Down on the streets, LA is a mess, a tent city of encampments, trash, shopping carts, RVs and civic disorder. But on the way up the trail to Griffith Observatory, the city assumes its old panorama of possibilities. Filtered out of these photographs are the humans and their rulers who make this city so perplexing.…
Drive west on Saticoy St., past the 405 and turn right/north, onto Densmore Avenue. You are still, according to Google Maps, in Van Nuys. (all apologies to Lake Balboa, which seems to have some fourteen boundariesaround its neighborhood.) On Densmore, near Stagg, you’ll find, as I did, a neat, monotonous, hard-working district of small companies; mostly…
"The remains of burnt down homes and vechicles resulting from the Woolsey Fire are seen on Busch Drive in Malibu, California on November 13, 2018. - At least 44 deaths have been reported so far from the late-season wildfires and with hundreds of people unaccounted for the toll is likely to rise, as thousands of…
"Next week, the South Los Angeles Area Planning Commission will consider an appeal of Buckingham Crossing, a proposed small lot subdivision near the Expo Line. The proposed development from Charles Yzaguirre, which would replace a single-family home at 4011 Exposition Boulevard, calls for the construction of four small lot homes. The houses would each stand four stories in height,…
One day, soon, there will be a revitalization of Van Nuys Boulevard. Gone forever will be the hopeless days when people laughed to mock it, or ran away in revulsion. All the central gathering places that should be occupied by civilized things, all the lots that hold parking, all the empty buildings along Van…
Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967) I previously wrote about this topic in 2014, but bring it up again as Los Angeles, and the State of California, are now in a furious debate about housing, cars, homelessness and how best to build. All B&W photographs below are by Ed Ruscha. Ed Ruscha’s “Thirty-Four…
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