Last Friday, Ace Hotel founder Alex Calderwood was found dead in London, where the chain had just opened its fifth location. He’s being remembered today as a design visionary, the leader of a cultural phenomenon. But his role was also that of a city-builder, reaching far outside hotel walls to build community and instill a sense of place in each neighborhood he touched.
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This week: Why we need real neighborhoods! Keeping L.A.’s transit momentum alive! Americans may have reached "peak car"! Daylighting rivers! And a ghost town you can call your very own!
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Pooping birds, overflowing trash cans, radioactive poisoning, too much driving, and those goddamn hipsters again. Welcome to another edition of What’s Ruining Our Cities.
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You’re late for a meeting in downtown Los Angeles and you’re still all the way over in Burbank—13 miles and 45 stop-and-go minutes away by freeway. Instead, you walk a few blocks to the Los Angeles River, where you board a stylish pod-like watercraft. Soon, you’re zipping down the river channel, faster than any vehicle on the 5 Freeway.
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Redrawing America’s political boundaries in two different ways, a tour of Hong Kong’s outdoor escalators, the race to build bigger bike share programs, and a devastating typhoon. Let’s start the week off right with some nice urban reads.
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Wicked dust storms spun through Newhall Pass during the centennial celebration of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on Tuesday. The winds shuddered against the tent that held hundreds of LADWP workers and sent blinding poofs of dirt into the faces of the civic dignitaries seated onstage. It was a rather ominous sign.
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Haunted houses have gone over the top
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Conventional wisdom designates Los Angeles as a young, capricious metropolis—an underage drinker in the geopolitical nightclub—but it’s simply not true. L.A. is actually an ancient city, and the proof is bubbling right up to the surface at the La Brea Tar Pits, one of the richest paleontological sites in the world and the only one being actively excavated in an urban setting.
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In recent years, we’ve watched with wonder as boring old yellow halogen car headlights have been replaced with futuristic, Tron-like LEDs. Now, that transition is about to take place on the city scale, as New York City prepares to replace its street lamps—all 250,000 of them—with LEDs.
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Happy birthday, you old crumpled wave of steel, you! L.A.’s signature building opened to the public 10 years ago today, giving the city’s downtown a much-needed civic boost and cementing architect Frank Gehry’s status as a metal god. I wrote a story for this month’s Los Angeles Magazine about the building’s anniversary, and, in the process, dug up a few more interesting facts that you can read while you wrap Disney Hall’s birthday presents in aluminum foil.
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