Don’t you hate it when you read about an event after it has already happened? You would have gone had you only known. Well, I’m giving you advance notice of one of my favorite annual events in Los Angeles —…
Author: Mark Berman
Video: Miracle Mile Under Construction
There has been a lot of buzz recently in the Los Angeles blogging world about Allison Martino’s excellent “Lost” Angeles Time Table website, which features tons of old pictures of L.A., focusing on Googie and mid-century signs and buildings. She…
Coolest 2 1/2 Blocks in L.A.?
How would you like to come home every day and feel like you are smack dab in the middle of the 1950s? You could if you live in the historic Mar Vista Tract in West Los Angeles. Designed by mid-century master…
A Tale of Two Buildings
There are two white skyscrapers on Miracle Mile. As a fan of architecture, one meets all of my criteria for a building that I would like, and the other has all of characteristics of a building that I would not…
Video: Reyner Banham Tours LA
Reyner Banham’s 1971 book “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” should be required reading for all residents of our fair city. I will write about him at length soon, but in brief, Banham was a Brit who first visited…
Los Angeles Holocaust Museum
Until I moved to the Miracle Mile area last spring, I used to take my daily runs in Pan Pacific Park. In the fall of 2008, ground was broken on the new Holocaust museum at the north end of the…
Video: Johnie’s on TV
I’ve written before about Johnie’s, the Googie masterpiece on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax. It is one of the few mid-century coffee shops in Los Angeles that has avoided the wrecking ball. It closed its doors to diners in 2000…
Transportation Proposal #4
How many times have you driven down a narrow one-way street here in Los Angeles when another car comes barrelling down the street towards you, you begin to pull over, but the other driver doesn’t seem to be slowing down, and…
Video: History of Hollywood Sign
Every wonder about the history of the Hollywood sign? Well, wonder no more:
No More Empty Shuttles at LAX
I was at LAX recently, waiting for the shuttle bus to take me to my parking lot, waiting and waiting and waiting, watching other shuttles pass me by until mine finally came. The one thing that jumped out at me…