in for New York City. Its nooks and crannies mimic that most urban of American cities, and Ramon Garcia's condo on Seventh and Spring streets is no exception. His seventh-floor window overlooks a courtyard in the Bartlett, a 1911 bank designed by the architects who planned City Hall, and his 550-square-foot residence is smaller than a racquetball court.
But one detail would be unthinkable in New York. If he sold it, Garcia estimates he'd get $105,000 — half what he paid in 2005. While 30 percent to 60 percent of the Inland Empire's homes have "underwater mortgages," making th
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Remembering the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s Role in Downtown Downtown News
by Greg Fischer Los Angeles Downtown News | 1 comment
photo courtesy of the Huntington Library Collection: The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway once operated the La Grande Station on Santa Fe Avenue between what are now Second and Third streets. The 1890s structure was made from red sandstone and brick and featured turquoise domes, turrets and chimneys
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - When it opened in the spring of 1939, Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal was the state of the art in passenger train service. The soaring building on Alameda Street was the last of the great railroad stations built in the United States as air transportation was displ
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Canada looks to lure energy workers from the U.S. In its quest to increase oil production, Canada is lobbying job fairs and air waves for laborers. California has become a prime target.
EDMONTON, Canada — With a daughter to feed, no job and $200 in the bank, Detroit pipe fitter Scott Zarembski boarded a plane on a one-way ticket to this industrial capital city.
He'd heard there was work in western Canada. Turns out he'd heard right. Within days he was wearing a hard hat at a Shell oil refinery 15 miles away in Fort Saskatchewan. Within six months he had earned almost $50,000. That was 2009. And he's still there.
"If you want to work, you can work," said Zarembski, 45. "And it's just getting started."
Llyn Foulkes' Retrospective at the Hammer Museum By Claire de Dobay Rifelj Thursday, Feb 14 2013
Pioneering artist Llyn Foulkes wasn't born in Los Angeles, but since moving to the city more than a half-century ago, L.A. has burrowed its way into his intense and challenging paintings. It appears as subject matter in canvases that mourn the stripping and gentrification of L.A.'s neighborhoods; and the city's debris literally inhabits the surface of many of his paintings, which often incorporate an array of found materials. None are straightforward landscapes or portraits; rather, Foulkes condenses his impressions of the L.A. Basin into deliberate, tactile works that offer an abstracted sense of place. After all, the city's issues often are those of the country as a whole, and Foulkes offers his unwavering opinions about
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Their approach can sound, at times, very technocratic. Environmentalists value rare habitats more highly than less-rare habitats. To create rare habitat, they plan to create more wetlands, rehabilitating the old asphalt parking lot, as well as land from an illegal, chemical-laden private golf course — controversially built near the marsh by billionaire Jerry Perenchio. Then, the scientists plan to lower the marsh's slight elevation to sea level and introduce more species.
But before creation comes destruction. A temporary dyke must be constructed to cut off the channels from the main lagoon, allowing workers to drain the channels and reshape them with bulldozers.
Suzanne Goode says this will be done with the utmost caution. "We have to pump the water out [of the channels], pump it into tanks, disinfect it, and pump it into the ocean," before beginning the massive earth removal. "That's $2 million right there. It's a high-stakes environment."
What a dump. That was Athena Shlien's thought when she saw huge Malibu Lagoon for the first time. She was walking through a marsh that makes up part of the lagoon on her way to Surfrider Beach, perhaps the most popular surfing spot in L.A. County and the historic epicenter of surf culture, where Hollywood filmed such movies as Gidget and Beach Blanket Bingo. From a dirt path that meanders over quaint wooden bridges, Shlien spotted green muck and potato chip bags floating atop the water.
She felt pity for the creatures living in this sorry place, just a couple hundred feet from an enclave of perfect beachfront movie-star homes called Malibu Colony. But as the years passed, she noticed the lagoon area growin
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In September 2010, Metro released a draft environmental study with a surprise: the announcement of the Constellation station "option." The next month, on Oct. 28, Beverly Hills community leaders stormed a Metro meeting, telling Villaraigosa, Yaroslavsky and other Metro board members that the idea of tunneling under Beverly Hills High School was unacceptable.
"We do not want the subway to run under our high school," Beverly Hills City Councilwoman Nancy Krasne told Metro board members.
Since then, school board president Korbatov says, Metro staffers and board members have only shown heightened interest in the Constellation option. "It really troubles me," Korbatov says, "and it troubles my colleagues. They're telling us, 'Wait, wait, the process isn't done yet, we haven't decided yet.' But it seems they have."
Villaraigosa, in particular, is publicly "promoting it. They appear to have made up their minds, but they just haven'
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