Get Ready to Pay Through the Nose for Dumping Your “Illegal” Trash

Life in Angel City
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Fines for dumping illegal garbage in Los Angeles have skyrocketed drastically, thanks to a new city ordinance. Yet, strangely, officials waited weeks to launch their public awareness campaign for the new regulations, which actually took effect last month.
Aimed primarily at businesses, the law allows trashy offenders to be charged “administrative” fines of $500, $750 and [...]

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Stowed Baby Mummies Spark Film-Noir-Like LAPD Investigation

Cryptic L.A.
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Sometimes it’s best not to snoop through somebody else’s old, abandoned luggage. Still, you can just picture the scenario as it unfolded Tuesday afternoon…
Rummaging down in the basement of an aging Westlake Neighborhood apartment building, the rental manager and a friend find three rustic steamer trunks. The discovery naturally piques the female pair’s curiosity. Do [...]

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Time Warp: William Desmond Taylor’s Sensational Death Scene

Cryptic L.A.
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Today it’s a Ross parking lot, but on the evening of Feb. 1, 1922, the tract at 404. S. Alvarado was a Mediterranean bungalow court — and the setting for Movieland’s first real-life murder mystery.
Sometime before midnight, two shots rang out, killing famed actor-turned-Paramount-director William Desmond Taylor from behind. Neighbors shrugged off the noise as [...]

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L.A.’s Ouija-Inspired Bradbury Building

Cryptic L.A.
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“Take Bradbury Building. It will make you famous…” That was the message George Wyman supposedly received from his dead brother, courtesy a Ouija board.
A mere draftsman, Wyman had been approached by millionaire Lewis Bradbury, who desired a structural marvel bearing his name in the downtown Los Angeles area. Wyman fretted over the assignment, but the [...]

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Detail Shot: Million Dollar Bison

Angeleno Sights
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A close-up of the many bison and gargoyle reliefs adorning the old Metropolitan Water District (MWD) headquarters at 307 S. Broadway, Los Angeles. Designed by architect Albert C. Martin and dating to 1917, the MWD tower was part of the Million Dollar Theater complex, which also housed Edison Co. offices. The fanciful sculptures are the [...]

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Speaking of the Lincolns…

Odds and Ends
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Call me a sucker for GEICO commercials. As a MarCom professional myself, I  not only admire the auto insurer’s inventiveness, but also have to confess to a tinge of jealousy at all the fun the company’s creatives must be having behind the scenes. After all, who wouldn’t want to work for a corporation with a  [...]

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Check It Out: The Haunting of America

Reading Room
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From time to time your humble blogger likes to share some of his library finds with Dateline>City of Angels visitors. This week I finished The Haunting of America, a fascinating look at our nation’s ongoing obsession with the paranormal, from the Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini’s attempts to unmask modern Spiritualism.
It’s a strangely perfect [...]

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Time Warp: Hollywoodland’s Immortal Gates

Angeleno Sights
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Brand spanking new 87 years ago, the Hollywoodland real estate development welcomes a handful of vintage automobiles through its Beachwood Canyon gates in this 1923 Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) digital archives photo. Likely carrying property buyers, the cars are parked outside the new neighborhood’s sales headquarters.
Although not visible, the world-famous “Hollywoodland” Sign loomed over [...]

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Hollywood’s Legendary Bronson Caves Are Just a Stone’s Throw Away

Angeleno Sights
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Recognize this gaping oriface in the Hollywood Hills? If you don’t, you obviously weren’t a fan of the 1960s Batman television series or numerous other Hollywood productions hearkening back to the Silent Era.
This is one of a handful of man-made excavations at the southwestern corner of Griffith Park known as the Bronson Caves. Featured prominently [...]

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Corpse Flower Creates Big Stink at Huntington

Cryptic L.A.
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This past weekend, crowds lined up at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, wanting to catch a glimpse of a flower known both for its humongous size (6 to 10 feet tall!) and its stench. The plant producing this startling, malodorous bloom is known by botanists as Amorphophallus titanum and by laypeople as the [...]

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Tripping Out to Pentecostalism’s Birthplace

Angeleno Sights
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Believe it or not, this little Victorian in Los Angeles’ historic Filipino Town is widely recognized as the birthplace of Pentecostalism.
Yes, before Aimee Semple McPherson’s celebrity revivalism, the Spirit took hold of a small band of fervent religionists here at 216 N. Bonnie Brae in 1906, allegedly inspiring them to speak in tongues not heard [...]

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SoCal Kitsch: Pink Panther Muffler Man

Odds and Ends
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Muffler sculptures are a staple of auto garages everywhere, but thanks to our Car Culture, they’re especially ubiquitous here in Southern California.
As an art form, more often than not they lack imagination, frequently resembling uninspired robots or clunky mechanical aliens. When you come across one that’s truly whimsical — like this Pink Panther near the [...]

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Friday Forum: Name Your Lost Landmark

Angeleno Sights
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From the Temple Theater, to the Brown Derby, to the Garden of Allah, Southern California seems to boast more bulldozed landmarks than living historical structures. (Joni Mitchell’s 1970 pop lyrics, “They paved paradise to put up a parking lot” make a really apropos Angeleno theme song.)
Starting today, I’d like to introduce a new Friday Forum [...]

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Then and Now: Temple City’s Lost Theater

Angeleno Sights
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Opened circa 1940 and named for land developer and Temple City founder Walter P. Temple, this proud single-screen theater once stood on the corner of Rosemead and Las Tunas Blvds. Seating 750, it was designed by S. Charles Lee, a prolific Southern California architect with more than 70 movie houses to his credit, almost all [...]

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That’s Our Lady: Needing a Hand in Echo Park

Angeleno Sights
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Though locals call her “Our Lady of the Lake,” this WPA-commissioned statue overlooking Echo Park Lake was actually entitled Nuestra Reina de Los Angeles (Our Queen of the Angels) when designed in 1934 by Ada Mae Sharpless.
In this Art Deco depiction, our city’s patroness stands atop a pedestal featuring iconic reliefs of the harbor, City [...]

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What a Difference a Doggie Year Makes

Life in Angel City
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Back in August this blog introduced Diablo, “my cute little puppy from hell.”
Mischievous and troublesome from the moment he arrived home, the black-and-tan Dobie was a replacement for my irreplaceable red Doberman, Ramses, who died much too young this past summer. (To this day, I still miss him.)
“Little Diablo” hailed from a European sire who [...]

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Metropolis: A Must-See for Cinema Buffs!

Odds and Ends
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Seeking 2 hours and 45 minutes of golden silence on the silver screen? You can’t do any better than Fritz Lang’s historic 1927 film masterpiece Metropolis, now playing on the Laemmle’s Theatre circuit.
Set in the 21st Century, the silent classic envisions a futuristic world in which a seductive female android goads subterranean proletariat workers to [...]

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Back in the Saddle Again

Odds and Ends
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I swear this blog has more lives than a danged alley cat.
Yes, since Dateline>City of Angels was launched a few years back, it’s suffered more B-Western-style cliff hangers than any self-respectin’ blog deserves. In fact, when we last left our plucky Web journal, it was finally starting to hit its stride once more after a [...]

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Winter Wonderland, SoCal-Style

Life in Angel City
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The return of these tumbleweed snowmen to Stadium Way can only mean one thing: It’s officially Christmas time in the City of Angels.
It’s amusing how ingrained the concept of a White Christmas is in our pop culture. Even here, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, these are the lengths we’ll go to in “recreating” [...]

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Aliens Implicated in Mysterious Cattle Slaughter

Odds and Ends
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While the rest of us were carving up our turkeys for the holiday, it appears someone — or something — in southern Colorado was engaging in an otherworldly animal carving ritual of their own.
According to this Associated Press story, “a creepy string of calf mutilations” has left local ranchers and sheriff’s officials “mystified:”
“Four calves were [...]

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