Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Once you get past the refineries, San Pedro looks like many port cities whose generations have lived near the sea. Little homes crowd the hilly, treeless streets that climb the sweep of landscape from the docks to the Palos Verdes heights. The maritime air smells clean, even at 90 degrees. Downtown, […]
Category: LA Weekly
Beginning at the Beginning
There’s finally some good news about the future of the downtown park known as the Pueblo of Los Angeles.Since the 1960s, most of the Pueblo, one of the most striking historical sites in California, languished under the very noses of federal, state, city and county government. Yet this collection of old buildings on a handful […]
Wetlands and the Well-Ordered Society
Philosopher John Rawls calls it “overlapping consensus.” What I understand the author of A Theory of Justice to mean here is that even among the most embattled opponents, there can be agreement on certain fundamental issues.Of course, even Taliban clerics can concur with militant feminists that rape and armed robbery are public evils. What gets […]
Where the Man Began
You notice the “Award-Winning Karaoke” parlor here, the smiling teens waving “Free Carwash for Jesus” placards there. But there’s no sign of Dick Nixon — usually termed our nation’s “most controversial president” — whose most flattering biographer to date concluded: “It is sometimes difficult to see where the cynical politician in him ends, and where […]
The Guns of Autumn
The summer is slowly ebbing away. In another time and place, the leaves would already be turning amber and our thoughts would be turning to hunting. This was the great American pastime centuries before Abner Doubleday ever pitched a ball. And now, many decades after I last participated, I can still recall rituals like handing […]
It’s Chinatown, Jake
A tiny City News Service item in Friday’s Los Angeles Times business section told the tale. Or at least part of it: “A blighted, 32-acre railroad property northeast of downtown Los Angeles will be redeveloped into an industrial park with the help of $11.75 million in grants from the federal government, officials said.”The story was […]
Big-Spender Mike
Firearms fans who came downtown to support continued gun sales at the County Fairplex’s gun shows put on a pretty good show of their own this week. Twenty people — some repeats from last time, but a few new faces — showed up to protest the supervisors’ decision to ban the show.It turns out that […]
Breaking Away
If only they had a choice, the people who work at the El Sereno Youth Center would like to forget there ever was a Los Angeles city councilman named Richard Alatorre. Failing that, they’d rather the world knew there’s no current association between the center and the man.”I used to respect him greatly,” executive director […]
County Living
Los Angeles’ organized-labor cadres seemed to be all over the metropolis on Tuesday in their quest for the living wage. Workers and union officials attended a meeting of the city’s Board of Airports to lobby for better pay at LAX, made a strong presentation to the City Council the same morning on USC’s four-year resistance […]
The Anti-Reform Movement
These days it seems that most Angelenos don’t like how their city works. You stumble on this perception in the least likely places. When interviewed recently on the future of Los Angeles, for instance, some Chicano-studies academics said they saw the city splitting, others saw it staying together. Some said they saw one Latino politician […]