In a city where many council districts seem to have been pounded together out of random bits, Los Angeles’ 4th District is right at home. It includes a smattering of the east San Fernando Valley and a bit of bohemian Silver Lake. It has a gangy smidgen of the Rampart area. It has most of […]
Category: LA Weekly
Guarding the Pound
Mayor Jim Hahn really put his foot in it last week. It might not be the biggest hornets’ nest at City Hall, but it certainly is the angriest: the one around which all the animal activists buzz.And sting.We are talking about the city Department of Animal Services, which has the largest and most devoted and […]
Giving In to Cops
With Gray Davis warning us about possible terrorist attacks, and the heightened consciousness about security in general, it seems a bit preposterous for the LAPD to keep talking about a compressed workweek. Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, the councilman from the inner-city 8th District, shares what seems to be the council’s general diffidence about the long-proposed and […]
Distant Port
Watts, San Pedro, Wilmington and Harbor City are the southernmost communities in Los Angeles. Together they form the 15th Council District — the most isolated in the city.The latter three communities live by (in both senses) the city’s huge port. Watts, on the other hand, has symbolized what‘s wrong with Los Angeles ever since the […]
Kiddie Diesel
Can the typically smog-belching diesel engine actually help launder the state’s fouled air? The South Coast Air Quality Management District will deal with that question this week. The issue at hand is whether, as the AQMD proposes, regional school districts must go with the cleanest available technology, or whether, largely for the sake of economy, […]
Old-School Star
John Ferraro had many friends. This was his strength and his weakness. He stuck up for people he liked, even when it turned out they did not have the city’s best interests at heart. In his more than 35 years on the City Council, however, it‘s fair to say Ferraro did more to keep Los […]
Naked in Quebec
John Ferraro had many friends. This was his strength and his weakness. He stuck up for people he liked, even when it turned out they did not have the city’s best interests at heart. In his more than 35 years on the City Council, however, it‘s fair to say Ferraro did more to keep Los […]
Richard’s Bracelet
It may not be rough, but it is justice. Richard Alatorre has been sentenced to serve eight months in the Eagle Rock home his lies bought, and for the sake of whose mortgage he falsified a property lease on his previous dwelling. A longtime crony had re-roofed the house with $13,200 worth of fashionable red […]
The Great Library Robbery
Let‘s face it: Pretense aside, the proposal from the Library Commission to name the Central Library after Mayor Dick Riordan was about as spontaneous as the Chinese Communist Party’s terming Mao the Great Helmsman.It is also completely unjust. After the old library was gutted by arson fires, it was Riordan‘s predecessor, Tom Bradley, who inspired […]
Alatorre’s Cat
Richard Alatorre, the notorious former assemblyman and Los Angeles city councilman, is about to pay his debt to society in the form of an eight-month home detention. But his politics live on, and some contend that he’s actually grooming a new political heir in a May 15 special election. The poll is to choose a […]