From the category archives:

Angeleno Sights

Cryptic Sights No. 2: The Unforgettable Cora May Phillips

Angeleno Sights

Take a walk through the tombstones in Section 5 of Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, and you’ll find this witty epitaph for a once highly popular lady:
Cora May Phillips
1872 – 1912
Gone But Not Forgotten
Yes, how could the City of Angels ever forget Cora May Phillips, one of its most notorious madams?
In the late 1800s, Los Angeles turned a [...]

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Photo Op: Carroll Avenue Revisited

Angeleno Sights

While organizing my old digital files I stumbled across this detail shot of a dusk-lit Victorian porch on Carroll Ave. It was snapped about two years ago with my then-new Nikon D70s, just after I took up amateur photography.
Each fall I like to return to Carroll Ave. and take in its haunting Victorian homes. Part [...]

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Cryptic Sights: One Lulu of a Burial at Angelus-Rosedale

Angeleno Sights

They say you can’t take it with you.
Maybe not, but it sure can buy you one helluva sendoff.
Just ask Louise Maier, only daughter of the wealthy Joseph Maier, the Bavarian owner of L.A.’s Philadelphia Brewery in the late 1800s. When Lulu (as she was known about town) died in 1897 at the blossom age of [...]

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Pop Quiz: Recognize This Crude Little Building?

Angeleno Sights

Here’s a relatively easy one, straight out of the LAPL digital archives. Part of the California Historical Society  collection, the above image is the earliest known photo of a famous Southland landmark. So can you identify it? Click “Read More” for the answer (as if you don’t already know it).

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Friday Flick: Pacific Ocean Park, Circa 1959

Angeleno Sights

A few decades ago, a SoCal day at the beach often meant a trip to Santa Monica’s Pacific Ocean Park (POP), a 28-acre seaside amusement extravaganza designed to rival Disneyland. Featuring a Sea Circus, pier, funhouses, thrill rides, and even a few outer-space themed exhibits, the park opened in 1958, attracting more than a million [...]

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Pop Quiz: Where Was L.A.’s First Chinatown?

Angeleno Sights

As the world celebrates the Beijing Olympic Games, it seems only fitting to serve up a pop quiz paying tribute to the City of Angels’ Chinese community, which has overcome tremendous adversity over the last 156 years…
The Question: Centered around North Broadway, New Chinatown is among L.A.’s most popular tourist attractions. However, as the name [...]

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Pop Quiz: Ready For Your Sunset Blvd. Close-Up Challenge?

Angeleno Sights

The Film: Sunset Blvd., the 1950 film noir classic co-written/directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson.
The Scene: After leading two repo men on a high-speed car chase along a winding stretch of Sunset Blvd., down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (Holden) ditches them with a quick turn into [...]

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Friday Flix: Trapsing Through the Tombstones

Angeleno Sights

We may not always be consistent about much else here at Dateline>City of Angels, but the one regular feature you can count on is Friday Flix. And now, without further adieu: This week’s choice for the most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing key words or themes with this blog…
Source: LiveVideo
Search Criteria: “Los [...]

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Neighborhood Snapshot: Vista Theater at Dusk

Angeleno Sights

At the crossroads of Sunset and Hollywood Blvds., the Vista was originally built in 1923 by J.H. Woodhouse & Sons as a vaudeville playhouse. Architecturally, the theater’s simple Spanish Revival facade conceals a strikingly gaudy Egyptian interior that was all the rage in the 1920s. Historically, the Vista occupies the former site of D.W. Griffith’s [...]

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Friday Flix No. 3: How Wrong They Were…

Angeleno Sights

This Week’s Source for the most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing key words or themes with this blog: YouTube!
Search Criteria: Los Angeles + Angel’s Flight.

The Result: A January 2007 KTLA-5 report on the scheduled summer reopening of the historic Angel’s Flight funicular depicted in this blog’s banner, featuring of all people, Star [...]

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Neighborhood Snapshot: Travel Town Locomotive

Angeleno Sights

Like so many boys growing up, I loved model trains. While my dad’s generation fixated on the famous Lionel O scales, my brothers and I built our miniature tunnels, trestles and crossing gates around the Tyco HO train sets of the 1960s and ’70s.
Those hobby adventure days may be long gone, but it’s good to [...]

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Friday Flix No. 2: Exploring L.A.’s Cinematic Landmarks

Angeleno Sights

Welcome again to Friday Flix, Dateline>City of Angel’s weekly feature showcasing my pick for the most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web videos sharing key words or themes with this blog. (Sure, you could sift through the vast online wasteland yourself, but why bother when I’m more than happy to do it for you?)
This Week’s Search: [...]

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Looking Past the Graves in Atlanta and Our Own Savannah

Angeleno Sights

Knowing my fondness for old graveyards, a friend sent me this link to local news coverage of Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery. It’s a fun feature series, which includes an online print article, video tours and a humorous piece on some killer epitaphs. (And it’s not even Halloween…)
But that’s the sort of appreciation for these final resting [...]

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Trip Out to Mission San Gabriel’s Restful Atmosphere

Angeleno Sights

Looking for a peaceful little Saturday getaway from the workweek’s cares and hassles? I know it sounds macabre, but tranquility awaits you within the walls of Mission San Gabriel’s Campo Santo.
Like many history buffs, I find old cemeteries both oddly soothing and profoundly educational. Walking among the plots, statuary and epitaphs, you never know what [...]

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Who’s That Girl?

Angeleno Sights

I don’t know why this young lady fascinates me so, but she does.
Maybe it’s her coy, backward glance and easy, confident smile. Or perhaps it’s her dark, penetrating eyes and casual sense of fashion.
Whatever it is, I was transfixed from the moment I saw her and had to know her story: Why was she here, [...]

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Yet More on the Sennett Marker

Angeleno Sights

If the bulldozers don’t get you, the taggers will… Not to beat a dead horse, but the EPHS News reports that Edendale’s Mack Sennett Marker will not only be preserved, but relocated to a more suitable site.
A lot has been made about the monument’s “misplacement.” The official address of Sennett’s old Keystone Studios was 1712 [...]

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Sennett Marker Survives — For Now

Angeleno Sights

Turn your back for a moment around here and the bulldozers literally move in.
Little more than a week ago I posted a short piece on the Mack Sennett marker that stands along Glendale Blvd., a stone’s throw from where the famous Keystone Studio was once located. Since then, all of the buildings that once surrounded [...]

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Scenic Snapshot: Shades of the Past

Angeleno Sights

A shrouded figure keeps its mournful, graveside vigil at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. Countless old monuments like this lend the historic boneyard an “authentic” atmosphere that you won’t find in our modern commercialized cemeteries.
Los Angeles’ first “fully integrated” graveyard, Angelus Rosedale dates to the 1880s and is the final resting place of many of the city’s [...]

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Double Blast From the Past

Angeleno Sights

Angeleno sightseers rejoice! Below you’ll find two more posts on the city’s heritage. The first, Fr. Crespi’s Beautiful Storm Drain, is a brand-new one dedicated to our mighty flood control channel, aka the “Los Angeles River.” The second, At Least You’ll Die Laughing, is another favorite from my former Website that recalls one of L.A.’s [...]

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Fr. Crespi’s Beautiful Storm Drain

Angeleno Sights

This month in 1769 a small but intrepid band of Spanish explorers encamped in the L.A. basin near present-day Elysian Park. Led by Gaspar Portola and accompanied by Padre Juan Crespi, the contingent was charged with surveying the vast California wilderness between Mission San Diego and Monterey Bay. Their long trek met with many discoveries, [...]

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