Dam right

The Mulholland Dam, now commonly known as the Hollywood Reservoir or Lake Hollywood, got off to a rocky start when a sister dam buckled and ruined the career of its creator -- Willam Mulholland. The St Francis disaster of 1928 cast doubt on the the safety of the antecedent Hollywood dam, and for decades afterward, kept Hollywood residents on edge. William Mulholland (1855–1935), the LA superintendent of water and power, was the engineer who carried out the transit plan that brought drinkable water and blue pools from the Owens Valley and the Sierra to the city. This is the history that lies behind the film Chinatown. On March 17, 1925, the completed dam was renamed in honor of Mulholland. In a ceremony attended by dignitaries and filmland luminaries, including a canine movie star named Strongheart, Mulholland was feted as a genius. The Los Angeles demigod, after which the infamous Mulholland Dr is named, was forced to retire in 1928, a depressed, dimmed man since the St. Francis disaster.

Expert consensus now holds that its sister dam buckled due to a perfect storm of factors, including its placement on an undetectable (at the time) ancient landslide and Mulholland’s inability to tailor the dam’s design to San Francisquito Canyon, relying too heavily on plans drawn up for the Mulholland Dam. Its collapse was a combination of geography and man’s folly. And so, the Mulholland Dam remains, as does the Mulholland Memorial Fountain and Mulholland Drive. Mulholland’s legacy has been remarkably rehabilitated, as the story of Saint Francis and its sister dam have been washed away from the city’s memory by the passing of time. Today, as a century ago, water is a daily topic of conversation across the state of California. Many of its water systems were built in the 20th century for a different climate, unaltered by the effects of global heating and for a smaller population. Both a visionary and a tactician, Mulholland is being looked at through a different lens in the context of a broader reassessment of history. For some, L.A. represents everything that has gone wrong in the relationship between man and nature.

A Requiem for Florida, the Paradise That Should Never Have Been

The state of Florida was basically considered a wasteland until developers figured out that they could transform swampland into promised land. Its economy over history has been a pyramid scheme of developers and people marketing “a bewildering dreamscape forged by greed, flimflam, and absurdly grandiose visions that somehow stumbled into heavily populated realities.” Swindlers sold swampland to homesteaders, turning Florida real estate into a land-by-the-gallon punchline. Pioneers flocked to the “tropical wonderland,” buying lots that looked great in the dry season only to find that they still flood regularly during the rainy season. Once Henry Flagler built a railroad to Key West in 1912, a Floridian version of manifest destiny took hold and real estate exploded. There was a land boom, then bust, in the 1920s. After World War II, settlers and retirees beelined in again, on new highways built in the 1950s and ‘60s. Cubans fleeing communism arrived around the same time. Between 1960 and 1980, the state population nearly doubled, from 4.9 million to 9.7 million.

But the fundamental issue is that South Florida is an artificial civilization, engineered and air-conditioned to insulate its residents and tourists from the realities of its natural landscape. From sea level rise to habitat loss, the effects of the climate crisis are on the verge of making South Florida uninhabitable. Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than South Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat. If scientists are right, the lower third of the state will be underwater by the end of the century. Will this stop people relocating here? Probably not—there’s still going to be a market for paradise. And most came here to escape reality, not to deal with it.

Miami’s tech boom is heating up as cutting-edge companies flee Silicon Valley, New York and other areas to join start-ups and investors here that are turning the “Magic City” into a prime innovation hub — called so because people who lived at the time recounted how it was as if a major city had popped up overnight, almost like magic. Miami would love to be the crypto, tech hub of the future if you can forget that Miami is sinking and will not have much of a future, but how long before transplants get wise to the fact that Mother Nature never intended us to live here? The Miami condo collapse is a crisis for the entire state, casting doubt over the desirability of living in South Florida. Many condo owners are going to have to bear the costs of special assessments and stricter building codes. These buildings take a beating from the weather, and with rising sea levels, it could become increasingly difficult to get insurance.

Understanding the causes of economic inequality are important but one thing is clear: climate change disproportionately affects poor people in low-income communities. The impact of global warming is going to hit some populations in Miami harder than others — especially retirees on limited incomes. Market experts in South Florida are anticipating that the lagging interest in older condos will cause prices to sink, while the push for more engineering reports will likely put lower-income condo owners in untenable positions, forcing many to take on assessments they can’t afford or sell as quickly as possible. That could lead to significant changes in condo ownership and even the Miami skyline. My heart goes out to anyone who was involved in the collapse, and any condo owners who now feel a sense of impending doom. Meanwhile, here are some sobering stats to ponder on:

Miami is considered the most vulnerable coastal city in the world. What were once called “100-year floods” could occur regularly — meaning every couple of years.

• Miami is predicted to see 6 inches of sea-level rise by 2030 and 2 ft by 2060.

• Miami, which is built on silt, is also sinking into the sea. When sea levels rise, saltwater also infiltrates water supplies and septic systems.

• Miami, already the warmest city in the U.S. year-round, has warmed over 2.3°F since 1970. By 2050, expect 151 days/year to feel like 105°F or higher.

Broadway: Downtown L.A.’s architectural wonderland

Downtown L.A. has one of the most impressive collections of historic movie theaters in the world. Broadway Street offered Angelenos a heady mix of vaudeville and cinema in beautiful theater houses and stately department stores. The Beaux-Arts style was firmly in place when most of the Broadway theaters were built, in 1910 to 1931, and therefore many exteriors and interiors favor classic (Greek, Roman, Italian Renaissance) designs. By the late 1920s, the Art Deco style had come into favor for office buildings, though theatergoers still loved the ornate, eye-popping styles as featured in The Theatre at Ace Hotel, the Tower, and particularly the Los Angeles.

Beginning in the 1920s, automobiles contributed to the decline of the extensive trolly system that connected Downtown Los Angeles to the rest of the urban area. As a result, ridership ceased to grow and with it fare revenue. An obsession with cars and the consequent rise of auto-centric planning along with “white flight” did more damage. Theaters began moving to Hollywood – Grauman’s had already opened the Egyptian Theatre in 1922 and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre opened in 1927 – and department stores opened branches in outlying areas. There’s no clear date that can be stamped on Broadway as its year of demise because the change was gradual. But by the 1950s, with the explosive post-war growth in the suburbs, the completion of new shopping centers, and the growth of the freeway system, the end had come.

Most of the majestic buildings still stand. They remain as icons of an earlier age.

Apple opens store in Los Angeles' historic Tower Theatre

Apple Tower Theatre is a new Apple Store designed by UK studio Foster + Partners inside an abandoned 1920s movie theatre in Downtown Los Angeles. Foster + Partners worked with the technology company to renovate the historic building, which was originally designed by American architect S Charles Lee in 1927 in the baroque revival style. Originally home to the first theater in Los Angeles wired for film with sound, the historic Tower Theatre has lain empty and unused after it closed its doors in 1988. It’s also been a frequent filming location and has been featured, among others, in The Last Action Hero, Transformers, and is a favorite shooting spot for David Lynch.

After Betty and Rita are seen entering the neon-lit doorway for Club Sliencio in Mulholland Drive, the following scene shows them watching a dreamlike show inside that mysterious club. Lynch filmed that interior scene in The Tower Theatre, which is also where Lynch filmed the Mulholland Drive scenes where Theroux’s character is seen staying inside a run-down place called the Park Hotel. Years later, Lynch returned to the Tower Theatre, using its interior as a location in the third season of Twin Peaks (or, as many people call it, Twin Peaks: The Return). This was the otherworldly space occupied by a character known as the Fireman (a.k.a. the Giant) and Señorita Dido. On his Twin Peaks Blog, Steven Miller analyzes where Lynch filmed these scenes within the building.

After walking through the Broadway doors, visitors enter the monumental lobby inspired by Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera house, featuring a grand arched stairway with bronze handrails flanked by marble Corinthian columns. The movie theatre's original balconies remain in situ, and Apple plans to use the space as an auditorium for daily skills workshops and presentations from local filmmakers and musicians. An original stained glass window with a pattern that includes coiled strips of film has also been painstakingly restored, along with a fresco of a blue and cloudy sky that arches over the double-height space.

Apple Tower Theatre anchors the corner of Eighth Street and Broadway. While the Broadway Theater District, home to a network of Latino-owned small businesses, has remained largely devoid of big global chains in its recent history, Downtown L.A.’s historic core is now undergoing a fast-moving transformation as big-box retailers and hospitality brands, including Urban Outfitters (the Rialto Theater) and Ace Hotel (the United Artists Theater), revive and reactivate Broadway’s concentrated wealth of historic theaters, many of which had gone to seed over the decades. Just north of the Apple Tower Theatre on Broadway and West Fourth, near Grand Central Market and the famed Bradbury Building, the neighborhood’s first high-rise constructed in over a century, a 35-story luxury residential tower, opened to residents this spring.

For businesses owned by people of color, large companies like Apple moving in will be a mixed blessing. It will bring foot traffic, which is good, but will those customers stop and purchase at a mom-and-pop store, and will those Latino-owned businesses eventually get displaced? Deep-seated racial disparities often mean they cannot rely on money from family and friends to start new enterprises, while also struggling to secure credit from banks. A gleaming Apple store is a wonderful thing, but a new reality is emerging from the rubble of the pandemic’s economic devastation: COVID-19 was a toxin for underdogs and a steroid for many giants. As we enter a new evolutionary stage of retail, one glaring trend is the mass commodification of the streetscape. Everything that we typically decried about chains—their cold efficiency, sterility and predictably, may come to feel like a blessing following a period when people felt stalked by murderous pathogens.

Postcard from Lake Tahoe

Starting not long after the turn of the 20th century, Lake Tahoe witnessed a strong infusion of filmmakers and Hollywood stars into the region. Legends of the Silver Screen such as Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Greta Garbo and Elizabeth Taylor became part of local lore as they stayed in and frequented local establishments during their shooing schedule. However, after World War II, when much of the railroad infrastructure was torn up and used as scrap metal, the steady stream of movies shot in Truckee/Tahoe dried into a trickle. Beverly Lewis, director of the Placer-Lake Tahoe Film Office, said one probable factor is the rise of the highway system and automobiles as a replacement for the railway system. “Hollywood’s first choice now (for mountain or winter scenes) is Big Bear or Mammoth because the drive is a little easier,” she said. This accounts for why after 1938, Tahoe/Truckee served as a location only once every couple of years, sometimes a couple of times a decade, rather than four or five a year. Nevertheless, what the region lacked in quantity of films produced, it made up for in quality. Here’s some of my favorites:

A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951)

Elizabeth Taylor, at the peak of her craft, and Montgomery Clift, one of the great American actors, team up for this sizzling and devastating romance. In the film, Lake Tahoe is supposed to resemble a lake set in upstate New York, where the beautiful people spend their summers sojourning amid their wealth, luxury and general self-regard. This gem from the Golden Era of Hollywood is loosely based on the novel “An American Tragedy” (1925) by Theodore Dreiser, itself inspired by the true story of a sensational 1906 murder case. A Place in the Sun premiered in Los Angeles on August 14, 1951, although it was filmed in 1949. The film scored a total of nine nominations and six wins at the 1952 Oscars.

Clift’s sexuality, like those other 50s idols Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, was carefully concealed from the public. He was “lonely,” yet with the help of his refusal to live in Los Angeles or participate in café society, he was able to keep his private life private. But he found acceptance and kinship with Elizabeth. On the evening of May 12, 1956, while filming Raintree County, Clift was involved in a serious car crash when he smashed his car into a telephone pole, minutes after leaving a dinner party at Taylor’s Beverly Hills home. Her devotion was never clearer than when she crawled into the wreckage and saved him from choking.

Monty's accident shattered his face and left him in constant pain. But even before Raintree, the decline had been visible. Author Christopher Isherwood tracked Clift’s decline in his journals, and by August 1955, he was “drinking himself out of a career”; biographies of Clift posit that he drank because he couldn’t be his true self, because homosexuality was the shame he had to shelter within. As he sank into alcoholism and addiction, Elizabeth used her power to keep him working. In turn, through scandals and multiple marriages, he was her constant. Their relationship endured until his death in 1966, and loyalty united them to the end. His influence continued in her outspoken support for the gay community, especially during the AIDS crisis.

MISERY (1990)

Misery was partially filmed in Nevada’s oldest town Genoa, which stood in for Silver Creek, CO. The opening scene in which Paul Sheldon drives off the snowy road was filmed near Donner Pass. The crew built four buildings on Genoa’s main boulevard – a cafe, radiator shop, sheriff’s station, and a general store. The production also filmed at Nevada’s oldest thirst parlor, the Genoa Bar and Saloon.

“He didn’t get out of the COCKADOODIE CAR”

“YOU DIRTY BIRD, HOW COULD YOU”

“Well, I’ll get your stupid paper, but you just better start showing me a little appreciation around here MR MAN”

THE BODYGUARD (1992)

In The Bodyguard, you may recall the scene where Kevin Coster's character jumps off the pier to save a boy from a boat that's about to explode. That pier belongs to Tallac House, a rustic lodge-style retreat on the shore of Fallen Leaf Lake, just a mile or so from Lake Tahoe.

Atomic L.A.

During the Cold War in the late ’50s, LA-96 was one of 16 NIKE missile sites that protected Los Angeles from a feared attack by Soviet bombers. Army specialists monitored the skies from this high point between Los Angeles and the Valley, looking for Soviet air strikes. The technology at the site could both detect enemy aircraft and assist anti-aircraft missiles launched from a nearby facility. It was an active battery from 1956-1968.

Years of disuse later, the missile site is now part of a public park. People can stomp up the steel structures and enjoy the sweeping views in all directions. Not much has changed, or what’s been added is deliberately made to match the existing structures, so it still sort of feels like somewhere you’re not allowed to be.

The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. Cuba’s alliance with the Soviets had a profound impact on the American psyche, which peaked in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.

Paranoia about an internal Communist threat—the second Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. During Eisenhower’s first two years in office, McCarthy’s shrieking denunciations and fear-mongering created a climate of fear and suspicion across the country. No one dared tangle with McCarthy for fear of being labeled disloyal.

The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. Federal employees were analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated allegations of subversive elements in the government and the Hollywood film industry.

McCarthy became the person most closely associated with the anticommunist crusade–and with its excesses. He used hearsay and intimidation to establish himself as a powerful and feared figure in American politics. He leveled charges of disloyalty at celebrities, intellectuals and anyone who disagreed with his political views, costing many of his victims their reputations and jobs. McCarthy’s reign of terror continued until his colleagues formally denounced his tactics in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings, when army lawyer Joseph Welch famously asked McCarthy, “Have you no decency?”

Desert X 2021

Artworks in this year’s biennial, scattered around the Palm Springs area, explore issues of land rights, water supply and more. In the foothills near the Palm Springs Visitors Center, Nicholas Galanin has mimicked L.A.’s famous Hollywood Sign with “Never Forget,” which references the colonization of ancestral Cahuilla territory. The undulating Pop installation of the word “Indianland” acknowledges the Hollywood Sign’s original form, erected as a real estate gimmick to promote the colonization of Beachwood Canyon. Built by Mexican laborers in two months during 1923, it is an accidental icon. Today, the city’s most prominent landmark is also a symbol of the entertainment industry; but “Hollywoodland“ was never designed to be anything other than an advertisement for a housing development on the side of a steep hill. People from around the world project their own dreams and fantasies onto it. In this way, it makes a perfect “empty vessel” to use as a springboard for the show’s most Instagram-ready work, which is both a strength and a weakness: strong because the virtual image will travel far and wide, weak because seeing it reproduced on a cellphone screen is actually more impactful than encountering the analog object at the site (much like the sign it mimics.) That said, the artist does point out that the sign itself is less significant than the land it sits on, and the history of who engages with that. A related, somewhat reversed issue hampers Xaviera Simmons’ string of billboards along Gene Autry Trail, a busy thoroughfare between the city and Interstate 10. Her image-and-text articulations of the pressing topic of reparations and redistribution of wealth are thought-provoking. But billboards aren’t designed for the paragraph-length typography found on several of them, which simply cannot be read at 55 mph.

Desert X is open until May 16.

The Cahuenga Pass Parkway

The first section of the Hollywood Freeway opened in 1940. It was then known as the Cahuenga Pass Parkway and trolleys ran down the center of it until 1952. The Parkway was designed by a team of engineers under the direction of Merrill Butler, the same team that had designed the Arroyo Seco Freeway/Parkway. Here in the Pass, they were able to incorporate lessons they had learned in their earlier work eg generous access ramps.

In spite of the fact that the on- and off-ramps of the former Cahuenga Pass Parkway have been modified by Caltrans since their original construction, the bridges have remained virtually intact. Although the detailing, methods of construction and structure of the three bridges are similar, and all manifest the *WPA-Heroic Streamline Moderne design influences, each has a slightly different appearance. The Pilgrimage Bridge is the low, arched one; the Mulholland Bridge, pictured, tall with a longer span over Cahuenga Blvd; and the Barham bridge wide and workman-like. These differences are most apparent in their streetlight/- luminaire designs, which are unique to each of these three bridges. However, they all share similar simple decorative concrete railings and a late Thirties sense of monumentality and civic presence. These bridges, walls, ramps, guard rails and tunnels represent an example of the late 1930’s civic social aspirations and grandeur. 

Where earlier roads once crossed open countryside, however, early planning maps showed the Hollywood Parkway (to use its original name) slicing through a densely populated area. Residents were understandably unsettled. As early as 1940, the Hollywood Anti-Parkway League denounced the Cahuenga Pass Parkway, then under construction, as “un-American.” Later, as planners moved to extend the parkway toward downtown, opposition became even louder. Movie stars worried about their Whitley Heights homes. Merchants fretted about a sweeping concrete viaduct over Franklin Avenue. The Hollywood Bowl Association feared noise pollution. Some critics suggested that the city build a rapid transit line instead. Most supported the general idea of a freeway but disagreed with its routing.

Ultimately, the state relented to local opposition and struck compromises with the mostly white, middle-class, and politically powerful Hollywood community. Construction claimed several historic structures, including Charlie Chaplin's and Rudolph Valentino’s former homes in Whitley Heights, but the state planted extensive landscaping near the Hollywood Bowl to dampen traffic noise, and highway engineers bent the freeway around local landmarks like the First Presbyterian Church, the Hollywood Tower apartments, and KTTV’s newly constructed television studio.

The more ethnically diverse and working-class communities southeast of Hollywood – as in Boyle Heights and East Lost Angeles, where seven superhighways were built over local objections – were not as lucky. There, the freeway took a more direct route. It bisected Echo Park, severing the recreational lake from its adjacent playgrounds. It carved a canyon through downtown, obliterating historic Fort Moore Hill and its 1873 high school building. And where it met the Arroyo Seco Parkway rose the Four-Level Interchange, a colossal structure that displaced some 4,000 people.

Construction lasted seven years (1947-54) and cost $55 million. Nearly half went toward right-of-way acquisition, which involved the relocation of 1,728 buildings and the demolition of another 90. When the final link of the ten-mile freeway opened in 1954, an ancient transportation corridor had entered modern times, but it had also opened urban wounds that have yet to heal.

*The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency, employing millions of job-seekers (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was established on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway

Originally started as a WPA flood control project, the Arroyo Seco Parkway—also known as the Pasadena Freeway—is considered one of the most important roads in American history. Built by the WPA and PWA (in conjunction with local agencies) and mostly completed by 1940, it was the first freeway west of the Mississippi. At the dedication, California Governor Culbert Olson stated, "It takes courage to do a thing the first time, no matter how simple and obvious it may appear after it is done. And this, fellow citizens, is the first Freeway in the West."

Designed in the parkway tradition, it features lush landscaping, windy curves and highlights the unique geographical features of Southern California, including views of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was also practical, becoming the initial stretch of road for the well-known (and, now, much maligned) Los Angeles freeway system. Today, it's still in nearly the same configuration it was in 1940 and is a American Society of Civil Engineers Historic Landmark.

Postcard from Pasadena

The Arroyo Seco cuts a steep canyon through the west side of Pasadena, separating it from the hilly neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles. As Pasadena grew, this canyon posed a daunting obstacle to accessing the neighborhoods to the west, one that would be bridged over many times to link both sides of the canyon. Although the stream of the Arroyo Seco itself is confined to a narrow concrete channel for most of its length through Pasadena, the adjoining landscape is far more natural than that along the Los Angeles River. Beneath the many bridges that span the canyon, the wooded canyon offers a lovely secluded bit of nature close to Old Pasadena.

As you walk through the park, you’ll find the aging remnants of old park infrastructure: a crumbling stone wall here, an old bench there. The cliff face on the west side of the canyon holds numerous staircases that seem to vanish into the overgrowth, while castle-like mansions poke out on the ridge above, aloof and disconnected from the nature beneath them. In contrast to Pasadena’s typically heavily-cultivated parks, such as the lush lawns surrounding the Rose Bowl just to the north, Lower Arroyo Park feels mostly forgotten by the city above.

Ironically, the Lower Arroyo was once home to a major tourist attraction. In the 1900s, Adolphus Busch (of the Anheuser-Busch brewing company) turned his summer home at the southern end of the park into an elaborate garden filled with statues, picturesque buildings, and waterfalls. This was the original “Busch Gardens,” long before it turned into a chain of amusement parks, and it stayed opened until the 1930s before it was closed and replaced with a residential neighborhood, with few traces of the gardens remaining.

But it’s the grace of the Colorado Street Bridge, proclaimed the highest concrete bridge in the world upon completion in 1913, which really draws your breath. With its majestic arches rising 150 feet into the sky, the Colorado Street Bridge is a historic Beaux Arts bridge that spreads over the Arroyo Seco to ease travel between Pasadena and Los Angeles. Before the bridge was built, people had to go down into the Arroyo Seco, cross the river and come back up the other side. Today it offers visitors picturesque views of the city and is featured in several television shows and movies. Most recently the Colorado Street Bridge was featured in the 2016 film "LA LA Land."

Postcard from Highland Park

The northeast Los Angeles neighborhood thrived throughout the prewar period, when many of the landmarks that now define Highland Park — including the Highland Theater and the Highland Park Masonic Temple — were built. In the 1950s, the rise of the suburbs saw the beginning of a period of transition for the neighborhood, with Highland Park becoming an important center of Latino life in Los Angeles. Though a cause for celebration when it opened in 1940, construction of the Arroyo Seco Parkway—America's first freeway—sped up Highland Park's gradual decline. Reduced to "drive-over" country connecting two distinct political powers—Pasadena and Los Angeles—the area struggled to retain its own identity. Channelization of the Arroyo Seco further accelerated the transformation of the area from suburban Eden to an inner-city enclave.

Paradoxically, Highland Park was fading as more and more people arrived to the city. The population of Los Angeles in 1900 was 100,000. By 1930 it was over one million and growing. Many of these new arrivals had come to California looking for a paradise that was advertised to them in newspapers, books and idyllic scenes from motion pictures. African-Americans from the South had come looking for opportunity and fair treatment. The civil war in Mexico drove a large number of immigrants north through the 1910s and 1920s, many settling near downtown to take advantage of available jobs and transportation. During the 1930s the number of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles decreased due to mass deportations carried out by government authorities, all without due process. But Latinos were nonetheless establishing themselves in areas such as Chavez Ravine and neighborhoods east of the Los Angeles River.

As early as the 1920s, the predominantly white residents of Highland Park began looking to other areas of Los Angeles for housing. As new neighborhoods developed and transportation became more available to the west, residents began moving to areas such as the Mid-Wilshire district, which offered both new housing stock (humble and magnificent) and thriving commercial districts. After World War II, this westward drift became a full-on exodus of Anglo middle-class families out of communities like Highland Park and into the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys. This in turn left housing in Highland Park to Mexican-Americans and working-class whites.

Real estate developers and property owners eager to maximize cheap rentals in the area subdivided large Victorian and craftsman homes, or razed them completely in favor of multi-unit housing and commercial strip malls. The once-thriving Figueroa commercial corridor lost much of its prominence as the trolley and foot traffic that had once supported diminished due the opening of the Arroyo Seco Parkway. Traffic now moved up and down the Parkway between Los Angeles and Pasadena at 40mph, with Highland Park reduced to being an off-ramp sign.

During the 1950s and '60s, Mexican-American working-class families continued to increase in numbers while whites moved out to newer, homogenous communities. This white flight occurred not only in Highland Park, but was seen in many of Los Angeles' original and older neighborhoods. As white middle-class families moved to the suburbs, resources moved with them, leaving their old neighborhood in slow decline. After the advent of the freeways, waves of white flight enabled many Latino families to make what they regarded as a step up from East Los Angeles to Highland Park, for example.

Today, Highland Park is one of the epicenters of gentrification in Los Angeles. Not so long ago it was an unassuming, mildly depressed, Latino-majority suburb with a string of mom-and-pop style businesses along its two major thoroughfares — York Boulevard and Figueroa Street. Now, or certainly pre-pandemic, it is a place of spiraling rents, designer Craftsman cottage renovations, bars, restaurants and playfully curated boutiques catering not to anyone’s basic needs but to shopping as recreation. Highland Park is also home to a groundswell of anti-gentrification activism, emboldened by but predating BLM protests. Vandalization of hipster stores and restaurants in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood is nothing new. Being named “The Hottest Neighborhood of 2013” by Redfin might well have been the death knell. Now, gentrification has become synonymous with white supremacy.

Like other fast-changing neighborhoods, Highland Park has not always been able to accommodate the new without displacing the established. As one blogger puts it: "Working-class communities are often built around interdependence on one another, gentrification redesigns the neighborhood around capital. Communal spaces are re-imagined into commercial spaces, homes which were once upheld as places for families are now upheld only by how much they can profit investors. As the demographic forcefully changes from proletarian to rich, brown or black to white, renter to homeowner, the sense of home starts to disappear as bourgeois newcomers seldom acknowledge the previous residents or the culture they’ve already established."

The Golden Age of L.A.'s 'Little Harlem'

During the 1920s, Los Angeles attracted more African Americans than any other city on the West Coast. Undoubtedly the epicenter of L.A.’s jazz scene, South Central's Dunbar Hotel was built in 1928 by Drs. John and Vada Sommerville – the power couple of progressive black Los Angeles – as a place where black travelers could stay in style and comfort. The luxurious hotel soon attracted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Billie Holiday. During the '30s and '40s, Central Avenue was the peak of chic. The Dunbar was the sun around which the tight-knit neighborhood revolved. The black entertainment district on Central Avenue welcomed white viewers and listeners. Many racially-prejudiced middle-class whites in Los Angeles were reluctant to live amongst African Americans, but they were attracted to jazz music and African American entertainment. Indeed, the creative theft and cultural appropriation of black music by white jazz bands transformed mainstream music and pop culture in Los Angeles. Before the Dunbar stopped attracting upscale visitors and fell into disrepair it was a source of tremendous pride on Central Avenue, and the area became known by some as “Little Harlem” and “Brown Broadway.”

Lured by an expanding economy and the prospect of jobs, many black families who had come from the South during the Great Migration settled in Compton and South L.A. Before the courts struck down racially restrictive covenants--deeds that prohibited blacks and other races from living on a property--in 1948, Compton was white. By the 1950s, Compton was a largely middle-class black city. For a brief moment in time, blacks and whites coexisted quite peacefully in Compton from the early 1950s to the Watts Riots of 1965. After the riots, and again after the L.A. riots in 1992, which erupted after four police officers were acquitted of assault for the beating of Rodney King, Compton experienced a wave of violence that prompted middle-class families to leave.

Around the world, Compton is famous for producing musicians such as Kendrick Lamar and athletes like Serena and Venus Williams. But the city is also known for its history with gangs and police violence. When the crack epidemic first hit Los Angeles in 1983, it embedded itself into the city’s fabric. Ravaging neighborhoods and taking lives, crack exploited the conditions that society had allowed to fester and were unwilling to confront. Economic restructuring in the manufacturing sector and other changes in the economy had led to a decline in low-skilled and semi-skilled employment among blacks. These conditions contributed to the rise of the crack cocaine economy. Crack offered a quick fix with a high profit margin. Crack single-handedly set back African American progress 30 years; the trauma gets passed down. Whether you used it or not, it changed the dynamics of the black community forever. But before the horrors of the drug were as widely known, the day-to-day realities of the crack epidemic were mainly told through the emerging art form that we would come to know as hip-hop. In 1988, N.W.A. put the city of Compton in the national consciousness (and on the world stage) with the release of Straight Outta Compton, a chronicle of violent life on the streets and fury aimed at the police. The emerging genre of hip-hop in the mid-1980s served as a portal for mainstream America to see what was happening in the urban centers that the Reagan administration had left behind. It was stark, brutal, and unrelenting in their depiction of violence on the streets of South Central and Compton.

Crack was a scourge, but it got turned into a demon, which was then used to demonize the inner city. To discuss crack cocaine is to tackle a litany of bigger, intertwined American issues: racial and economic disparities; inner city poverty and crime; media reporting and sensationalism; political and legislative campaigning and action; mass incarceration and exploitation; and personal and communal responsibility. Many of those topics are present in Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy, Stanley Nelson’s documentary, which examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it. 

Horror hotel

Built in 1924, the Hotel Cecil opened just a few years before the Great Depression (1929-1939). The hotel was intended as lodging for business people, but with the economic collapse, the Cecil’s clientele drifted toward the less affluent. The Cecil’s central location in Downtown Los Angeles and proximity to the Pacific Railroad made it an ideal spot for transients including actress Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia.) The 1947 murder is one of the great unsolved murders of history. Apparently, Short was seen at the Cecil’s bar in the days leading up to her death. It has yet to be proven or disproven. More recently, Elisa Lam, a Canadian student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was recovered from a water tank on top of the hotel on February 19, 2013.

The Hotel itself was known to have “insanity within its walls,” as said in Netflix's Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, with guests ranging from drug dealers to prostitutes and rapists. One interviewee in the documentary says the hotel is where “serial killers let their hair down,” perhaps in part because it was so cheap — in the mid-1970s and ’80s, rooms were about $14 per night. Killer Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker, stayed at the hotel between his grizzly murders. One witness in the documentary said he would often see Ramirez take off his bloody clothes in the alley and walk up the Cecil stairs to his room.

Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger stayed at the Cecil for a time in 1991 in a twisted homage to Ramirez. During that time he posed as a journalist and killed at least three sex workers, all while taking advantage of his rapport with the police that he garnered during ride-alongs. Unterweger was later convicted of the murders and hanged himself in Austria. Other incidents at the Cecil included someone trying to burn down the hallways, domestic abuse, assaults and stabbings, someone slashing their own throat with a razor and even an infamous leap by Pauline Otton, who jumped from the ninth-floor window, killing herself and an elderly passerby who was on the pavement below her.

Back in 2015, the Cecil inspired Ryan Murphy to create American Horror Story: Hotel, which focuses on the disturbing events at the fictional Hotel Cortez. The most-recent incident happened in 2015, when a 28 year-old man was found dead on the pavement outside the hotel in an apparent suicide. Los Angeles-based firm Marmol Radziner was to helm Hotel Cecil’s rehabilitation, but it remains to be seen if the long-in-the-works project will continue, given that the pandemic has severely hurt the hotel industry and effectively killed off travel. Once again, it seems like fate has dealt the storied hotel a heavy blow.

Postcard from India

This was first published on the World Land Trust blog on February 28th, 2013, while I was in India.

If you want to see wildlife, then you must explore a forest on foot, and quietly. And that is exactly what Richard Bence did on a recent trip to the Western Ghat mountains in Kerala.

At the start of the year I joined a field biologist on a visit to the Tirunelli-Kudrakote elephant corridor project supported by World Land Trust (WLT). Mr Ramith is a biologist working for Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and, as it turns out, he spends a lot of his time examining prodigious piles of poo. Elephants eat 200kg of vegetation a day and this results in 45kg of dung. Being a stressed out Londoner, I wanted my elephant hit – right now. Going on 14km treks was all well and good, but dung in itself had limited appeal and I could only find interest in the flora and fauna for so long.

MINIMISING CONFLICT
Apart from a few notable exceptions like my Mum, humans of any variety, shape or form are not my favourite species. As Yann Martel’s eponymous character says in the film Life of Pi: “What you don’t realise is that we are a strange and forbidding species to wild animals. We fill them with fear. They avoid us as much as possible.”

I too find humans far more frightening than wild animals – although I am mindful of the fact that living with the threat of elephants stampeding through my front room might be a rather stressful way to live. For that is the purpose of World Land Trust’s efforts: to minimise conflict between these magnificent beasts and rural communities. As the human population increases, the animals’ natural habitats become threatened. So, WLT takes a socio-holistic approach by helping to re-locate the village people to another plot thereby creating harmony for animal and human.

CLASH OF CULTURE
WLT’s efforts are paying off, but protecting wildlife is a big task in a country that‘s developing at lightning speed. Initially I had no interest in experiencing the brash modern face of commercial India. I wanted the exotic, eternal India, the one with elephants, tigers, flying giant squirrels, cobras and faded colonial grandeur (although not necessarily in that order or all at the same time). But halfway through my trip I found myself in a shopping mall in Mangalore. Seeing the locals being so easily seduced by distractions (an inflatable bucking bronco looked particularly tragic and incongruous in an Indian shopping mall) and dead-end promises made me sad. But it’s really none of my business – and in fact, as I was to find, spending a few hours in a temperature-controlled environment free of traffic noise has its appeal given the hot and horn-honking alternative out on the street.

CHAMPIONING NATURE CONSERVATION
Later, out in the field, a world apart from air conditioned shopping malls, we finally came across elephants, foraging happily in a conflict-free field where villagers once lived. I had much to learn from Mr Ramith’s quiet, patient observation skills. During my trip I came to realise that a butterfly could be just as impressive as an elephant if looked at in a less all-or-nothing light. The prospect of championing nature conservation in a country that is developing as rapidly as India is truly daunting. But while brave organisations like Wildlife Trust of India and World Land Trust are doing sterling work, elephants at least are in safe hands.

MORE INFORMATION
WLT’s Elephant Corridor Project is creating a network of forest corridors to enable Indian Elephants to move safely between protected areas. After the success of the Tirunelli-Kudrakote corridor, WLT is now fundraising for a corridor in northern India to link the Corbett National Park to the neighbouring Ramnagar forest.

los angeles on film

The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century, Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales—from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel—have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures, from Chinatown to Forrest Gump, Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood. Here are some of my favorite films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema. Some notable omissions: Postcards from the Edge (1990), Clueless (1995), and L.A. Confidential (1997).

Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece is a reflection of Hollywood through a glass, darkly. It pulls back the curtain on the business of show-business – the false smiles and threadbare adoration that operate to keep Norma Desmond living in exile at the edge of insanity. Like many of the post World War II classics, Sunset Boulevard is covered with a thick sheen of cynicism. For Wilder, Paramount symbolizes the shimmering Janus-faced dream-maker that continues to beckon hopefuls to the boulevard of broken dreams. Desmond (Gloria Swanson) epitomizes yesterday’s glamor queen, a forgotten star with a limping, sagging and fading career. And yet still she captivates. With Sunset Boulevard, Swanson, a real-life silent-screen star who once lived in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, actually made a comeback, something her character is unable to achieve.

Chinatown (1974)
Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic is a veritable tour of Los Angeles landmarks. Capturing the hidden sacrifices and backroom dealings behind the emergence of LA as one of the world’s great cities, Chinatown revels equally in Los Angeles’s classic Spanish Colonial architecture, the glamor of iconic Hollywood restaurants like The Brown Derby, and the urban backwash of the city’s aqueducts, bridges and barren riverbeds. Much like the city itself, there are more layers to this movie than possible to comprehend in one screening, but what we have is a glimpse beneath the surface to expose the squalor behind LA’s veneer of sophistication and charm.

Blade Runner (1984)
Ridley Scott's cyberpunk vision of the future is set in the Los Angeles of 2019, a perpetually rainy city permeated by smog where loneliness prevails. Featuring a run-down version of an iconic downtown location, The Bradbury Building, the dark, dank and dusty interior creates a dream-like quality where reality is lost and boundaries between human and replicant become blurred. Indeed, the film’s use of architectural treasures from the city’s “real past” that appear in the movie, including the Bradbury Building, Union Station, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, is what makes this dystopian masterpiece so arrestingly beautiful and might explain why Blade Runner continues to fascinate. "Perhaps it expresses a nostalgia for a dystopian vision of the future that has become outdated. This vision offered some consolation, because it was at least sublime. Now the future looks brighter, hotter, and blander. Buffalo will become Miami, and Los Angeles will become Death Valley, at least until the rising ocean tides wash it away," said Thom Andersen in Los Angeles Plays Itself. "Computers will get faster, and we will get slower. There will be plenty of progress, but few of us will be any better off or happier for it. Robots won’t be sexy and dangerous, they’ll be dull and efficient, and they’ll take our jobs."

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Like Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive is a long east-west street in Los Angeles. They run roughly parallel, while Mulholland Dr. is at the top of the Hollywood Hills and Sunset Blvd. at the bottom. The similarity of the movie titles (Sunset Blvd. and Mulholland Dr.) right down to the use of the abbreviation of the titles, is another parallel. Not only do both films offer a critique of people who are ultimately destroyed by the film industry, but also the action starts with an incident involving a car accident. Released twenty years ago, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive has come to be regarded as perhaps the most important film of the century so far. Essentially, it is a mystery film that never settles its own mystery. Even its greatest admirers are loathe to explain it or endure it being explained.

Crash (2005)
In 2005, there were many reasons to be excited about Crash. Don Cheadle is just one part of a remarkably talented cast including Thandie Newton, Ludacris, Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, Sandra Bullock, and Brendan Fraser. And with Americans still lingering in some semblance of post-9/11 national solidarity, it seemed like everyone was ready to have a serious conversation about cultural harmony. Back then, an exploration of L.A.’s hyperspecific cultural enclaves felt relevant, brave even. Fifteen years on, the film gets criticized for being a white redemption story. Can a movie be retroactively chastised for not being woke enough? Critics and award committees adored Dillon's portrayal of a flawed cop at the time: things look different today through the filters of MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Director Paul Haggis said his ensemble drama, which also won him the best director Oscar, did not deserve to win best film. What do you think?

Drive (2011)
Mr. Winding Refn is a Danish-born director, some of whose earlier films have inspired ardent, almost cultish devotion in cinephile circles. Carey Mulligan plays the girl who lives down the hall from Ryan Gosling, the guy with no name, and a lack of dialogue. Her innocence is axiomatic and part of the reason the driver goes to such messianic lengths to protect her. The Driver, on the other hand, is characteristically clad in his now-iconic silver scorpion jacket, a modern version of shining armor. The car replaces the steed, while the nocturnal Los Angeles skyline creates a somber backdrop for this neo-noir thriller with an obvious stylistic nod to the 1980s. Making fine use of Los Angeles locations, particularly the lonely downtown streets around the L.A. River, Refn transforms Los Angeles into a modern-day fairytale world of chivalric romance.

Nightcrawler (2014)
Nightcrawler offers a fascinating look at a part of journalism that is rarely, if ever, explored in the media. With each crime scene that cameraman Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) encounters, he continues to crave better material. He has a good eye for framing, and is even willing to contaminate a crime scene in order to get the best pieces of journalism for both the money and the reputation. He's cunning, creepy, and bold. Los Angeles is his cradle and his hunting ground. The whole thing is dangerously beautiful, set in the nocturnal underbelly of Los Angeles. Dan Gilroy successfully delivers a media satire in the spirit of "Network" and "To Die For" that critiques the way cable news can distort or misrepresent the truth by spraying its viewers with agitprop to boost ratings. Inaccurate coverage of protests, for example, has highlighted the problem of media bias. The fabrication and omitting of information to frame a narrative feeds the perception that news coverage is tainted and cannot be trusted. Indeed, a deeper understanding of what people read, listen to, and watch, could not be more poignant as it becomes increasingly difficult to agree on what just happened.

La La Land (2016)
Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence as La La Land. The filmmakers depict a clean, spare, elegant city, sluiced in midcentury technicolor, consisting almost exclusively of jazz clubs and studio backlots, dreamy piers and sodium lamps, starlight and cappuccinos. That a movie as guileless and nostalgic as La La Land – which draws as its inspiration from the classic musicals Singin’ in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – has provoked such ire, is perhaps not surprising given the cultural context of the time. April Reign’s hashtag #OscarsSoWhite had erupted like a big bang at the 2015 Oscars, causing a commotion by challenging the multicultural image the industry aspired to. When La La Land, the story of the rather easily attained success of two white seekers and strivers, played by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, was thrust into the spotlight, public opinion had begun to tilt in favor of increased diversity in front of and behind the camera. Damien Chazelle’s tribute to the golden age of musicals walked away with six wins at the 2017 Oscars. Moonlight won best picture. Here’s to the ones who dream.

gay movies

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
From a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette concerns the inter-ethnic relationship between Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young South London Pakistani man, and his childhood friend Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), a white skinhead. Under Margaret Thatcher’s reign, Britain was a deeply divided nation. Omar’s rampant individualism tallies with Thatcherite doctrine in a way that the subversive power of homosexual attraction to traverse economic/class/racial lines does not. Frears dares to address racism, homophobia, and sociopolitical marginalization in an England that has echoes in today’s post-Brexit Britain.

Paris is Burning (1990)
Paris is Burning presents the lives of real people on the drag ball circuit, a safe haven for poor, black, Latin, queer ‘children’ in late 80s Harlem. With its mix of competitiveness, pageantry and raw talent, the drag ball was serious business for its contestants. Willi Ninja, the godfather of Voguing, made his first appearance here as the “mother” of the House of Ninja. Many of the contestants vying for trophies represent “Houses” which serve as surrogate families for those on the fringes of society with a desperate need to belong. ‘Reading’, ‘Shade’ and ‘Realness’ are all slang terms that have entered the mainstream(ish) vernacular, since popularized by RuPaul’s Drag Race, but they originated here. Tragically, most of the cast died young from AIDS-related illness and saw little of material benefit from their performances. Beautiful and sad.

Philadelphia (1993)
“Andy brought AIDS into our offices,” says the former boss of the law firm that fires Tom Hanks’ character, Andrew Beckett, when they discover he is gay and has AIDS. By 1993 AIDS had killed more than 200,000 Americans. Philadelphia put a subject that America didn’t want to acknowledge on the big screen with a major star. The Oscar-winning moment comes when Beckett translates opera lyrics for his reluctant attorney, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), the only lawyer willing to help him fight his case. A deep bond develops between them. We watch Miller melt before our eyes as he starts to see Andy as a fellow human worthy of compassion and respect. In that moment, the national conversation about HIV-AIDS changed—although for many a decade too late.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
Thirty years ago, HIV treatments were a nightmare and the diagnosis was a death sentence. 1993-95 were the worst years of all for AIDS-related deaths in the US — over a decade after the first deaths in America — and just before the arrival of the cocktail therapy that turned everything around (death rates began to drop in 1995, with the introduction of effective anti-retroviral medications in 1996 fuelling this decline). The exuberant Priscilla, a film about two drag queens and a transgender woman from Sydney on a road trip through the unforgiving and unaccepting Australian outback, pivoted towards a joyful new dawn after a decade of death and shame. It was a time to reclaim the camp extravagance of the liberated 70s that the AIDS epidemic so brutally stole from the LGBTQ community. Priscilla functions as a glittering time capsule that enshrines the ebullient spirit of a community that had weathered an awful storm and marks a moment in gay history when queer folk could once again allow themselves to look to the future with hope.

Beautiful Thing (1996)
With a screenplay written by Jonathan Harvey based on his own original play first performed in 1993, this British film gives a rare glimpse of gay love crosshatched with working class realism—a quality often missing from portrayals of LGBTQ life. This tender coming-of-age tale of two teenagers—Jamie and Ste—set during a hot summer on a South-East London housing estate, is the crown jewel in the pantheon of rite-of-passage LGBTQ movie-viewing experiences. It speaks to a pre-internet age when reaching for your first gay magazine off the top shelf or going to your first gay pub were simply what you had to do in order to find your support system. It showed that gay people were just like everyone else, only without the same opportunities to safely express themselves.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Brokeback Mountain broke ground as a major motion picture portraying a love story about two men: a pair of young cowboys, Ennis and Jack, in the 1960s. They fall in love during a summer spent tending sheep in the isolation of a fictional mountain in Wyoming. They spend the rest of the film—and their lives—grappling with a love that they have to keep secret. Brokeback Mountain came at just the moment when attitudes were shifting, and mainstream audiences were ready to see two men coupling—particularly when those two men were Ledger and Gyllenhaal. Stories like Brokeback Mountain retain their potency because shame, fear, and prejudice have not vanished.

A Single Man (2009)
Based on the 1964 novel by ­Christopher Isherwood, this was the first foray into film by Tom Ford, one of the most famous names in fashion and luxury branding. George Falconer, played by Colin Firth, pictured, is a discrete Englishman whose partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), has just died in a car accident. Set in Los Angeles in 1962, he dresses impeccably and lives in a modernist house whose glass walls promise an openness that George can’t personally show. Julianne Moore plays George’s alcoholic best friend Charley, a ­fellow English expat and ­divorcee who lives across the street. Through flashback, we get to see what a domestic life shared by two men with dogs could look like, albeit a rather fabulous one. To observe a man’s heart break for another man is a thing of rare beauty. A Single Man is an aesthetic feast. The film was shot in John Lautner’s J.W. Schaffer Residence so it’s a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the house from within. Being a true perfectionist, every other aspect of Tom Ford’s opera prima is just as delightful, from the cinematography to the performances by Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

Weekend (2011)
While London often hogs the limelight in British movies about gay people (see above), Andrew Haigh’s down-to-earth feature takes place in an unremarkable provincial town. This sets the tone for a frank, accurate portrayal of two young men who meet on a drunken night out. Weekend shines a light on the paradoxes of gay identity in an era when basic battles for legal recognition have been won, but more insidious forms of homophobia are still very much alive. The heckling that comes from off-camera in the finale, for example, serves as a reminder that public displays of affection can still be hazardous for gay people. A film fully of its time, their drug-fueled debate over gay marriage is sharply observed. Softly spoken Russell, who works as a lifeguard at the local leisure center, thinks marriage is to be celebrated, while Glen, a fired-up art student on his way to America, argues it’s a conformist capitulation to heteronormativity. John Grant’s melancholy music makes the perfect accompaniment to a profound piece of modern storytelling that leaves deep, seismic emotional aftershocks.

Stranger by the Lake (2013)
Mainstream movies often shy away from explicit sex scenes by presenting a castrated version of gay masculinity that panders to a straight audience. Not so with this French film, which takes place at a cruising ground and nudist beach by a lake, and makes no apology for its graphic depiction of what goes down in the bushes. Franck falls for Michel, who looks like an 80’s porn star, and it is exhilarating to see so much gay male flesh on display in such a blissful natural setting. But all is not well in this little patch of Eden: there is a serpent in the grass. When the cops get involved the detective is baffled by the indifferent nature of a clandestine culture that relies on anonymity asking “One of your own was murdered, and you don’t care? You guys have a strange way of loving each other sometimes”. Tense, intelligent thrillers don’t get darker than this.

Moonlight (2016)
Barry Jenkins’ honest and uncompromising drama about a gay black kid in an underprivileged, drug-ridden neighborhood of Miami, is a story that never gets told. By critiquing a culture that inherently devalues the stories, if not existences, of “non-normative” people, Moonlight takes the unsung narrative to a new level. Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” the film follows the stop-start relationship between the main character, Chiron, and his classmate Kevin with powerful restraint. Boys often lack permission or space to discuss their interior lives. Arrestingly beautiful, Moonlight breaks the mould by elevating black boyhood as something worthy of rooting for to succeed.

God’s Own Country (2017)
2017 was a banner year for LGBTQ filmmaking. The exquisite Call Me By Your Name took the lion’s share of mainstream attention, but a movie like God’s Own Country, a subdued yet visceral story about two men who find each other on the muddy hills of England, is in a league of its own. The sex on display isn’t pornographic, but it’s frank, aggressive, and unconcerned with showing its stars’ bits and pieces. Aggression-as-romance is the kind of story that feels uniquely gay — or at least presents far less problematically in a gay story — and Francis Lee explores that notion to some interesting ends. The farm life feels richly, sadly, but not condescendingly observed. Johnny and Gheorghe are unfairly limited by circumstance, but they’re not tragic. And in that way, this Bloke-back Mountain of a movie feels like progress.

Postcard from Topanga Canyon

Los Angeles is a city and county ringed by mountains where it doesn’t touch the ocean. With the mountains come canyons, including Topanga Canyon, a winding ravine descending from Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley to the ocean between Santa Monica and Malibu. Topanga Canyon has a checkered history combining bohemians, sensational crime, and environmental catastrophes such as fires and mudslides. No doubt the remoteness of the locale and relative inaccessibility contributed to all three. Through it all, folks come to Topanga for its natural beauty and breathtaking views.

The name Topanga comes from the local native people, generally called the Tongva, who originally occupied the area in close proximity to the Chumash. In the 1920s, Topanga attracted Hollywood stars looking for a quick getaway from the pressures of celebrity. Some, like Cecil B. DeMille and actress Pola Negri, built homes here. Like so many other canyons, Topanga came to be a mecca for artistic types in the 1950s and beyond. The remoteness and natural beauty attracted many musicians. Neil Young recorded his album “After the Gold Rush” in his Topanga Canyon basement. Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson was inspired to write the rock anthem “Going Up the Country” here. Linda Ronstadt and Jim Morrison were frequent visitors. Beach Boy Dennis Wilson had a home nearby.

Artists and fringe types still shape the culture of Topanga. But the canyon has a dark side. On July 26th, 1969, Charles Manson and his “family” murdered a gentle Buddhist musician, Gary Hinman, who had befriended the group. That act was the first in a murder spree that took the lives of at least seven people, including actress Sharon Tate and her friends. Family members tortured Hinman for three days at his Topanga Canyon home before killing him in a confused dispute over what was likely drugs or money. By all accounts, Gary was a welcoming, mild-mannered and warm-hearted man who was also gay.

Topanga Canyon is a geologist’s dream. Cliffsides contain fossils, everything from scallops to whales, left by retreating ocean waters millenia ago. Sandstone structures, part of what is called the Vaqueros Formation, make dramatic appearances on the hills. Remnants of indigenous culture are found in the many bedrock mortars, man-made holes used to grind food products. Wild fires are a perennial problem in the hills of Los Angeles. Topanga is no exception; spectacular and destructive fires have broken out many times. Where there are fires, flash floods are never far behind. Topanga has suffered from repeated cycles of floods and mudslides, sometimes trapping residents for days due to washed out roads. In recent years, mudslides have been an annual occurrence.

Paul Landacre

Near the top of an impossibly steep and winding street in the hills of Echo Park, there sits a quietly fading house, its cracked gray shingles and worn brown siding dappled by the shadows of surrounding trees. It was once the home of one of Echo Park’s many notable artists: the groundbreaking printmaker, Paul Landacre, a highly regarded woodcut artist from the 1930s. His art captures the mood of the neighborhood and of California during his era. He lived in his hillside cabin from 1932 until his death in 1963. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he was an athlete as a youth. During his sophomore year at Ohio State University, he contracted a life-threatening illness that left him partially disabled. Landacre moved to California for his health. He eventually settled in Echo Park with his wife, Margaret McCreery. The Landacres’ rustic cabin now overlooks the Glendale Freeway. The Landacres purchased the property on El Moran Street in 1932, when he was just starting to earn renown for his work. L.A. was then one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States — but in Edendale, as it was then known, you could live amid native black walnut trees, possums and scrub jays. Weeds have swallowed up the staircase of the cabin, pictured, and its windows are either broken or boarded up. The big live oaks Landacre etched with such brio are still there, but the old curving street — the Landacres had a whole block to themselves — has been sealed off and is eroding away. This section of the neighborhood once was known as the Semi-tropics Spiritualist tract, and the Landacre home was declared a City of Los Angeles landmark (Historic Cultural Monument No. 839) in March 2006. Landacre’s name is still painted on the mailbox of the now-padlocked home.

The Brits who built Los Angeles

Los Angeles was a backwater with a population of barely 50,000 people when John Parkinson arrived in 1894. He had no formal education, no contacts, and just a few dollars and a tool box to call his own. By the time of his death he had designed many of the city's iconic buildings, including the city's first skyscraper, the first luxury hotel, the Homer Laughlin Building (now home to the Grand Central Market), high-end department store Bullocks Wilshire, the Memorial Coliseum, which hosted the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, and Los Angeles' City Hall. What City Hall may lack in iconic recognizability it makes up for with an almost subconscious symbolic power. Though few Angelenos could draw the building from memory, they have seen it over and over again, and so, at this point, has much of the rest of the world. Every LAPD badge has borne its image since 1940, and the building began playing its series of major roles in television shows like “Dragnet,” “Perry Mason,” and “The Adventures of Superman.” A 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells' “The War of the Worlds” even blew it up, at least in scale model, setting off a cinematic tradition of felling the large buildings of Los Angeles. Parkinson’s story sounds like the classic American Dream, with a British twist - he was the son of a millworker and born in Scorton, Lancashire. He is virtually unknown in his native land, and all but forgotten in the city he came to call home. Others from the British Isles who left their mark in early Los Angeles history are better remembered - Belfast-born William Mulholland, whose life inspired the movie, Chinatown, oversaw the huge engineering project that controversially brought water to the city in 1913 and was memorialized with Mulholland Drive. And Welshman Griffith J Griffith (not to be confused with American film director D.W. Griffith) gave most of his vast lands to what became the 4,310-acre Griffith Park, which is home to the Griffith Observatory and Greek Theatre, projects he both funded. As for Parkinson's legacy, more than 50 of his buildings still stand in downtown alone, and the Coliseum will certainly feature again during the 2028 Olympics.

London-born architect Robert Stacy-Judd moved to Los Angeles in 1922. His most famous commission was not a residence but a commercial building—the Aztec Hotel, built in the city of Monrovia on a stretch of road that was once the famous Route 66. Designed in a Mayan Revival style, the 1925 hotel was built in the context of a generalized taste for architectural exoticism that flourished in Southern California at this time. The mid-to-late 1920s were the heyday of interest in Meso-American archeology and the idea that Native American styles could be the basis for a new all-American architecture. Proponents of the Meso-American (or pre-Columbian) style viewed it as a welcome return to the folk-like and primitive, and Stacy-Judd became a prominent exponent of the Meso-American idiom. A flamboyant publicist and showman as well as an architect, Stacy-Judd wrote and lectured about Mayan architecture and traveled to the Yucatan jungles to explore Mayan pyramids. By 1930, public interest in both Meso-American architecture and Stacy-Judd had waned. But his writings and lectures, and his Aztec Hotel in particular, had captured Dr. Atwater’s fancy, and the dentist commissioned him to build two Hopi-inspired homes perched atop a hill next to Elysian Park. Robert Stacy-Judd’s Atwater Bungalows combine the features of a Pueblo Indian kiva with the fantasy of a Hollywood stage set. The multiple contradictions of Stacy-Judd's cross-cultural transvestism–an Englishman in search of an "All-American" architectural style–reveals much about Pan-Americanism, appropriation, and the diverse contemporary uses of architectural styles lifted from Ancient America. Former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Hawthorne, now L.A.’s design tzar, has written that “To wander through Robert Stacy-Judd’s neo-adobe Atwater Bungalows …is to be convinced that you are, first, completely isolated from city life and, second, that you are in a place that could only be Los Angeles.”

Postcard from Elysian Heights

In the opening decades of the 20th century, in the era of silent movies, Edendale was widely known as the home of most major movie studios on the West Coast. The district’s heyday as the center of the motion picture industry was in the 1910s but by the 1920s the studios had moved elsewhere, mostly to Hollywood, which would come to supplant Edendale as the “movie capital of the world.” In the years prior to World War II, Edendale had a large artist community and a large communist community. Many of its residents were transplants from the Eastern United States or the Soviet Union. When the Edendale red car line ceased operations in 1940 and the Glendale Freeway was built, the neighborhood was essentially split into two distinct sections overnight. What to call this new neighborhood south of the 2? Well, because of the neighboring park below it, Elysian Heights seemed to make the most sense. Elysian Heights as we know it today began to develop in the early 1900s when the Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s Association laid out their first tract in 1905. They left portions of land intentionally empty as a public space to hold their revivals and seances and drinking parties. The Spiritualists who lived on the hills surrounding the campground would come down and gather in the field to drink and dance the night away. Since the 1910s, Elysian Heights, along with what was once known as Edendale, have been home to many counter-culture, political radicals, artists, writers, architects and filmmakers in Los Angeles. Elysian Heights is also known for architecturally notable and historic homes such as the Paul Landacre House, the Klock House, the Judd-Atwater bungalows, the Ross House (Al Nozaki, the famed art director who designed the martian war machines in George Pal’s 1953 sci-fi classic “The War of the Worlds”, lived there during the 1950’s and 1960’s), and Rudolph Schindler’s Southall House. It is also home to Salkin House (1948), the “Lost Lautner” on Avon Terrace, pictured. Elysium in Greek means Paradise.