Downtown
Articles about downtown Los Angeles.
In a city with many famous features and elements, including such mega-stars as the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica Beach, the Los Angeles River is more like the well-known character actor that you’ve seen in dozens of movies and TV shows, but you can’t remember their name. That’s especially ironic when it comes…
Art Deco is an architectural style that is very much associated with Los Angeles. Since the new style first appeared in the 1920’s, at the Exposition des Arts décoratifs in Paris, through the 1930’s there was a boom in construction in LA, and developers immediately turned to the new style for inspiration. Art Deco seemed…
The South Park neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles is undergoing enormous change at the moment, as new apartment and condominium blocks sprout upwards and older buildings (such as the beautiful Herald Examiner Building and the Commercial Exchange Building) are renovated and repurposed, often as lofts or ‘creative’ offices. The crypto.com Arena and the many restaurants,…
Amongst Los Angeles hotels the Hotel Cecil holds a unique place. It’s a marquee name that not only a lot of Angelenos know, but also many visitors too. It’s been the subject of numerous documentaries, articles and, even, a TV horror series, yet you can’t actually rent a room there (at time of publication). In…
Visitors are often surprised to learn that LA had an extensive tram network over the first part of the twentieth century. Many visitors, and even a few Angelenos, don’t even know that we have a metro rail system today, they just assume that “everyone drives in LA”. So it comes as a shock to them…
Los Angeles is about to become the third city to host the Summer Olympic Games three times, funnily enough (after London and Paris). Perhaps that’s not surprising considering the city’s unique renown, sports-mad population and ability to put on event of this size and magnitude. Still, LA has been a leader in many ways in…
Charles Spencer Chaplin, or ‘Charlie’ for short, is one of the most influential figures in the history of entertainment, as a Hollywood pioneer and, arguably, its greatest superstar. Not only do his films endure the test of time, with six of his movies selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, including The Gold Rush,…
Some people have become obsessed by a celebrity and it can be very unhealthy. The news is full of stories of stars who’ve been stalked by overly-fanatical fans, so I’m definitely not encouraging that kind of stuff in How to Guarantee Seeing a Celebrity in LA! The first thing to know about famous people (and…
Los Angeles Union Station is to LA what Grand Central Station is to New York. It’s our major rail terminus, designed and built to reflect the history and feel of the city back at us as we pass through. It opened in May 1939 with much fanfare, ironically just as the US was falling out of…
If you’re booking a flight and the chance presents itself to visit Los Angeles on a layover, or stopover, you probably aren’t going to refuse the opportunity, especially if you’ve never been here before. LA is a place that most people would like to visit, at least once, in their lives. And why not? Forgetting…