Postcard from Point Reyes

Manka’s Inverness Lodge is a long-celebrated rustic-luxury retreat in Inverness, California, perched on the edge of Point Reyes National Seashore and looking out over Tomales Bay. Its origins reach back to the Bay Area’s early 20th-century holiday culture, when the settlements around Inverness drew city dwellers seeking to trade urban routines for summers among the woods and waterways.

Leather armchairs, bearskin rugs, mica-shaded lamps and broad wooden floorboards set the mood. Log-post beds, Victorian soaking tubs and generous fireplaces are paired with Pendleton blankets, vintage fishing nets and wooden oars. Rustic in character yet deeply comfortable, the interiors strike a quiet balance between wilderness and refinement.

Set between forest and bay, the property is a scatter of secluded cabins and waterside boathouses rather than a conventional hotel of corridors and numbered doors. It feels instead like a small private settlement with its own unhurried rhythm.

Food has always been central. Manka’s built its reputation on a kitchen devoted to local ingredients drawn from the farms, ranches and waters of the surrounding area. After the original restaurant was lost to fire in 2006, the owners later opened Sir and Star at a nearby inn, extending the same thoughtful, ingredient-led approach for a time.

Breakfast arrives in a wooden box left outside the door with a quiet knock—homemade yogurt and granola, a thermos of coffee, hand-pressed apple cider among the usual offerings. With the woods and the bay on the doorstep, there is little need to go farther. A fire, a good meal and a comfortable chair become their own persuasive itinerary.

Manka’s remains a reminder that the best places to stay offer more than a bed. They create a world of their own, where landscape, interiors, food and quiet hospitality combine to make staying put feel like the most appealing plan of all.

Dogs are welcome in Manka’s Cabin and the Writers Cabin, subject to the lodge’s current policies.

mankas.com

We live in a beautiful world

“We live in a beautiful world,” sings Chris Martin on Don’t Panic, the opening track of Coldplay’s 2000 debut album, Parachutes. He sings it twice, almost apologetically, as though offering a small correction to the prevailing mood. The song is barely two minutes long. There is no grand declaration, no soaring crescendo, just a delicate guitar figure, a melancholy voice and the suggestion that beauty might be something we have overlooked.

I have been listening to it again while also rewatching The Office, the original British series that first appeared on the BBC in 2001. Together, they return me to a particular moment in British culture, when understatement still felt possible. Music was allowed to be quiet. Comedy could be uncomfortable. Ordinary life, with its humiliations and minor disappointments, was treated as a subject worthy of serious attention.

Neither Parachutes nor The Office tried especially hard to be liked. Both seemed comfortable with their own peculiarities: one could be sentimental without being grandiose, the other funny without being reassuring. There was room for awkwardness, silence and the possibility that nothing much would happen.

What I miss is not youth, or even the Britain I remember, but a certain scale. Culture felt human-sized. You could discover a record, listen until its edges became familiar, and carry it around privately. A television programme could make you laugh at the recognisable absurdity of your colleagues without telling you what it all meant. The internet existed, but it had not yet colonised every quiet corner of experience. There was less pressure to make every experience count, to document your response, to turn enjoyment into identity. You could simply like something and not broadcast it to the world.

It would be easy to claim that everything was better in 2000. It was not. The past is generous with its omissions. The optimism of Cool Britannia had its limits, and the ordinary lives depicted in The Office were hardly free of anxiety. David Brent’s desperate need to be liked was an early warning about a culture of performance that would eventually escape the office and follow us everywhere.

Still, something in those two works feels worth recovering. They understood that the ordinary is not the opposite of the extraordinary. It is where most of life happens.

Perhaps the difference is that, in 2000, an experience did not have to become anything beyond itself. A song could accompany an evening without becoming the soundtrack to a social media post. A walk could be enjoyed without being mapped, measured or recorded. You could sit in a café, watch the people passing and let your mind wander. There was no particular need to turn any of it into evidence that you were having a life.

Of course, people have always documented their experiences, and nostalgia has a way of editing out the distractions of the past. But the technology we carry now has changed the terms of our attention. The phone offers an endless succession of things to look at, while the world in front of us waits patiently for its turn. Even our attempts to escape can become projects: the weekend planned down to the last detail, the itinerary that leaves little to chance, the restaurant chosen from hundreds of reviews. We can spend so much time arranging to experience something that the experience itself begins to feel almost incidental.

I keep returning to the lyric because it is so modest. It does not promise that everything will be fine. It does not deny that the world is frightening, absurd or difficult. It simply holds two thoughts together: that things can be terrible, and that beauty persists.

Perhaps this is what Parachutes and The Office have in common. Both are melancholy yet quietly optimistic. Neither needs to manufacture a happy ending. Their optimism is quieter than that, residing in the music, the silences, the awkward exchanges and the small recognitions that make life bearable.

Maybe that is what I miss about the turn of the millennium: not a better world, necessarily, but a culture that seemed more comfortable with the idea that life did not have to be extraordinary to be worth paying attention to. Before every experience became something to record, share or turn into a performance, there was a little more room simply to inhabit it.

The Closing of LA: Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard is more than a road. It is one of Los Angeles’s great mythic thoroughfares, running more than 20 miles from downtown to the ocean and passing through some of the most photographed parts of the city. It cuts through Echo Park, Hollywood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, carrying you from one version of Los Angeles to another.

But the road becomes something else in a roughly mile-and-a-half stretch at the western edge of West Hollywood, just before it crosses into the manicured money of Beverly Hills. That is the part people still call the Sunset Strip: the neon, the giant billboards, the old rock clubs, the hotels that have appeared in a thousand movies. That is the part this is about.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2014, a drive along that stretch still felt like moving through history. Restaurants, hotels, bars, clubs and shops filled the corridor. Tourists mixed with celebrities, people who wanted to be celebrities and people who simply liked being near the noise. The Strip still carried some of the old Hollywood charge that made the place famous.

Pink Taco was there. The restaurants were packed. The bars were busy. The Standard had that slightly louche, groovy idea of what a Hollywood hotel should feel like. It is reopening this month as Public West Hollywood, an Ian Schrager project. The whole stretch felt theatrical. Of course, the Chateau still holds court.

But the important thing was not any individual restaurant or hotel. It was that people actually went there.

Today, much of it feels like a backdrop after the actors have left.

It still looks iconic: the billboards, the fragments of glamour, but now with the strange sensation that you are driving through advertising shells — structures selling a version of Los Angeles that no longer quite exists.

Los Angeles has become very good at maintaining the appearance of things after the underlying business has gone. A storefront stays. A sign stays. A luxury apartment goes up. A restaurant opens, closes and gets replaced by another restaurant. A hotel changes hands. A shopping center gets a new coat of paint. There is always another rendering promising that the next project will bring the street back to life.

But the ecosystem that made these places work is thinning out.

The Sunset Strip’s entire identity depended on density: enough people, businesses, nightlife, tourists and money concentrated in one corridor to create something greater than the individual pieces. Remove enough of those ingredients and the place starts to feel strange. A restaurant can survive without a busy street. A hotel can survive without a thriving neighborhood. A luxury retailer can live off destination shoppers. A Strip needs all of it happening at once.

That is what has changed. It is not simply that some businesses have closed. Cities have always had turnover. Restaurants fail. Hotels change names. Retailers move on. The real question is what replaces them — or whether anything replaces them at all.

Across Los Angeles, commercial vacancy has been climbing. Citywide retail vacancy reached 5.83 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the highest level in more than a decade. On some corridors, it is considerably worse. Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade is the most visible example of what happens when a commercial district loses too many tenants at once.

The Strip has a different problem. It is not simply empty. It is hollow.

The connective tissue — the ordinary retail, the casual places, the bars, the restaurants and the reasons to come to the Strip in the first place — has thinned. And the Strip was never simply a collection of businesses. It was an ecosystem built around the idea of going out.

That idea is under pressure across Los Angeles. Eating out is becoming an occasion rather than a habit. Retail has moved online. Working from home has reduced the need to be anywhere in particular. Entertainment has become more fragmented. More of daily life can now happen without leaving the house. That is a very different kind of city.

The irony is that Los Angeles is still exceptionally good at selling the idea of Los Angeles. The Strip is wrapped in the visual language of glamour: palm trees, neon, billboards, expensive cars, famous names, rooftop pools and buildings that have appeared in movies and television for decades.

But the gap between the image and the actual experience is getting harder to ignore. You see it in empty storefronts and underused shopping centers, in businesses that seem to exist mainly as signage and in streets that are busy with traffic yet strangely quiet once you get out of the car.

The city is still busy. It is still wealthy. There are still tourists, celebrities, restaurants and hotels. What is disappearing is the ordinary commercial life that used to connect them.

That is why the Sunset Strip is a revealing stress test for Los Angeles. Its entire brand was built on concentrated glamour, nightlife and the promise that something was happening here. If even a place with that much history and cultural recognition cannot sustain the full ecosystem that made it famous, the problem is larger than a few vacant storefronts.

The lights are still on.

But is anyone home?

Final curtain

There was a time when Hollywood did not merely make movies in Los Angeles. Hollywood was Los Angeles.

For most of the twentieth century the entertainment industry functioned as one of the city’s great self-reinforcing economic engines. Studios required writers, actors, directors, editors, designers, publicists, agents, lawyers, accountants, caterers, carpenters, drivers and an almost endless supply of people who wanted to work near the people who made movies. Restaurants opened. Houses were bought. Freeways were built. Neighborhoods developed distinct local economies because Hollywood was there.

Los Angeles drew talent because Hollywood was based there. Hollywood stayed because Los Angeles had become the place where movies were made. That second half of the equation is weakening.

Film and television production is mobile. A soundstage is a soundstage. Crews can travel. Sets can be built almost anywhere. When other jurisdictions offer sizable tax credits—Georgia, New Mexico, New York, Canada, Britain, Australia and parts of Eastern Europe among them—Los Angeles becomes one option among many. The romance of shooting in California is a harder sell once a chief financial officer calculates the subsidy.

Los Angeles is therefore absorbing two simultaneous pressures. Entertainment companies are consolidating, cutting staff and relying more on technology, including artificial intelligence. At the same time, the production work that remains is increasingly performed elsewhere.

A studio can still make a successful film with a leaner organization and principal photography hundreds or thousands of miles away. A city cannot so easily detach itself from the economic ecosystem that grew around the industry.

The former studio employee still needs housing. The production worker still needs a dry cleaner, a coffee shop, a mechanic and a dentist. The editor’s landlord needs tenants. The restaurant needs customers. The production company needs a lawyer; the lawyer needs an office; the office needs a cleaner; the cleaner needs a supermarket. Cities function through the accumulation of these ordinary transactions. For decades Hollywood generated them at scale. That machine is now contracting at both ends: fewer jobs overall, and fewer of those jobs that require a Los Angeles address.

The industry itself will survive. Los Angeles will continue to make movies. The more consequential question is whether Los Angeles will remain the place where making movies sustains a broad local economy.

The visible city still looks the part—the palms, the hills, the light, the houses in the Hollywood Hills that continue to command extraordinary prices. Yet the buyers are changing. Increasingly they are people who can afford Los Angeles without needing the local industry to employ them.

For much of its modern history the city attracted people who arrived with a fantasy and hoped the economy would eventually absorb them. Hollywood was one of the primary engines of that possibility. The dynamic is reversing. Those most likely to thrive often arrive already equipped: a family connection, an inherited network, an agent who knows the parents, a social infrastructure that predates any résumé.

Nepotism is not new. What has changed is its relative weight. When the total number of viable jobs shrinks, the value of pre-existing access rises. The children of actors, directors, producers, agents and executives grow up knowing how the rooms work. Outsiders must acquire that knowledge from scratch. As opportunities contract, the system naturally favors those already connected to it.

The old mythology of Hollywood depended on a degree of permeability. Enough outsiders got through the door to keep the fantasy of arrival plausible. That permeability is narrowing at the same moment the industry’s economic footprint in Los Angeles is shrinking.

The result is not simply fewer jobs. It is a tighter coupling between a smaller industry and a narrower set of people who can enter it—while the broader urban economy that once depended on Hollywood’s scale adjusts to a diminished role.

Death warmed up

In 2014, American Horror Story was arguably the most exciting thing on television.

At that point, the series had already produced three seasons that had become iconic in their own right. Every season reinvented itself. Every episode seemed capable of producing an image you had never seen before.

Most importantly, it trusted the audience.

That is what makes watching American Horror Story: Season 13 such a dispiriting experience.

The problem is not that the show has become too campy, too weird or too excessive. Those were always part of its appeal. The problem is that the writing increasingly seems terrified that the audience will fail to understand what it is seeing.

Characters explain things that should be obvious. Themes are announced rather than dramatized. Characters articulate the significance of events instead of allowing those events to acquire significance on their own. The dialogue repeatedly stops being dialogue and becomes signposting.

At one point Sarah Paulson effectively has to tell us: “This is the portal to Hell.”

Thank you.

The image is apparently no longer permitted to speak for itself.

This is the fundamental difference between the AHS of yesteryear and the AHS of today. The old series could show you something bizarre and let you sit there wondering what the hell you had just witnessed. The new series seems compelled to stand beside the image and explain it.

It is the dramatic equivalent of subtitles for your own imagination.

And once you start noticing it, you cannot stop.

“Drink it.”

“Eat it.”

“These are the rules.”

“This is what is happening.”

“This is what this means.”

The lines arrive with the conspicuousness of dialogue written to make sure nobody misses the point. They do not sound like things human beings would say in those circumstances. They sound like the writers communicating with the audience through the characters.

That is fatal to horror.

Horror depends on uncertainty, implication and the audience's willingness to participate. The imagination is always more frightening when it is allowed to complete the picture itself. A strange look, a pause, an unexplained object, somebody behaving incorrectly: these things create tension because we have to interpret them.

But AHS increasingly interprets itself.

And the irony is that this was once one of television's most confident shows.

In 2014, Freak Show could introduce a bearded woman, a killer clown, a traveling carnival, conjoined twins, a disgraced aristocrat, a murderous strongman and Jessica Lange singing David Bowie — and somehow make the whole thing feel like a coherent universe. It did not require a character to turn toward the camera and explain why any of it was significant.

The show understood something that contemporary television frequently forgets: strangeness is more powerful when it is treated as reality rather than commentary.

The characters were characters.

Elsa Mars had ambitions, vanity, cruelty and longing. Jimmy Darling was not a thematic statement about difference; he was a young man trying to construct a life in a world that had given him almost no reason to believe one was possible. Dandy was not simply “a commentary on privilege.” He was a spoiled, terrifying human being whose narcissism gradually became monstrous.

Even when the writing was melodramatic, it was melodrama with personalities attached to it.

That is increasingly absent.

The characters in the newer AHS can feel like carefully assembled delivery mechanisms for concepts. They enter scenes carrying a piece of mythology, a thematic statement or an attitude, deliver it, and leave. They have information. They have positions. They have dialogue.

What they increasingly lack is interiority.

You can feel the difference in the way the old characters reacted to horror. They were frightened because something frightening was happening to them.

The newer characters sometimes seem to understand that they are in a horror story and are waiting for the appropriate line.

That is not self-awareness. It is self-consciousness.

And self-consciousness is death for this kind of television.

The great achievement of early American Horror Story was that it made television feel slightly dangerous again. You genuinely did not know what the next episode might contain. The series had the energy of something being invented in real time.

Look back at the cultural landscape of 2014 and the contrast becomes even more striking. True Detective had just demonstrated how atmospheric television could become. The Leftovers had premiered. Serial was transforming podcasting. Fargo had arrived. Orange Is the New Black was establishing Netflix as a serious television force. Mad Men was approaching its end. Game of Thrones was becoming a cultural phenomenon.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, American Horror Story was doing something nobody else quite was.

It was trashy television made with enormous ambition.

That was its magic.

It did not need to pretend to be respectable. It could be grotesque and intelligent at the same time. It could be ridiculous without becoming embarrassed by its own ridiculousness. It understood that horror and camp could coexist with genuine emotion.

Most importantly, it understood that the audience was smart enough to keep up.

Season 13 increasingly feels like the opposite philosophy.

It tells you what the portal is.

It tells you what the metaphor means.

It tells you what the characters feel.

It tells you when something is sinister.

It tells you when something is important.

It tells you the rules.

And after a while, it feels like a lecture.

There is no mystery.

And most egregiously, it is not scary.

In 2011, American Horror Story did what Scream had done in 1996: it reinvented its genre by understanding it deeply enough to break its rules.

By 2026, American Horror Story has become pure drivel.

The Closing of LA: Boutique Fitness

If you lived in LA in 2014, you did not simply work out. You went to Barry’s. You rode at SoulCycle. You did Orangetheory. If you moved in certain circles, you might have tried The Phoenix Effect; if you were especially image-conscious, you found your way to Cycle House on Melrose.

The price of entry was high enough to feel exclusive yet still within reach for a particular slice of the population. Inside, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” blasted while a room full of people pushed through intervals together. The experience was tribal, aspirational and, for a while, genuinely compelling.

What sustained it was a specific kind of consumer: affluent enough to spend serious money on self-improvement, image-conscious enough to care which studio they belonged to and optimistic enough about the future that recurring charges on the credit-card statement rarely prompted deep scrutiny.

Fitness had become lifestyle. Lifestyle had become identity. And identity, in that moment, was something you could buy by the month.

Then the conditions that made the model feel permanent began to shift.

COVID was the first and most visible rupture. Physical studios emptied almost overnight. Across the country, thousands of fitness businesses never reopened. SoulCycle’s footprint contracted. Orangetheory and other chains had to rethink a business model built around getting large numbers of people into enclosed rooms at regular intervals.

The rooms that had once felt like permanent fixtures of the city’s social infrastructure simply disappeared or contracted.

But the pandemic was only the beginning.

A second, slower pressure arrived through everyday economics. A $180 monthly membership looks different once inflation, higher housing costs, more expensive groceries, rising insurance premiums and the general accumulation of subscriptions have taken their toll.

The boutique model is particularly exposed to this kind of squeeze. A studio has limited square footage, a fixed number of class slots and a large base of unavoidable costs. When even a modest number of members stop renewing, the numbers can turn quickly. You cannot simply shrink the room by 20 percent and preserve the same economics.

A third change has been quieter and stranger.

For decades, one of the strongest motivations for enduring those high-intensity classes was the promise of visible transformation — especially on the scale. Work hard enough, often enough and the body would change.

Then GLP-1 drugs arrived.

Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and the drugs that followed have not eliminated the need for exercise. Strength, metabolic health, mood and longevity remain compelling reasons to move. Muscle loss associated with rapid weight loss has, in fact, given the fitness industry a new problem to address.

But culturally, something has shifted.

A pharmaceutical route now exists to one of the principal outcomes that once drove people into expensive group classes. That matters because the industry was never really selling exercise alone.

Running in Griffith Park is free. Walking the dog costs nothing. Weights at home or a competent YouTube session can deliver a perfectly respectable workout.

What the studios sold was motivation, community, identity and the feeling of belonging to a particular tribe. They sold the instructor. The music. The room. The ritual. The sense that you were one of the people who went there.

For a fleeting moment, that package proved extraordinarily powerful.

It becomes more discretionary, however, when people feel economically constrained — and when one of the central promises of the experience can be partially achieved elsewhere.

That is why the quiet closing of individual studios is more interesting than it first appears. It is a small piece of evidence for a larger cultural story: the fading of the particular LA fitness economy that belonged to the low-interest-rate, pre-COVID, subscription-happy 2010s.

The clues are ordinary rather than dramatic.

A storefront becomes another business. The signage comes down. The Instagram account stops posting. The membership offer vanishes from the website. There is rarely a grand announcement. No one writes the obituary.

Much of that era did not end with a crash.

A lot of it simply stopped renewing its membership.

The Closing of LA

Looking back, the years between roughly 2014 and 2016 now resemble more than a good period for Los Angeles. They marked a broader cultural inflection point. New forms of media were still expanding rather than consolidating, and the cultural landscape had not yet fragmented into quite so many competing streams of attention. Serial, which debuted in October 2014, demonstrated that long-form narrative podcasts could command mass audiences and effectively created the template that countless true-crime productions would imitate. HBO's The Leftovers, which premiered the same year, belonged to an era when prestige television increasingly rewarded ambition over algorithms. Meanwhile, AHS: Freak Show pulled in more than 6 million viewers for its premiere, a figure that would be difficult to imagine today.

What is striking is how distant that world now feels. Not historically distant, exactly, but culturally distant: twelve years ago, yet belonging to an entirely different media ecosystem. The platforms had not yet multiplied quite so completely, the audience had not yet fragmented quite so thoroughly, and the idea that millions of people might encounter the same piece of culture at roughly the same moment still felt relatively ordinary.

Instagram still functioned primarily as a place to discover rather than to perform, Uber felt like a civic innovation rather than a utility, and the creative economy retained a sense that independent ideas could still find audiences before being absorbed into larger platforms.

Los Angeles was perhaps the city that most visibly embodied that moment.

The city had always been sprawling, disconnected and oddly elusive. Its famous landmarks rarely lived up to the mythology, and getting from one neighborhood to another often felt like an expedition. But suddenly its separate worlds appeared to be converging. On weekends, people moved between Venice coffee shops, Fairfax boutiques, downtown galleries and Hollywood creative spaces, documenting a version of Los Angeles that felt both aspirational and accessible.

Everyone seemed to be chasing the same dream: the perfect shot outside the pink Paul Smith wall on Melrose, before hopping into an Uber and heading across town to whatever new restaurant, DTLA gallery opening or rooftop gathering had appeared that week.

It was a distinctly 2014 feeling. Instagram had transformed the city into a visual playground, but the underlying reality had not yet fully caught up. Neighbourhoods were becoming fashionable, yet they still contained enough unpredictability and affordability for ordinary people to participate. A person could still arrive with an idea, a little money and a willingness to experiment, and perhaps find a place within the city's expanding creative ecosystem.

The Los Angeles Renaissance

In Venice, the arrival of the Rose Hotel in 2014 captured that moment. More than a boutique hospitality concept, it helped legitimise a neighbourhood already gathering momentum. It contributed to a local ecology where hospitality, social life and cultural production overlapped. It functioned less as a hotel than as a social node, drawing together artists, founders, fashion people and international visitors and making Venice feel newly central.

Elsewhere, similar signals accumulated.

NeueHouse Hollywood opened in October 2015, formalising a new kind of infrastructure for the city's creative economy. It offered a physical home for entrepreneurs, designers, filmmakers and creative professionals whose work increasingly blurred the boundaries between technology, media and culture.

Hauser & Wirth opened in downtown Los Angeles in March 2016, reinforcing the idea that the city could support cultural institutions of international significance. The Los Angeles Metro Expo Line reached Santa Monica in May 2016, strengthening a still tentative belief that Los Angeles might begin operating less as a collection of disconnected enclaves and more as a coherent urban system.

Clifton's Cafeteria reopened in October 2015 after years of restoration, becoming a symbolic marker of downtown Los Angeles' revival and its aspiration toward civic reinvention. The Fairfax District, meanwhile, was consolidating its role as a hub for independent fashion retailers, streetwear brands and creative businesses.

Taken together, these developments created the impression of a city briefly in sync with itself.

The Infrastructure of an Open City

What made this moment possible was not prosperity alone, but the relative affordability of experimentation.

Rents were rising, but many neighbourhoods still contained spaces where independent operators could take risks. Operating costs were materially lower. Social media had not yet fully reorganised cultural life around algorithmic visibility. The expectation that every concept needed immediate scale had not yet become dominant.

Risk remained possible.

That mattered because cities rarely become culturally interesting through certainty. They become interesting when enough people can afford to experiment, fail and try again.

Many of the places that shaped this period were not important because they followed a proven formula. They mattered because they created environments where unexpected connections could occur.

Los Angeles has always relied on privately owned places to perform public functions. Unlike older European cities, where public squares and dense neighbourhoods naturally create interaction, Los Angeles developed much of its civic life inside cafés, cinemas, bookstores, bars, restaurants, hotels and cultural spaces.

These were commercial enterprises, but they also acted as civic infrastructure.

The Rose Hotel was not simply a hotel. Cinefamily was not simply a cinema. Against the Stream was not simply a meditation centre. Bar Mattachine was not simply a bar.

Their value came from the encounters they enabled.

They allowed people from different industries, backgrounds and social circles to occupy the same spaces long enough for friendships to form, ideas to circulate and collaborations to emerge.

The Closing Begins

The end of this period did not arrive as a single collapse. Some of the institutions associated with the Los Angeles renaissance continue to thrive. Hauser & Wirth remains a major cultural presence in downtown Los Angeles. The Expo Line continues to connect parts of the city that once seemed permanently separated.

But the broader ecosystem these places represented proved more fragile.

What began disappearing was not simply a collection of venues. It was the network of smaller, more improvisational spaces that allowed culture to develop around them.

The Rose Hotel's quiet disappearance in March 2020 now looks, in retrospect, like an early marker of that shift. The pandemic was the immediate cause, but the pressures were already building: rising rents, escalating operating costs, changing consumer habits and the increasing difficulty of sustaining independent businesses in desirable neighborhoods.

The lockdowns accelerated those forces. Some businesses never reopened. Others returned to a city whose rhythms had changed.

Cinefamily had already closed. Against the Stream disappeared around the same period. Clifton's Cafeteria, despite significant reinvestment and a celebrated reopening in October 2015, eventually succumbed to the challenges of operating a large historic venue in downtown Los Angeles and permanently closed this spring (2026).

Each case had its own circumstances. Together, however, they reveal a broader question: whether the kinds of idiosyncratic spaces that defined the mid-2010s can still survive in a city where the cost of operating has risen so dramatically.

Finding Gay Neverland

When I first came to Los Angeles I stayed in a magical house at the top of a steep street in Franklin Hills, just above the six-way intersection by what is now Tarantino’s Vista Theatre. I had arrived from London carrying years of second-hand images — films, magazines, endless Columbo reruns — and none of them prepared me for the physical reality of the place.

From the deck the city rolled away beneath a canopy of trees. Who knew Los Angeles was so green? The hills folded into one another, houses appeared and vanished among the foliage, and at certain hours it felt less like a city than an improbably beautiful garden. Slightly unreal, sprawling, glamorous, and somehow still wild. It felt like Eden.

Los Angeles keeps its secrets close. If all you know are the freeways and the tourist circuits, it is hard to understand why anyone falls in love with it. The city only fully reveals itself when someone who knows someone opens a door — when you are invited into a house in the hills, taken to a bar you would never have found on your own, or driven across town to a pocket of life that seems to exist entirely apart from the Los Angeles you thought you knew.

I had already fallen a little in love on my first visit in February 2006. Through a mutual acquaintance I met some cool people and glimpsed a private, slightly inaccessible version of the city. I left thinking I might one day live here.

I came back the following September for work, staying at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. Friends of friends steered me across town to Silver Lake and the Eagle, which had opened only the year before. It was rough around the edges, unselfconscious, and distinctly local. I loved it. From the ocean, Silver Lake felt like a major expedition — a completely different Los Angeles of little houses, orange trees, steep streets, and improvised, slightly scruffy life.

Other cities have their own urban magic, but Los Angeles is extreme because its geography reinforces the social secrecy. Hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, West Hollywood, Echo Park, Laurel Canyon, Venice, the Valley, the hills — they are not merely neighborhoods. They can feel like separate little civilizations, linked by freeways yet socially distinct.

Slowly I understood something essential about the place: the Los Angeles you fall in love with is usually the one you are lucky enough to be shown. It is not the city of the tour bus or the gridlocked freeway. It is the city behind the doors, up the hills, and around the corners — the enclaves that appear only when somebody lets you in.

I didn’t know it then, but I had arrived near the end of something.

When I finally moved to Los Angeles in 2014 I spent the first months in Franklin Hills before settling in West Hollywood. WeHo was easier — compact, central, somehow familiar. Silver Lake kept a different hold on my imagination. It felt less polished, more eccentric, closer to the unvarnished Los Angeles I had always dreamed of.

There was a time when Silver Lake was one of the great gay neighborhoods in the world, though, like many things about Los Angeles, it kept its cards close to its chest.

The old gay Los Angeles was not meant to be seen. Much of it was deliberately hidden.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, being publicly identified as gay could cost you your job, your home, or your family. Bars were raided. Police and newspapers sometimes photographed the people inside and published their names. There were excellent reasons not to hang a neon sign announcing what happened behind the door.

So the bars tended to be dark, anonymous places — windowless boxes, barely marked from the street. You might know what was behind a particular door; a stranger walking past might have no idea.

And then you went inside.

That is one reason so little of this world survives in photographs. The places were dark. The people inside had reasons not to be photographed. And the generation that created much of it was devastated by AIDS. Young men died and left behind apartments full of the ordinary evidence of lives that had been lived — photographs, negatives, letters, diaries, clothes, records. Sometimes those things survived. Often they didn’t.

It is strange to think about now, when almost every moment of a night out is photographed and uploaded. The gay Los Angeles of that era was almost the opposite. It existed in the dark, and much of it disappeared into the dark.

Photographer Reynaldo Rivera has described that Los Angeles as the last remnants of the world of John Rechy’s City of Night: violent, dangerous, and free. There is a certain amount of danger in freedom, he has said. That is probably difficult to explain to people who came of age when being gay was safer, more visible, and increasingly mainstream.

But the darkness was not only frightening. It could also be liberating. Inside those bars you could become somebody else — or, for the first time, simply become yourself.

Silver Lake had been accumulating this world for decades. The Mattachine Society, one of America’s earliest gay-rights organizations, was founded there in 1950. The Black Cat Tavern was the site of a notorious police raid in 1967 and the protest that followed, two years before Stonewall.

By the 1980s the neighborhood had developed an extraordinary queer infrastructure. Bars sat alongside leather shops, bookstores, sex clubs, and AIDS organizations. The scene was notably Latino and working-class as well as white, and it accommodated a bewildering variety of gay lives.

West Hollywood had the polished bars, the circuit crowd, and, increasingly, the money. Silver Lake was something else. Leather guys had their places. Bears had theirs. There were piano bars, dance bars, neighborhood bars, and sex clubs. There were punks, hustlers, artists, older men, younger men, Latino bars, kinksters, and people who simply did not fit particularly well into the more polished, stand-and-model world of West Hollywood.

In the 1990s and early 2000s you could do a proper gay bar crawl across the neighborhood: Gauntlet II (which became the Eagle), Faultline, Cuffs, Detour, Akbar, MJ’s, Woody’s, The Other Side, Basic Plumbing, Barracks, Meat Rack, Nighthawk, Prowl, King of Hearts, Exxile, and others. Some were bars. Some were sex clubs. Some became institutions. You could move between them — and, in a sense, between different versions of gay life — without ever really leaving the neighborhood.

That was the magic of it.

Silver Lake was not a utopia. It could be dangerous, including gay-bashing attacks. The roughness that made the neighborhood feel exciting could also make it genuinely frightening. But there was an energy that is difficult to recreate once you remove the danger, the secrecy, and the necessity of physical proximity.

The bars did not disappear all at once. Detour closed in 2001. Cuffs disappeared later in the decade. The Other Side was gone by 2012. MJ’s closed in 2014. Faultline eventually left its longtime Melrose location in 2021—a casualty of the lockdowns. One by one the doors went dark.

That is perhaps the saddest part: the lights went out one bar at a time.

Silver Lake was becoming more expensive. The old houses, independent businesses, proximity to Hollywood and downtown, and slightly outsider atmosphere that had once made the neighborhood relatively affordable became precisely the things that made it desirable. Rents rose. Families and wealthier professionals moved in. Restaurants and preschools replaced some of the bars and other businesses.

And gay life was changing too. As being gay became less socially isolating, fewer people needed a gay bar simply to meet other gay people. Then came the apps. What once required a neighborhood could now happen on a phone.

The world that had once forced people together was coming apart.

And perhaps that is why I feel so nostalgic for a place I only really encountered at the very end of its heyday.

When I made that journey to the Eagle in 2007 I had no idea I was walking into the last remnants of something. I only knew that Silver Lake felt different from anywhere I had been, and as a travel writer for a gay magazine I had visited a lot of gay barrios around the world. I liked the houses climbing the hills, the trees, the steep streets, the old storefronts, and the feeling that the neighborhood had accumulated several different versions of Los Angeles on top of one another.

But I especially liked the feeling that something had happened there. You could still sense it. A doorway. A bar that had changed hands. An old sign. A building that looked entirely ordinary from the outside but had once contained a whole world.

The remarkable thing about those old photographs, if you can find them, is how little they look like the gay life we know now. There are no polished Instagram shots, no branded parties, no endless images of people announcing themselves to the world. There are men standing in darkness. Men leaning against bars. Men whose faces were sometimes deliberately obscured. Men who had gone somewhere they could be themselves but did not necessarily want the rest of the world to know where they had been.

And perhaps that is what has been lost.

Not the bars themselves, or even the idea of a gay neighborhood, but the feeling that there was a secret world just behind the door. A world with its own geography, its own codes, its own characters, and its own nights. A world where you could go out without documenting the evening. Where you might see the same people every night, or meet someone you would never have encountered anywhere else. Where different kinds of gay men could occupy the same few blocks and somehow create a community simply by being there.

For a few decades Silver Lake was a place where you could live, drink, flirt, have sex, fall in love, make friends, and grow old without having to leave very far. It was messy and sometimes frightening. It was also funny, erotic, unruly, and alive.

And because so much of it happened behind unmarked doors and drawn curtains, it has left remarkably little evidence of itself. That makes the memories feel almost illicit now.

Silver Lake is still beautiful. The hills are still there. The trees are still there. The architecture is still there. The Black Cat signage remains, the Mattachine Steps are still there, and the Eagle and Akbar still draw people through their doors.

But the old world is mostly gone. Not simply because the bars closed, but because the conditions that created them disappeared. The darkness disappeared. The necessity disappeared. The danger disappeared. And with them, some of the peculiar intimacy of that world disappeared too.

For a little while, it was gay Neverland.

Gay LA: The Canyon Club

Far enough from the suburbs to be considered wild, and sufficiently bedeviled by flood, fire and rattlesnakes to deter the half-hearted, Topanga Canyon has traditionally cast itself as LA’s preferred utopian outpost: the city’s own rustic, occasionally treacherous Shangri-la.

In the middle of the canyon stood a building that seemed to acquire a new identity every few years. Originally the Sylvia Park clubhouse, dating to 1930, it later became a gambling den during the reign of Mickey Cohen, among other incarnations. By the 1950s, it had become the Canyon Club — a remote drinking and dancing spot that would develop a particular following among gay men and women.

Getting there was part of the appeal. A dusty road led into the canyon and away from the watchful eyes of Los Angeles, to a place where gay men and women could meet, drink and dance with considerably more freedom than they could in the city. The club was owned by a former Los Angeles policeman, an unlikely proprietor of a gay bar whose attitude toward its clientele was reportedly less than sympathetic. But business was business, and the money to be made outweighed his prejudices.

That did not mean the club was beyond the reach of the law. Police harassment was an occasional reality, and when the red lights appeared, everyone knew what to do. Men and women would quickly pair off, swapping partners to make themselves look respectable before the authorities came through. The performance could be absurd, but the need for it was real: same-sex dancing remained illegal in Los Angeles County until the 1970s.

Topanga offered something that was harder to find in the city: a little distance from conventional life. During the McCarthy era, the canyon attracted blacklisted actors, artists and political outsiders, and its growing reputation as a place for eccentrics and renegades created an atmosphere in which people could, at least temporarily, invent lives outside the rules of mainstream Los Angeles.

But that freedom was not distributed equally. For heterosexual artists and bohemians, living outside conventional society could be an expression of independence. For gay men and lesbians, being discovered could cost them their jobs, their families and their reputations. The underground nature of places such as the Canyon Club was therefore not simply romantic. It was a necessity.

The Canyon Club remained part of Topanga's queer life into the early 1970s, when the legal and social landscape was beginning to change. The building itself continued its restless succession of identities, eventually becoming a music venue and, after a later restoration, the Mountain Mermaid.

What survives is less a perfectly preserved piece of gay history than the physical trace of a particular kind of Los Angeles freedom: a place hidden in the canyon where people who could not always be themselves in the city could, for a few hours, be free.

Counter culture

I have always thought there was something rather sophisticated about eating alone. It requires a certain confidence about occupying public space without needing to explain why you are there. You can walk into a restaurant, sit down by yourself and have breakfast simply because you want breakfast. There doesn’t have to be another person involved, and there doesn’t have to be a particular occasion attached to the meal.

The American diner was exceptionally good at accommodating this. The counter was one of the great pieces of social architecture because it gave the solitary customer a completely natural place in the room. You could sit among strangers without having to interact with them. You could read the paper, drink coffee, watch the staff working and listen to fragments of other people’s conversations. You were surrounded by people without being required to join them.

That seems increasingly difficult to find.

COVID obviously didn’t invent the decline of the diner counter, but it seems to have accelerated it. When restaurants were forced to remove stools and space tables apart, operators discovered that the new arrangements could make more economic sense. A counter occupied a considerable amount of valuable floor space while accommodating customers who, by definition, were likely to spend less than a family or a group. Once restaurants had invested in new layouts, outdoor seating and different service models, there wasn’t much financial incentive to reconstruct the old arrangement when restrictions disappeared.

The labor situation reinforced the change. The old counter was based on a particular kind of restaurant service, with someone continuously working that narrow strip of real estate, taking orders, pouring coffee, clearing plates and turning over seats. At a time when restaurants were dealing with higher labor costs and difficulty finding staff, that model was not necessarily attractive. Meanwhile, the customers who had once populated counters — office workers grabbing breakfast, people stopping somewhere alone after work, regulars dropping in for coffee — were no longer as predictable, particularly as remote work changed the daily rhythms of American cities.

What is interesting is that the change has now become cultural as well as economic. Walk into many newer restaurants and the room seems to assume that people will arrive in groups. There are large tables, banquettes and family-sized arrangements, often in spaces designed around the idea of a busy social occasion. The person who walks in alone is still perfectly entitled to eat there, but the room no longer necessarily makes that person feel as though it had been designed with them in mind.

I noticed this recently when I went for breakfast somewhere that had once had the kind of terrace and seating arrangement that made eating alone completely unremarkable. The counter had disappeared, and most of the room was occupied by large tables. I found myself surrounded by families and groups of perhaps ten or fifteen people, and although nobody was paying the slightest attention to me, I suddenly became very conscious of being there alone.

That feeling is difficult to explain because nothing objectively unpleasant has happened. Nobody has made you feel unwelcome. The restaurant has not refused to seat you. But the physical arrangement of the room tells you something about the sort of customer it expects to see. When almost every table is designed for a group, a single person becomes visually conspicuous in a way that they never were at the counter.

This is what I think we have lost with the disappearance of that kind of seating. The counter allowed you to participate in public life without necessarily participating socially. You could be around other people while remaining entirely in your own world. There was no expectation that you should be talking, celebrating, sharing or even particularly enjoying yourself in the conventional sense. You could simply sit there with your breakfast and your newspaper while the restaurant carried on around you.

There is something quite civilized about that arrangement, and perhaps something particularly appealing about it now. We live in a culture that has become increasingly concerned with being connected, included and accompanied, while the ability to spend an hour in public entirely on your own is treated almost as an eccentricity. Restaurants increasingly reflect that change. They are places for couples, families, friends, birthdays and groups, rather than places where a person can simply turn up and occupy a small piece of the room.

Of course, eating alone has not disappeared. You can still sit at a bar, find a small table in a café or have dinner by yourself. But the experience has changed when the architecture around you assumes that the natural customer arrives with other people.

That is why I miss the diner counter. I miss the social permission it quietly provided. It made being alone in public seem so ordinary that you didn’t have to think about it at all.

And perhaps that was its greatest virtue: nobody had to tell you that you belonged there. The room had already made the argument for you.

The Closing of LA: Brite Spot

I am becoming increasingly protective of places that are just… places. The coffee shop designed for sitting rather than photographing. The diner that never needed a concept. The room that exists because people need somewhere to be, not because someone needed content.

This is not about preserving venues in amber like nostalgic relics. Remember when Clueless had a pop-up café in the early pandemic? As if. The goal isn’t to freeze the past. It’s to notice when the present quietly decides that certain kinds of ordinary life are no longer worth the rent.

Brite Spot opened in Echo Park in 1949, long before the neighborhood became shorthand for a particular kind of creative class. For decades it was the sort of place that did not need to explain itself: chrome, vinyl, coffee, bacon, eggs, pie. A late-night refuge. A hangover breakfast. A place where you could order corned beef hash with over-easy eggs and a side of bacon without wondering whether the meal had been optimized for Instagram.

That kind of place became increasingly hard to sustain.

The online reaction to Brite Spot’s decline was revealing. People remembered the food, the location, and especially the role it once played. But they also described a restaurant caught between worlds: a diner that was no longer quite a destination, in a neighborhood that was becoming increasingly expensive, with repeated closures and reboots that gradually eroded whatever loyalty remained.

One observation captured the problem particularly well: it was difficult to sustain a greasy-spoon diner in a neighborhood increasingly filled with one-bedroom apartments renting for $4,000 a month.

The Echo Park around the diner changed. So did the economics of the city. The people who had once stumbled into Brite Spot after a night out were increasingly being priced out, while the people moving into the neighborhood arrived with different expectations of what a restaurant should be. That does not mean they did not want breakfast. It means the cultural ecosystem that supported the old kind of breakfast place was disappearing.

Brite Spot closed during the pandemic, reopened, and closed again. Stuart Weisfeld took over and managed to keep the lights on for a time, but the restaurant eventually closed once more. There were further attempts to revive it, but the pattern had become unmistakable: closure, reopening, reinvention, closure.

At some point a restaurant can survive its original audience but not its original purpose.

And that may be what happened to Brite Spot.

There is something particularly sad about the disappearance of a place like this because nobody has to declare it obsolete. There is no grand announcement that the old Los Angeles has ended. The change happens incrementally. The diner closes. Someone tries to revive it. The revival does not quite work. Another restaurant appears. The apartments get more expensive. The old regulars move elsewhere.

Then one day you realize that the city you remember is mostly accessible through photographs.

Brite Spot was one of the first places I visited when I arrived in Los Angeles over a decade ago. I did not know then that I was arriving near the end of something. That is perhaps what makes old Los Angeles so difficult to mourn. There was no single moment when it disappeared. It simply became harder to find. And then, eventually, places like Brite Spot stopped being there at all.

Shifting sands

One of the strange things about living in Los Angeles is how infrequently Angelenos go to the beach. It’s easy to think of it as a “beach city,” but it really isn’t. The beach is there, of course, running along the western edge of the city, but for most Angelenos it is somewhere you visit once in a blue moon rather than somewhere you live your life.

The broad sweep of sand, the volleyball nets, the surfers, sunbathers, runners and cyclists, the rows of lifeguard towers and the endless Pacific beyond them all seem so intrinsically Californian that it is hard to imagine the coastline any other way. But much of what we now think of as the Southern California beach is surprisingly recent.

The sand, of course, was there. Nineteenth-century Angelenos had a coastline, and people certainly visited it, picnicked on it, sought its fresh air and, increasingly, went into the water. Santa Monica was already developing as a seaside resort by the end of the nineteenth century, while Venice was attracting bathers by the early 1900s. But the experience of the coast was very different from the one we know today. Beaches could be narrow, shifting and difficult to reach, backed by bluffs, dunes or marshland, while other stretches of the coast were distinctly rocky. The Pacific was not yet the vast recreational playground it would become.

That transformation is the subject of Elsa Devienne’s Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, a fascinating reminder that some of the most seemingly “natural” features of Los Angeles are actually the result of decades of engineering, planning and cultural change.

From the early twentieth century onward, Los Angeles began systematically remaking its relationship with the coast. Cities and public agencies acquired shoreline, built roads and transportation links, addressed sewage and pollution, fought erosion and constructed facilities that made the beach increasingly accessible to a rapidly growing population. Most remarkably, they began moving sand around on a vast scale, widening and stabilizing beaches that had previously been considerably narrower and more variable.

Some of that sand even came from the dunes around the Hyperion sewage-treatment area in Playa del Rey. It is a wonderfully Los Angeles detail: material associated with the city’s infrastructure helping to create the enormous recreational landscape that now looks completely natural.

By the postwar period, the ambition had become considerably larger than simply preserving the coastline. Los Angeles was creating beaches capable of accommodating Los Angeles itself — a growing, increasingly mobile population that wanted somewhere to swim, sunbathe, play, exercise and escape the city without actually leaving it.

And this wasn’t simply a physical transformation. The culture of the beach changed along with the beach itself. What had once been associated with health, fresh air, seaside resorts and occasional bathing became a defining part of Southern California life. The ocean moved from the edge of the city into the center of its identity. Surfing, swimming and sunbathing became commonplace, while the beach developed its own fashions, rituals and ideas about the body.

That is what makes Sand Rush such a compelling title. The story isn’t that Los Angeles suddenly discovered that it had sand. It is that the city turned sand into a beach — and turned that beach into a cultural institution.

The result is so successful that it is easy to forget how constructed it all is. We look at those enormous stretches of sand today and see nature. But underneath the southern California fantasy is an extraordinary story of urban planning, engineering, public access, environmental intervention and changing social attitudes.

Fargo at 30

One of the things that has aged remarkably well about Fargo is the styling.

At the time, presumably, none of this was meant to look especially period. This was contemporary America. The clothes were contemporary. The cars were contemporary. The offices were contemporary. The houses were contemporary.

And yet, nearly thirty years later, it all looks incredibly specific.

That is partly because the sets are so good.

Jerry’s father-in-law’s corporate office is almost unbearably horrible. It has that particular late-1980s, early-1990s corporate ugliness that is difficult to recreate because it was never really a style. It was simply what offices looked like. Wood veneer. Beige walls. Cheap furniture. Fluorescent light. Desks and partitions that seem to have been ordered from some industrial catalogue and installed without anyone ever asking whether they looked good.

Then there is the Lundegaard house.

It is not a movie version of a suburban house. It is a house that feels mass-produced. The furniture has that slightly flimsy, factory-made quality. The colours are muted. The surfaces look synthetic. Everything seems to have been purchased because it was available, affordable and perfectly adequate.

That is what makes it so uncanny now.

The house does not look designed. It looks manufactured.

And I wonder if that was precisely the point.

The Coen brothers were making a movie about very ordinary people doing something extraordinarily stupid and terrible. So the world around them had to be ordinary too. There could be no visual glamour to distract from it. No heightened movie version of suburbia. Just offices, kitchens, bedrooms, parking lots and houses that looked exactly like the places people actually lived.

What is fascinating is that this realism has become stylization through time.

We can now look at Fargo and immediately recognize an era that the filmmakers themselves were presumably just experiencing as the present.

The cheap carpeting. The laminated furniture. The enormous coats. The geometric sweaters. The fake wood. The beige plastics. The strangely shaped lamps. The heavy telephones. The cars.

None of it was intended to say 1996.

It simply said normal.

And that is why it has aged so beautifully.

There is something almost archaeological about watching it now. You are not just watching the story. You are looking at an entire material culture that has disappeared.

Jerry’s world is commercial America. His office, his clothes, his house, even his general manner all have that slightly impersonal, mass-produced quality. And making him a car salesman is perfect because he exists inside a world of laminated surfaces, showroom gloss and things designed to be sold.

Marge’s house is almost the opposite. It feels domestic rather than commercial. Warmer, softer, more accumulated. It has the feeling of things actually belonging to someone rather than being selected from a catalogue.

That contrast could become the heart of the piece: Fargo is full of different versions of ordinary America, and the production design quietly tells you who these people are before they say very much.

The really clever thing is that neither environment screams character design. Jerry's house isn't "the house of a pathetic car salesman." Marge's isn't "the cozy house of a nice police chief." They just feel like places those people would actually live.

And that makes Jerry's world even sadder. He is surrounded by things that are supposed to signify success — the business, the house, the car dealership — but everything has the faintly depressing quality of something bought rather than loved.

The genius of the production design is that it understood something Hollywood often gets wrong: ordinary life is incredibly visually specific.

People do not furnish their houses to create a cinematic mood. They buy the sofa that is on sale. They inherit a dining table. They get the bedroom furniture from a department store. They put a television on a piece of furniture that was never specifically designed for a television. They replace something when it breaks.

The result is usually ugly.

But it is also incredibly authentic.

And Fargo understood that ugly authenticity could be beautiful on film.

Nothing's fine, I'm torn

Watching Natalie Imbruglia’s Beautiful Love is a slightly depressing experience, though not because the song itself is terrible. It is actually rather pleasant, and Imbruglia remains, well into her career, completely capable of selling a pop song. The problem lies in everything surrounding it.

She wanders through what appears to be a Cotswolds village, wearing a helmet, carrying a takeaway coffee and dancing with the slightly frantic energy of someone who has been handed an iPhone five minutes before filming began. The coffee cup is flung around so enthusiastically that you spend half the video wondering whether it is actually full and whether she is about to baptise the pavement in oat milk. It is charming, perhaps, but also astonishing when you remember what a major pop single used to look like.

There was a time when releasing a song by a major pop artist meant creating an entire visual world around it. The music video was not something casually knocked out on a Tuesday afternoon; it was an event. Directors, choreographers, stylists, cinematographers, art departments, editors and enormous production crews were assembled. Sets were built, locations transformed, concepts developed, lighting designed and wardrobes carefully considered, so that every frame had a reason to exist. Crucially, people cared about making the thing memorable.

The 1990s and early 00s were probably the high-water mark of this particular form of pop culture. Think of Britney Spears arriving at school in …Baby One More Time, Michael and Janet looking iconic in a spaceship in Scream, Kylie Minogue suspended in that impossible white futuristic space in Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the Spice Girls inventing an entire visual language around themselves, or George Michael’s Fastlove and Outside being treated as highly produced events. You could often identify a video from a single frame, which is an extraordinary standard.

It was not simply the result of bigger budgets but of an attitude toward pop itself. A single was an opportunity to create an image, a character, a fantasy and a moment. The video had to compete for attention alongside television, magazines, radio, MTV and everything else occupying people’s cultural bandwidth, and there was real pressure to make it count.

Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn (1997) remains a perfect example. The brilliance of that video is almost easy to overlook because it is so simple: Natalie performs in a room while the supposed reality of the video gradually falls apart around her, the camera eventually pulling back to reveal the artificiality of the set. The whole thing is clever without screaming that it is clever, and Natalie herself looks like a star. That last part matters. The styling, lighting, cinematography and direction all work together to elevate the artist; she is not merely documenting herself existing. The production is creating an image of Natalie Imbruglia.

Compare that with Beautiful Love. There is something almost anthropological about watching it: a famous pop singer wandering around a pretty English village in ordinary clothes, holding a coffee, wearing an astronaut helmet and dancing into what looks like a consumer-grade camera. She looks like someone who has crash-landed in the Cotswolds and is now attempting to understand human civilization through the medium of acoustic pop. And that is the strange thing: the weirdness is not necessarily the problem. Pop has always benefited from weirdness. The problem is that the weirdness no longer feels designed.

The great pop videos could be bizarre, camp, ridiculous, extravagant or completely nonsensical, but they were usually bizarre on purpose. Somebody had an idea and then assembled an army of people to execute it.

Today we increasingly get the opposite: something that feels spontaneous, casual and authentic because it is, essentially, spontaneous and casual. The technology has improved enormously and production has become easier than ever; anyone can now shoot something in 4K on a phone that would have required a television crew twenty-five years ago. And somehow the results can feel smaller. That is the paradox. We have more technical capability than ever and less visual ambition.

Part of this is undoubtedly economics. The old music-video ecosystem was supported by an enormous commercial machine in which record labels were willing to spend serious money promoting singles because music television, physical sales and radio could turn a successful song into a global phenomenon. But it is also cultural. The internet changed the way pop works. We moved from the era of the music video as finished object to the era of endless content: TikToks, Reels, Shorts, behind-the-scenes clips, lyric videos, acoustic versions, live versions, dance challenges, snippets, Stories and posts. The artist is no longer required to create one definitive visual statement; they are required to keep producing. And perhaps that is what has been lost: the idea of the definitive pop moment.

In the 1990s a great pop video could feel like an arrival. You saw it for the first time and immediately understood that something had happened. The song, the artist, the styling, the choreography, the imagery and the cultural moment fused together. You did not simply consume it; you remembered it. That is why so many videos from that era remain lodged in the collective memory. We can still picture them decades later: the silver jumpsuit, the school uniform, the red room, the desert, the choreography, the wind machine, the ridiculous car, the impossible hairstyle. They became cultural objects.

And perhaps the most depressing thing about Beautiful Love is that it reminds you how difficult that actually is. Creating an iconic music video was never easy. Throwing money at something does not automatically make it iconic. For every Torn or Can’t Get You Out of My Head there were dozens of expensive videos that disappeared almost immediately. But at least they were trying. They were trying to create something that would look spectacular on television, something people would talk about at school or work the next morning, something that might become inseparable from the song itself.

Watching Natalie fling that coffee cup around a Cotswolds village makes you realize how much of that ambition has disappeared. It is not really about nostalgia for the 1990s. It is about missing the sense that pop culture was allowed to be larger than life. A pop star was supposed to look like a pop star. A music video was supposed to look like a music video. And sometimes there was something wonderful about spending an absurd amount of money, assembling fifty professionals and building an enormous fake world simply because someone thought a three-minute song deserved it.

We have never had more sophisticated cameras, never had easier access to filmmaking, and never had more ways to distribute a video. And yet, somehow, we ended up with Natalie Imbruglia wearing a helmet and wandering around the Cotswolds with a coffee.

spooky season: LA

In the historic neighborhoods of West Adams and Country Club Park, grand early-20th-century mansions stand as silent witnesses to Los Angeles's Gilded Age — and to the city's enduring fascination with death, mystery and the supernatural.

Some became famous because Hollywood made them frightening. Others have histories that are unsettling enough without any help from the movies. Convents, funeral homes, murder houses, family tragedies and even a dynamite attack all figure into the stories behind these imposing residences.

Here is a short tour of five Los Angeles houses where real history and fictional horror collide.

1. 1120 S Westchester Place — Rosenheim Mansion / AHS Murder House

Built in 1908 by architect Alfred Rosenheim as his own Tudor Revival residence, this imposing Country Club Park landmark was designed as a showcase of early Los Angeles wealth, with Italian brickwork, Peruvian mahogany and Tiffany glass. A former chapel was later converted into a recording studio.

For decades, however, the mansion had a very different life: it was used by the Sisters of Social Service before eventually becoming a private residence.

Its most famous incarnation is entirely fictional. The mansion became the "Murder House" in the first season of American Horror Story, with its exterior and some interiors filmed on location while other scenes were recreated on sets. It returned in later seasons and spin-offs.

Today, fans continue to seek it out — something that has reportedly been considerably less welcome to the property's later owners.

2. 2215 S Harvard Boulevard — Thomas W. Phillips Residence (pictured)

Built in 1905 by architects Sumner B. Hunt and Abraham Wesley Eager, this 7,707-square-foot Craftsman mansion was constructed for Thomas W. Phillips, one of early Los Angeles's prominent residents.

The house became the Robeson family residence in Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs (1991), where the grotesque "Man" and "Woman" imprison victims beneath their home. The production transformed the stately Craftsman into one of the most unsettling domestic spaces in horror cinema.

The property later doubled as the Myers kitchen in Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) and appeared in The Immortalizer, The Convent and other productions.

3. 2263 S Harvard Boulevard — Frederick Hastings Rindge House

Built around 1902–1904 for Frederick Hastings Rindge and his wife, May Knight Rindge, this imposing Romanesque Revival mansion belonged to the same Rindge family whose name is inseparable from Malibu.

Frederick Rindge was one of Southern California's wealthy industrialists. In 1892, he and May acquired the enormous Rancho Malibu Spanish Land Grant, making the family owners of what was then one of the region's great private estates. After Frederick's unexpected death in 1905, May inherited the fight to keep Malibu private.

For decades, she battled railroads, roads and developers who wanted access to the family's enormous coastal property. Her determination eventually made her known as the "Queen of Malibu" and turned the Rindges' struggle into one of Southern California's great property battles.

May herself died in the Harvard Boulevard mansion in 1941.

After the Rindges, the house became a convent and later a maternity home. It has also appeared in films and television.

4. 2421 S Figueroa Street — Stimson House

Known as the "Red Castle," this extraordinary 1891 Richardsonian Romanesque mansion was designed by Carroll H. Brown for lumber millionaire Thomas Douglas Stimson. It was reportedly the most expensive private residence in Los Angeles when completed.

And five years later, someone tried to blow it up.

In 1896, dynamite was placed against the house's foundation, directly beneath Stimson's bedroom. The resulting explosion damaged the area around the mansion but failed to destroy its massive sandstone walls. Neighbors reportedly saw a man fleeing the scene and fired after him.

5. 2302 W 25th Street — Six Feet Under House

The Auguste Marquis Residence, dating to around 1904–1905, is an imposing Queen Anne/Eastlake-style house and a Historic-Cultural Monument.

Television audiences know it as something else entirely: Fisher & Sons Funeral Home, the home and workplace at the center of HBO's Six Feet Under.

The real house has its own long history. It was originally built for a Swiss mining figure and later became associated with the founder of the Filipino Federation of America, which continues to occupy the property.

The abandoned Borscht Belt resort that once brought vacationers to the Catskills in droves

Nothing about the Nevele is quite what it appears to be.

Take the Hawaiian-themed Waikiki indoor pool. Designed in 1954 by architect Sydne Schleman, its yellow-and-green ceiling ornaments, bridge, cascading waterfall and distinctive pineapple chandelier were not simply decorative flourishes. The pool was the crown jewel of an ambitious health-club complex, a piece of mid-century spectacle designed to make the resort itself the destination. Guests could dance poolside on the adjoining patio, surrounded by an entirely manufactured tropical fantasy in the middle of the Catskills.

And that was the point.

The Nevele was part of a vast postwar vacation machine built around the enormous Jewish leisure market that had developed in the Catskills. Hundreds of rooms, restaurants, indoor and outdoor pools, golf, skiing, skating, entertainment and conference facilities were assembled into a self-contained world in which guests could eat, exercise, socialize and be entertained without ever needing to leave the property.

For decades, that model worked extraordinarily well.

But by the 1980s and 1990s, the economics that sustained the Borscht Belt were changing. Affordable air travel opened up Florida, Europe and other destinations. Cruises and new forms of resort travel offered experiences the Catskills could no longer monopolize. The long summer and winter stays that had once filled enormous properties became increasingly difficult to sustain.

The Nevele's greatest asset became its greatest liability: its sheer size.

A resort designed around an enormous volume of guests still required an enormous amount of money to operate, maintain and staff. By the time the property finally failed, the infrastructure that had once made the Nevele spectacular had become an extraordinary financial burden. In 2011, the resort reportedly owed roughly $20 million to creditors, while its assessed value was cut from $15 million to $5 million.

And yet the physical place did not disappear.

The ten-story dodecahedral tower, ice rink, ballrooms and pools remained standing, largely untouched, for years. Successive redevelopment proposals came and went. Some treated the existing structures as assets worth preserving rather than simply demolishing them. The resort became something stranger than an abandoned hotel: a remarkably complete physical remnant of an entire vacation economy.

The circumstances of the final collapse only added to the mythology. The closure was abrupt. Employees and creditors were left unpaid. An auction was canceled. A mysterious foreign buyer reportedly appeared and then failed to materialize. Ownership disputes and litigation dragged on as the property sat dormant.

But beneath the mystery was a simpler story.

The Nevele did not die because its fantasy had stopped being impressive. It died because the world that had made that fantasy economically viable had changed.

What disappeared was not just a hotel. It was a particular way of spending leisure time: an immersive, self-contained resort culture built for a postwar generation that once arrived in the Catskills in enormous numbers — and eventually found other places to go.

The Lost World of Topanga

Long before Topanga became a bohemian enclave, a movie location or a weekend escape from Los Angeles, it was part of an Indigenous world that had existed here for thousands of years. Some of the most remarkable evidence of that world was discovered at Topanga Beach in 1910, when a group of Stanford students came upon an ancient Native American burial site in the bluffs near the mouth of the canyon.

The burial mound at Topanga Beach

In July 1910, newspapers reported that geology students from Stanford University had excavated a large number of Native American burials near the mouths of Topanga and Temescal Canyons. The Los Angeles City Planning Department's historical account records 34 bodies discovered in the bluffs of Topanga.

It is an extraordinary number to encounter in the history of a place that now looks so thoroughly modern. There was no Pacific Coast Highway then, no steady stream of cars passing through the canyon and no development crowding the slopes. There was simply the canyon, the creek, the beach and the remnants of a much older human landscape.

And the story did not end with the excavation. In 1923, construction of the road at the mouth of Topanga Canyon reportedly cut through another prehistoric burial area. Archaeologists later noted that the exact archaeological site involved is uncertain. The road, of course, eventually became part of the Pacific Coast Highway.

A landscape that had been used by Indigenous people for generations was transformed into one of Southern California's busiest automobile corridors. The burial ground disappeared beneath the modern landscape.

Who were the people buried here?

The people who lived in the Topanga area were part of the Indigenous communities now generally identified as Tongva, whose ancestral territory encompassed much of the Los Angeles Basin and surrounding region. The name Topanga itself derives from the Tongva place name Topaa'nga, although its original meaning has been lost.

The canyon offered an extraordinary combination of resources: fresh water from Topanga Creek, access to the coast, oak woodland, native plants and animals, and routes connecting the interior mountains with the ocean. Archaeological evidence tells us that people had been living in the Topanga region for thousands of years.

That makes the discovery of those 34 burials even more intriguing. It is tempting to imagine a single cemetery: a defined patch of ground containing 34 graves. But that may not be what we are looking at. The archaeological record from Topanga represents a much longer and more complicated history, with ancient habitation deposits, tools, milling equipment and human burials discovered at multiple sites.

At the Tank site, for example, archaeologists documented 19 primary and secondary burials in a site dating to the Millingstone period. The 34 people discovered in 1910 therefore should not necessarily be thought of as the people buried in Topanga. They are simply the people whose remains happened to be exposed and recorded during one episode of archaeological excavation.

How many others were buried in the broader Topanga landscape over the centuries? We don't know. And perhaps we never will.

The landscape is the remnant

There is something slightly misleading about asking what "remains" of the Tongva world survive in Topanga. It suggests that we should be looking for an artifact: a wall, a monument or a ruined structure.

But Topanga did not need to be built in order to be inhabited.

The creek was already here. The canyon was already here. The oak woodland was already here. The rocky slopes and terraces were already here. The coastline was already here. These were the things people knew and moved through, the physical landmarks around which their lives unfolded.

And some tangible traces of that use of the landscape do remain. Archaeological sites in the Topanga area have produced stone tools, milling equipment and other evidence of daily life. Indigenous people also used bedrock mortars for processing plant foods, and some of these features have survived in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The buildings and roads are the new layer. The landscape underneath them is much older.

Imagine Topanga 1,000 years ago

If you could stand in Topanga a thousand years ago, you would not be standing in an untouched wilderness. You would be standing in a lived-in landscape.

People would have been moving through the canyon, following the creek, gathering food, processing plants, fishing and traveling between settlements. There would have been familiar places known by name, and stories attached to particular rocks, springs, mountains and stretches of coastline. Children would have grown up knowing the canyon not as scenery, but as home.

And there would have been people dying here, too.

Their communities had ways of caring for and remembering their dead. Some were buried; cremation was also practiced among Indigenous communities of the region. Over generations, the dead became part of the same landscape in which the living had made their homes.

That is perhaps the most difficult thing to picture when looking at Topanga today. The landscape was not merely inhabited by people who happened to live here. It was a place of birth, life, death and memory.

Then came the bulldozers

The 1910 discovery was made by people who were essentially visitors to that landscape: Stanford students and their instructor, excavating Native remains as archaeological specimens. A little more than a decade later, the highway came through.

The 1923 road construction at the mouth of Topanga Canyon cut through another prehistoric burial area. What had once been a place of Indigenous life and burial became a transportation corridor carrying modern travelers along the Southern California coast.

And yet the old landscape never completely disappeared.

It is still there beneath the roads and houses, in the shape of the canyon and the course of the creek, in the oak trees and rocky slopes that have outlasted generations of human development.

A strange world beneath modern Topanga

What makes local historian Pablo Capra and archaeologist Chester King's research particularly fascinating is that the story of Topanga's Native inhabitants is not simply an archaeological inventory of tools and bones. It opens onto an entire lost world.

Their research into the Topanga Beach burial mound brings together accounts of men with horns, dwarfs, giants, Aztec invasions and smoking mountains, alongside the much more mundane but equally strange history of the people who rediscovered the site: a class of Stanford students, an artifact collector from Wisconsin, a Civil War colonel and even a family of squirrels.

It sounds almost like folklore. In fact, it reads like the ingredients for an old Topanga tall tale.

But beneath the strange stories is something very real: evidence that the landscape around us has a history that stretches vastly further back than the modern town.

The Topanga Historical Society's presentation of Capra and King describes the 1910 burial mound as a forgotten Native American site that was ultimately paved over by the construction of Pacific Coast Highway in 1923.

What happened to the people buried there?

We don't have a satisfying ending to that question.

The remains discovered in 1910 did not become a preserved monument. Burial areas were disturbed, archaeological deposits were damaged or destroyed, and some sites were looted by artifact hunters. The precise location of some of the early discoveries is now uncertain, and there may be other burials in the Topanga landscape that were never discovered at all.

But the deeper story begins long before the bulldozers arrived.

By the time those Stanford students opened the burial site in 1910, the Indigenous world they were uncovering had already been profoundly disrupted. The people whose ancestors lay in those bluffs had lived in the region for thousands of years, but centuries of Spanish colonization, missionization, disease and displacement had transformed the communities and landscapes in which their ancestors had lived.

The bulldozers, in other words, did not erase the Tongva. They erased pieces of the physical landscape in which the Tongva had lived.

There is something strange about driving through Topanga today and thinking about the people who were buried here. It isn’t that there is a mysterious "Indian burial ground" hidden somewhere, waiting to be discovered. It is that Topanga itself was the burial landscape: the steep slopes and rocky terraces, the creek winding through the canyon, the oak trees, the beach and the mountains rising above it all.

These were not simply scenic features surrounding a village. They were the places through which generations of people moved, lived, gathered food, raised children and buried their dead.

The houses came later. The highway came later. The traffic came later.

The landscape was here first.

And somewhere beneath the modern layers of Topanga Beach, there may still be pieces of that much older world — places where the boundary between archaeology and the living landscape is no longer visible.

You simply have to know that you are looking at it.

In this picture, Topanga pioneers celebrate the opening of the canyon road in 1898.

Laurel Canyon: The Cold War Beneath the Dream

There is a particular moment when driving up into Laurel Canyon when Los Angeles seems to disappear.

The traffic noise fades first. The boulevards give way to serpentine roads, dense foliage, and houses hidden from one another behind steep hillsides. Sunlight filters through eucalyptus and live oaks onto homes that seem less built upon the landscape than placed there by it—as though the canyon itself had decided where they should stand.

The city’s commercial excess falls away, revealing another Los Angeles: one where the polished mythology of Hollywood gives way to something older, more elusive, and far less easily explained.

It is easy to understand why generations of artists came here seeking reinvention. Laurel Canyon offered something increasingly difficult to find in post-war America: the illusion of escape. A musician could live among the trees, write songs in a hillside cottage, and believe, at least temporarily, that the rules governing the rest of society no longer applied.

The canyon became a place where young people could experiment with identity, art, spirituality, and possibility. It was not simply a neighbourhood; it was an idea.

By the late 1960s, that idea had become one of the most powerful myths in American culture. The hills above Hollywood became home to an extraordinary concentration of musicians who would define an era: The Doors, The Byrds, Love, The Monkees, Frank Zappa, The Mamas & the Papas, Mama Cass Elliot, and many others who passed through this small, winding network of roads.

Houses became informal salons where musicians gathered, friendships formed, and songs that would shape a generation were written among the trees.

The image remains intoxicating: musicians on porches, guitars leaning against walls, conversations stretching late into the evening—a community searching for something beyond conventional American life.

Laurel Canyon seemed to embody the promise of California itself: that with enough imagination, courage, and sunshine, a person could invent an entirely new self.

But places, like people, rarely reveal everything at once.

The same hills that nurtured creativity also concealed loneliness, addiction, exploitation, and tragedy. Houses disappeared behind dense vegetation. Roads twisted unexpectedly. Neighbours could live only a few hundred feet apart yet remain almost entirely separate.

It was a landscape that encouraged both intimacy and isolation.

Perhaps the most intriguing contradiction of Laurel Canyon lay in who many of its revolutionaries actually were.

The counterculture is often remembered as a rebellion against the American establishment, yet many of its most influential voices emerged from the very institutions that defined post-war America: military families, government circles, universities, and professional households shaped by the Cold War.

Jim Morrison was the son of Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, whose career placed him close to some of the defining military events of the Vietnam era. Frank Zappa grew up in a household shaped by his father's work in chemical warfare research at Edgewood Arsenal.

Others came from similarly structured worlds: educated families, disciplined homes, and communities built around achievement, science, and national service.

The irony was profound.

The same post-war system that created military power, technological advancement, and economic security also created a generation with enough freedom to question the values of that system.

The rebellion was not simply an escape from America. In many ways, it was one of America's unexpected products.

That paradox becomes even more fascinating when considering the role of psychedelics.

The CIA’s MKUltra program, which operated from 1953 into the 1970s, explored techniques of psychological influence and interrogation, including experiments involving LSD. Some of these experiments involved unethical practices, including administering substances to people without informed consent.

At the same time, LSD was moving through scientific, artistic, and intellectual circles far beyond government research. Figures such as Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter encountered psychedelics through government-linked research environments and later became influential figures in the psychedelic movement.

The irony was unmistakable: a government program designed to understand and potentially control altered states of consciousness existed alongside a cultural movement that embraced those same experiences as a pathway toward creativity, freedom, and expanded awareness.

Laurel Canyon was not the centre of the psychedelic movement in the way San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district was, but it absorbed the same atmosphere. Psychedelic ideas flowed through its music, conversations, and artistic experimentation.

A program intended to explore control became part of a much larger cultural moment defined by questioning authority.

Adding another layer of mystery was the presence of Lookout Mountain Air Force Station, the secretive Cold War-era military film facility hidden among the hills. There, Hollywood technicians worked behind high security to produce classified footage of nuclear tests and other military projects.

The contrast was extraordinary: a hidden government facility operating within the same landscape that became a sanctuary for artists, musicians, and countercultural experimentation.

Naturally, such a setting invited speculation. Writers such as Dave McGowan, in Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, argued that the Laurel Canyon scene may have contained deeper connections between military backgrounds, intelligence networks, and cultural movements.

Most historians, however, view Laurel Canyon as the result of a far broader and less coordinated convergence: Los Angeles’ entertainment industry, post-war migration, military expansion, economic prosperity, and a generation searching for new forms of expression.

The mystery endures not because everything was orchestrated, but because so many unlikely worlds existed in such close proximity.

Laurel Canyon was where Hollywood met the military-industrial age, where suburban privilege met rebellion, where technological power met spiritual exploration.

It is easy to forget that post-war Los Angeles was not only the world’s entertainment capital but also one of America’s great military and aerospace centres. The Cold War transformed Southern California into a landscape of bases, research facilities, aircraft manufacturers, and defense contractors.

For many of their children, childhood meant constant relocation, disciplined households, and the geopolitical anxieties of the age.

Reinvention did not simply become attractive—it became imaginable.

The irony is that rebellion requires resources. A society must be stable enough, wealthy enough, and open enough to produce people who can afford to challenge it.

The machine built the environment. The children decided to question the machine.

And the children of the military-industrial age became the poets, mystics, and iconoclasts of the psychedelic generation.

Today, the trees still arch over narrow roads. The houses remain hidden among the hillsides. The afternoon light still creates the same golden haze.

A visitor could easily believe that nothing has changed.

Yet every hillside has its previous occupants. Every house has its stories. Every road carries traces of the people who passed through it: musicians chasing immortality, actors seeking privacy, dreamers searching for meaning, and those who discovered something far darker than they expected.

Laurel Canyon endures because it contains so many of California’s contradictions within one steep, wooded bowl: utopian dreaming and Hollywood cynicism, artistic freedom and industry machinery, natural beauty and hidden power, openness and secrecy.

It remains a place where paradise seems entirely possible—accompanied always by the uneasy suspicion that paradise was never quite as innocent as it appeared.

Tales of Topanga

As the Laurel Canyon dream began to lose some of its innocence, many artists looked westward toward the deeper folds of the Santa Monica Mountains. If Laurel Canyon had become the stage on which the counterculture announced itself, Topanga offered something more private: a place to disappear, to experiment, and perhaps to believe that a different way of living was still possible.

Among those drawn to its winding roads was Linda Ronstadt, the young singer who became known as the “barefoot lady of Topanga.” The image captured something essential about the canyon in that era: the sense of freedom, informality, and possibility that attracted a generation of musicians searching for a life beyond the expectations of the mainstream. Yet beneath that romantic image existed a more complicated reality.

Topanga was never simply a sanctuary. Its isolation gave people space to create, but it also allowed problems to remain hidden. The same hills that sheltered musicians, writers, and dreamers also sheltered excess, addiction, and people living at the edges of society. The canyon’s openness—its refusal to ask too many questions, its tolerance for outsiders—was part of its appeal, but it was also part of its danger.

The tragedy of Topanga was that the qualities that made it magical were the same qualities that made it vulnerable. Its remoteness offered freedom, but also separation. Its rejection of convention encouraged creativity, but sometimes removed the structures that protected people from their own excesses.

The canyon became a place where the California dream could be lived intensely and briefly: beautiful, unconventional, and liberating, but never entirely safe.

Others who lived here include Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman of The Byrds, Taj Mahal, Tim Buckley, members of Spirit and Canned Heat, and later Neil Young, who recorded portions of After the Gold Rush in a basement studio here.

At the center of this world was the Topanga Corral, a former country-western roadhouse transformed into a gathering place for the counterculture. Under its wooden roof, blues musicians, bikers, folk singers, and canyon residents shared the same small stage. It was an unlikely meeting point between old California and the new one emerging in the 1960s.

The image remains powerful: long nights at the Corral, guitars competing with the sound of the creek, musicians gathered around fires, artists testing the boundaries of what life could become. Topanga represented another version of the California dream—not Hollywood glamour, but a return to something more elemental. A belief that a person could step outside the machinery of modern life and create something more authentic.

But places, like people, rarely reveal everything at once. The same rugged terrain that nurtured solitude also created vulnerability. Steep slopes, narrow roads, fire-scarred ridges, and unpredictable creeks made the canyon both beautiful and unforgiving. Houses could feel completely isolated even when neighbors were nearby. The same independence that attracted artists could also allow darker elements to remain hidden.

Topanga’s reputation as a refuge for outsiders meant that it attracted not only musicians and artists, but also people living further beyond society’s margins. The canyon’s countercultural openness existed alongside drug culture, violence, and tragedy. Charles Manson and his followers moved through the broader Topanga orbit, and musician Gary Hinman, who lived in the area, became one of their early victims. In 1970, Canned Heat guitarist Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson died in the canyon, another reminder of the era’s fragile boundary between creativity and self-destruction.

Topanga promised authenticity: a life closer to nature, removed from the pressures of the modern world. Yet the canyon remained connected to the same cultural forces it was trying to escape. Musicians still depended on the industry below. Fame still followed people into the hills. The outside world was never truly gone.

Perhaps that is Topanga’s greatest contradiction. It has always been portrayed as gentler and more bohemian than its neighbor Laurel Canyon, yet it carried a wilder edge: horses and motorcycles, folk songs and roadhouse blues, spiritual seekers alongside old-timers and outsiders. It was never as neatly packaged as the Laurel Canyon legend, and perhaps that allowed it to retain something more authentic.

The canyon has endured its own hauntings: the memory of fires that reshaped hillsides, floods that erased homes, and generations of artists who arrived searching for freedom and sometimes found something more complicated.

Today, Topanga remains fiercely itself. The roads still wind through dense foliage. After rain, the air still carries the scent of sage and eucalyptus. Artists, musicians, and new generations of seekers continue to arrive, drawn by the same promise that has shaped the canyon for decades.

The Topanga Corral is gone, but its spirit survives in places such as the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, in galleries tucked among the hills, and in the stubborn refusal of residents to surrender entirely to the pace and pressures of Los Angeles.

Topanga endures not as the louder legend, but as something quieter and more resilient. It represents one of California’s oldest contradictions: the desire to leave society behind while remaining connected to its stories, its music, and its dreams.

The hills are beautiful. The creeks still run. But the land remembers every fire, every flood, and every song once sung beneath its oaks.

Museum Towns and the Experience Economy

A recent weekend in Kernville, California, felt like stepping back into a more grounded era. Tucked deep into the Sequoia National Forest—at least three hours from Los Angeles—the town green was humming. Café staff were warm and chatty, the crowd was a diverse, everyman mix of hikers, families, and locals gearing up for river swims, boating, or trails. It had that easy, unpretentious 2014 California feel: normal people enjoying a weekend in the countryside rather than performing it. The location helps. You have to want to get there. It’s not a casual stop-off.

Contrast that with Carmel-by-the-Sea, slap-bang on Highway 1. Same state, very different fate. Carmel has perfected the storybook charm—cottages, courtyards, dramatic coastline—into one of America’s most photographed destinations. Yet that very success has turned it from a lived-in village into something closer to an experience to be consumed. Visitors chase the perfect image; the town risks being overwhelmed by them. 

This is the peculiar paradox of many of the world’s wealthiest and most desirable enclaves. They achieve extraordinary property values, flawless restoration, and global recognition—yet quietly lose the ordinary disorder and daily rhythms that make a place feel alive. The warning sign is not decay. It is perfection.

From Living Towns to Curated Exhibits

Call it the “museum town” effect. These places are not empty; they are carefully staged. Wealth purchases more than privacy—it reshapes the public realm. Historic buildings gleam, flower baskets overflow, and streets stay immaculate. But the broader cross-section of life gradually disappears. Cafés and shops that once served locals on modest margins give way to luxury dining, boutiques, and lifestyle brands that can absorb sky-high rents. The town grows richer and more beautiful, yet narrower and quieter outside peak visitor hours.

Tiburon, north of San Francisco, illustrates the withdrawal of life. Its waterfront remains stunning, but the everyday vitality that once drew ferry day-trippers has thinned. In California’s Gold Country, Grass Valley leans into polished heritage aesthetics—galleries, cafés, curated charm—while nearby Sonora retains more of the texture of a working town, where residents still shop, work, and linger without everything revolving around tourism or lifestyle consumption.

The same forces are unmistakable in the UK. Coastal Dorset offers a textbook case. Hotels and inns that once catered to middle-class families have been reimagined for a far narrower clientele. One that your parents used to stay at now operates as Pig on the Beach and commands up to £800 per night. This is not mere inflation—it is affluenza in action: the contagious pressure of extreme wealth to commodify every desirable experience, pushing prices beyond the reach of the broad public that once sustained these places as genuine destinations.

Travel Trends Fueling the Shift

Modern travel has accelerated this transformation. July 23, 2026, was the busiest day for commercial air travel ever. Social media rewards the photogenic and the performative. Instagram, TikTok, and travel influencers turn towns into visual products—perfect light, hidden gems, “secret” beaches that quickly cease to be secret. The rise of the “experience economy” means visitors increasingly seek curated moments rather than simple stays. Short-term rentals and high-end boutique hotels amplify the effect, concentrating returns among owners and operators while squeezing out year-round local businesses.

Overtourism is one symptom (Carmel’s crowded lanes, Dorset’s honeypot villages). The opposite—hollowed-out exclusivity—is the other. In both cases, the place stops being primarily a home for its residents and becomes an object of desire for outsiders. Wealthy enclaves withdraw into privacy; popular ones are loved to death. The middle ground erodes.

Affluenza compounds it. As global affluence grows for the top tiers, demand for “authentic” escapes intensifies. Paradoxically, the pursuit of authenticity often destroys it. Towns respond by polishing every surface, but in doing so they replace the messy, mixed-use vitality—mechanics grabbing coffee, children buying snacks, neighbors chatting on errands—with something more staged. The invisible infrastructure of community weakens.

The Healthier Path

The healthiest towns and villages occupy the “messy” middle. They welcome visitors without surrendering their soul to tourism. They attract investment without pricing out the ordinary businesses and people who generate everyday life. They preserve beauty without freezing themselves as museum pieces.

A thriving place is not defined by flawless architecture or stratospheric prices. It is defined by diversity of purpose: enough different people with enough different reasons to be there on any given day. Locals living their routines alongside respectful visitors. Working trades alongside weekend hikers. Independent shops alongside smarter restaurants. Imperfection and ordinariness are features, not bugs—they signal that life is still visibly unfolding, not just displayed.

Kernville’s relative remoteness and unpretentious character give it breathing room for now. Many less Instagram-famous coastal spots retain similar resilience (somehow Cambria is still holding on). But as travel trends push ever higher prices and expectations, the pressure spreads.

The danger of extreme prosperity and hyper-connected travel is not that places become ugly. Quite the opposite. They can become so beautiful, so desirable, and so expensive that the living communities they were built for quietly fade into the background, leaving polished exhibits in their place. Recognizing the pattern is the first step toward protecting the middle ground that keeps towns truly alive.

Maine offers a quieter version of the same dilemma. Its coastal villages have long attracted visitors precisely because they resisted becoming resorts. Places such as Deer Isle and Stonington retain the qualities travelers increasingly crave: working harbors, independent shops, unhurried rhythms, and the feeling that daily life continues beyond the visitor season.

But that authenticity has itself become a commodity. The search for “the real Maine” has created the same pressures seen elsewhere: rising property values, second-home ownership, seasonal economies, and a widening gap between those who visit and those who remain year-round. The danger is not that Maine will suddenly become another Carmel. It is that the qualities that made it special become preserved as scenery rather than sustained as community.

The ultimate irony of the experience economy is that people are increasingly paying to encounter places that have not yet been fully shaped by the experience economy.