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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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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Beverly Hills Versus the Westside Subway By Patrick Range McDonald Thursday, Jul 14 2011
On an overcast morning, Susan Bursk, president of the Century City Chamber of Commerce, is running a meticulously staged press conference at the corner of Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars, across from the Century Plaza Hotel. She has enlisted a gaggle of middle-aged supporters who cheer and wave placards for the TV cameras while Century City boosters urge spending tens of millions of dollars on a Westside Subway stop on sleepy Constellation Boulevard, instead of at a long-discussed site on bustling Santa Monica Boulevard about two blocks away.
Bursk, politically savvy if reserved, declares that a station "in the heart of Century City" — a marketing phrase she coined to promote building the subway stop at Constellatio
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The First 15 Minutes by Ryan Deto LA Weekly Photos from the week of November 24, 2011
"I think there will be looting and rioting right after it happens," Gooday predicts.
With streets in the Spring Street area filled with rubble and crushed cars, and no way to call for aid, word spreads among those trying to help victims: The California Hospital Medical Center, the only hospital in downtown proper (White Memorial Medical Center is in Boyle Heights, across the L.A. River, and County USC Medical Center is three and half miles away), is 12 blocks away, close enough to go for help.
Little do they know that California Hospital Medical Center is ground zero for its own disaster. Figueroa Street, Pico Boulevard and Grand Avenue near the hospital are at a standstill, with some 20,000 fans converging on the area for a 7:30 p.m. Katy Perry concert at Staples Center when the quake hits. That panicked mass ha
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The First 15 Minutes by Ryan Deto LA Weekly Photos from the week of November 24, 2011
Peggy Gooday sits paralyzed on her sofa as the world outside shrieks with an unearthly roar. The sound of millions of bits of lumber, metal, concrete and glass twisting and shattering echoes as downtown Los Angeles plunges into darkness. Gooday's TV is launched off its pedestal and smashes at her feet. Paintings jump from their hangers. Her clattering cup of tea falls off the coffee table and splashes onto her carpet.
Gooday's eighth-floor apartment in the historic Alexandria Hotel at Fifth and Spring streets is convulsing like a paint shaker, and her emotions race from fear to fascination and back. All she can do is sit, immobile, in her suddenly pitch-dark domicile.
Gooday says: "I would probably try to grab my
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In Leigh Fondakowski’s harrowing new book, Jonestown survivors talk about what happened in Guyana — and the might-have-been utopia that still haunts their dreams
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the infamous Jonestown murdersuicides orchestrated by Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana. More than 900 people lost their lives.While Jones’ Peoples Temple is inherently a Bay Area story — that of an Indianapolis preacher who, in 1965, moved his followers to Ukiah and later San Francisco, where they became a political force — the church branched out to L.A. and attracted thousands of local congregants. In her new book, Stories From Jonestown (University of Minnesota Press), author Leigh Fondakowski interviews more than 40 survivors, former cult members, relatives of the deceased and vario
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"Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” screenwriter Will Beall says of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second most famous employer, the L.A. Police Department, where he was a homicide detective in South Central’s notoriously rough 77th Division. Then he published his first novel, the gritty rookie-cop saga L.A. Rex, which earned Beall plaudits from Joseph Wambaugh, fellow LAPD vet–turnedauthor, plus a gig adapting the screenplay for über-producer Scott Rudin.
When that script landed in seventh place on 2009’s "Black List” — the annual insider survey of the industry’s best unproduced screenplays — Beall
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