Houston struggles to save the Astrodome, London vows to make biking safer, L.A. sees light rail successes, and San Francisco mounts a shitty campaign for its sewers. It’s Christmastime in the city for this week’s urban reads.
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It’s usually one or the other. If you live in a big city, you forgo nature and stars in the sky. And if you live under the starry night sky, you’re out in the boonies far away from civilization. But what if you can have both?
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Lupie Leyva has answered questions about immigration issues, taught people how to use email, and once even helped a person make an appointment to see a family member who was incarcerated. "I’ve worked in public libraries for 10 years," she says. "Nothing surprises me anymore."
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In 1968, model Vicki Dunlap was featured in newspapers around the country as the face of the future. But that stylish makeup of tomorrow wasn’t just for show. It was to protect from L.A.’s smog-filled air.
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They’re perfectly conical, with long draping boughs and a citrusy fragrance: Your search for the perfect Christmas tree ends here. Unfortunately, you can’t chop down any of the 132 historically protected cedars that line a street outside of Los Angeles called Christmas Tree Lane.
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On my way to the theater, I asked Siri about the movie Her, and she got confused. "What kind of businesses are you looking for?" Siri replied in her always off-kilter robotic murmur. I barked back some line about Siri being stupid. She cracked some stupid joke. And my phone went back into my pocket.
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The Los Angeles City Council ruled last week to give landmark status to Johnie’s Coffee Shop, a blue-and-white striped diner in the city’s Miracle Mile district. Opened in 1956, the building’s dramatic angles and flashy neon made it a darling of L.A.’s newly car-centered culture.
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Anyone who’s flown into Los Angeles can see them: the tiny, irregular-shaped turquoise gems that dot the residential landscape. It’s incredible, really, how visible L.A.’s backyard pools are from the sky. You might have even found yourself counting them as you began your descent into LAX.
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One can never have too many post-apocalyptic visions of Los Angeles, right? This future L.A. is better known as Mega-City Two, a late 21st-century megalopolis that comes to us thanks to a new Judge Dredd comic, Mega-City Two: City of Courts, which hits shelves in January 2014.
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