In the 1960s, Mercedes Cortes arrived in Hollywood after fleeing her homeland of Guatemala, which was roiled by bloody unrest. After moving around a bit, she and her husband and their three sons settled in a two-bedroom apartment on Eleanor Avenue, a community of run-down apartment buildings and old Craftsman-style houses, which is a short walk from Paramount Pictures and Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where many stars are buried.
A decade later, Cortes' world was shattered again — when gang violence and drug dealing hit her beloved neighborhood. This time, the affable, soft-spoken housekeeper bravely stood her ground as Hollywood was en
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Behind the Goodyear auto shop on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, there's a dimly lit parking lot with scattered cardboard boxes and two Dumpsters. At night it's as silent as an empty church, and mist drifting in from the ocean forms a permanent fog. Up against the shop's rear façade, there's a small indentation in the wall, about 4 feet wide and 1 foot deep.
This indentation is where Russell Sheen, 61, has made his home for the past three months. A Vietnam vet and self-proclaimed alcoholic (sober for 15 years), Sheen walks with a limp from shrapnel he caught in his left leg during an explosion while in combat. He lost his apartment last year. He's been on the streets ever since.
"I've been in probably some of the worst spots in the world. I
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Several years ago, filmmaker Dan Abrams was in his office above Primitivo Wine Bistro on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, an ex–New Yorker thinking about how much he loved Venice.
L.A.'s housing bubble meant beloved bungalows were being converted into high-design mansions and condos, transforming once-charming pocket neighborhoods as land speculation gripped the city. But Abrams had some money, and realized that if he bought the quirky property where he rented his office, he could preserve the place he loved, which also encompassed iconic Joe's Restaurant and a third eatery, plus the popular local Sculpture Gardens Nursery, the community's famed melaleuca tree and back parking lots along Electric Avenue. He figured he could develop the site based on environmentally sustainable ideals imbued with a Venice vibe, going up in height but not too hi
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In 2010, it was still a crime to stick your toe in the L.A. Now we are on the way to a newly vibrant waterway
In the late 1930s, in response to a pair of deadly floods, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to control the unruly Los Angeles River, which had, over millenniums, shifted its course innumerable times on its way to the sea.
Taming L.A.'s river was the Army Corps' first major flood control project, and its mission was to get the water to the ocean as fast as possible. The idea that it might make sense, in a city that gets less than 15 inches of rain a year on average, to conserve some of those hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater seems to have never occurred to the corps
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Goji berry (Lycium barbarum) native in Tibet
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Bike trail Duarte bike trail –Pacific electric railway, 2.2 km long, from Royal Oaks Park to Buena Vista Street 2627 Royal Oaks Drive, Dua
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