Herewith a local conundrum: Why has no Los Angeles politician been arrested, sentenced and jailed for corruption for almost 60 years? Is it because, ever since the 1937 Frank Shaw scandals that dumped a mayor, a police chief and, ultimately, most of a City Council, they’ve all been so clean and respectable?Or is it, as […]
Month: July 2018
Enviro groups lose it at Playa Vista Wetlands
I’d really hate to have to forgo the affectionate mail I get every time I write about the Ballona Wetlands/Playa Vista controversy. But it seems I can stop beating this particular dead horse for a while. Since the anti-Playa forces’ wrong-way win in federal court – provoking a decision that halted wetlands conservation at Playa […]
Reform runs aground on redistricting
Some say the world will end in fire; some say it will end in ice. Others say the new city-charter effort will fizzle away for causes utterly unrelated to its objective of making the city run better.There was, for instance, that disruptive proposed bill of rights. No, I don’t want to get into that one […]
Squinting at the Future
No one really wants the future anymore. It certainly wasn’t always thus. I was raised on the future’s Jetsonian pledges: commercial space travel, personal air cars, picture-frame TVs on walls. And its threats: first, the Red menace and total nuclear annihilation, and then an ecological doom that somehow included California’s falling off the continent.From the […]
How Los Angeles transformed – and didn’t transform – Tom Bradley
Almost the last time I saw Tom Bradley, I didn’t recognize the slumped old man in the far corner of the City Council, whispering to a few friends. It was 1994, and he hadn’t been in City Hall since his retirement the year before. He’d returned for what seemed a strange reason: to counter then-Fire […]
Autumn of the Ethnocrats
Two demises on last Wednesday’s front page. One death was literal: Tom Bradley’s, at 80 years of age. The other was political: 14th District Councilman Richard Alatorre’s, at 55.What a contrast.Bradley died at 80 after over 50 years of public life: He came closer to representing most of this city than has any other mayor. […]
Dome of Renown
What, after all, do we mean when we say Hollywood? The rest of America speaks of a film capital, a land of cinematic dreams and commercial mythologies, of chancy but infinite opportunity. But we locals know this idealized zone really isn’t located anywhere. The real geography of movie and TV studios extends from the San […]
Sheriff’s Tariff
What kind of political race puts the challenger on the defensive? Exactly the kind of contest you had until recently for the highest-paid law-enforcement job in the county. In the battle for the almost $250,000-a-year post of sheriff, the hound – insurgent Lee Baca – seemed to be running from the hare – Sheriff Sherman […]
Taco Bowl
When you think Carson, you think car dealer Don Kott long before you think wheeler-dealer Michael Ovitz. Carson is a residential city that socially and geographically bridges the distance between Compton and Torrance. It’s got Nissan Motors’ U.S. headquarters, a Cal State campus, Kott’s sprawling auto dealerships and an IKEA-anchored mall, plus some of the […]
Remember Him?
Even if you knew Lawry’s California Center during the years when it flourished, it was kind of hard to explain it to out-of-town friends. But you had to explain, because you so often ended up taking them there.Why? Because it was so inexplicable. There on Avenue 26 off the I-5, hard by the Los Angeles […]