Download or read book Freewaytopia How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles written by Paul Haddad and published by Santa Monica Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles explores how social, economic, political, and cultural demands created the web of expressways whose very form—futuristic, majestic, and progressive—perfectly exemplifies the City of Angels. From the Arroyo Seco, which began construction during the Great Depression, to the Simi Valley and Century Freeways, which were completed in 1993, author Paul Haddad provides an entertaining and engaging history of the 527 miles of road that comprise the Los Angeles freeway system. Each of Los Angeles’s twelve freeways receives its own chapter, and these are supplemented by “Off-Ramps”—sidebars that dish out pithy factoids about Botts’ Dots, SigAlerts, and all matter of freeway lexicon, such as why Southern Californians are the only people in the country who place the word “the” in front of their interstates, as in “the 5,” or “the 101.” Freewaytopia also explores those routes that never saw the light of day. Imagine superhighways burrowing through Laurel Canyon, tunneling under the Hollywood Sign, or spanning the waters of Santa Monica Bay. With a few more legislative strokes of the pen, you wouldn’t have to imagine them—they’d already exist. Haddad notably gives voice to those individuals whose lives were inextricably connected—for better or worse—to the city’s freeways: The hundreds of thousands of mostly minority and lower-class residents who protested against their displacement as a result of eminent domain. Women engineers who excelled in a man’s field. Elected officials who helped further freeways . . . or stop them dead in their tracks. And he pays tribute to the corps of civic and state highway employees whose collective vision, expertise, and dedication created not just the most famous freeway network in the world, but feats of engineering that, at their best, achieve architectural poetry. Finally, let’s not forget the beauty queens—no freeway in Los Angeles ever opened without their royal presence.

Download or read book Carmageddon Beauty Queens and the Hollywood Split How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles written by Paul Haddad and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carmageddon, Beauty Queens, and the Hollywood Split: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles From the Arroyo Seco, which began construction during the Great Depression, to the Simi Valley and Century Freeways, which were completed in 1993, author Paul Haddad provides an entertaining and engaging history of the 527 miles of road that comprise the Los Angeles freeway system. Each of Los Angeles's twelve freeways receives its own chapter, and these are supplemented by "Off-Ramps"--sidebars that dish out pithy factoids about Botts' Dots, SigAlerts, and all matter of freeway lexicon, such as why Southern Californians are the only people in the country who place the word "the" in front of their interstates, as in "the 5," or "the 101." Carmageddon, Beauty Queens, and the Hollywood Split also explores those routes that never saw the light of day. Imagine superhighways burrowing through Laurel Canyon, tunneling under the Hollywood Sign, or spanning the waters of Santa Monica Bay. With a few more legislative strokes of the pen, you wouldn't have to imagine them--they'd already exist. Haddad notably gives voice to those individuals whose lives were inextricably connected--for better or worse--to the city's freeways: The hundreds of thousands of mostly minority and lower-class residents who protested against their displacement as a result of eminent domain. Women engineers who excelled in a man's field. Elected officials who helped further freeways . . . or stop them dead in their tracks. And he pays tribute to the corps of civic and state highway employees whose collective vision, expertise, and dedication created not just the most famous freeway network in the world, but feats of engineering that, at their best, achieve architectural poetry. Finally, let's not forget the beauty queens--no freeway in Los Angeles ever opened without their royal presence.

Download or read book Skinny White Freak written by Paul Haddad and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles, 1978. Skateboarding and tanned bods rule the SoCal landscape. Compared to his groovy peers, 13-year-old Adam Lipsitz is an outcast. He is too skinny, too pale, too brainy. To make matters worse, just as his parents are separating, he's cast off to Kamp Kickapoo, where he faces the prospect of being tormented by a bully named "Worm" for six interminable weeks. Then... a horrific event rocks Adam's world. And there's no turning back. How Adam deals with being bullied forms the core of Skinny White Freak. By summer's end, Adam will make the journey from kid to young adult, striving to replace fear with courage, cynicism with empathy, and low self-esteem with self-acceptance.

Download or read book 10 000 Steps a Day in L A written by Paul Haddad and published by Santa Monica Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.: 52 Walking Adventures is for urban adventurers with a passion for healthy living who are also hungry to explore L.A.’s hidden, unsung, and sometimes quirky side. This unique guidebook provides everything readers need to venture out and tackle the city’s 500 square miles. The book is based on a concept that first took hold in Japan—that if people walked 10,000 steps each day, they would burn 20 percent of their caloric intake through that activity alone. Now an ingrained part of the American lifestyle, the 10,000 steps phenomenon is taking the country by storm; it is now a recognized daily goal by a number of major insurance companies like Kaiser Permanente and health institutes such as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the American Heart Foundation. In this first-ever book to explore the 10,000 steps concept in the City of Angels, these walks take readers through the terrain that makes Los Angeles the envy of many a metropolis—beaches, mountains, rivers, and reservoirs, not to mention the nation’s largest urban park, Griffith Park—all while immersing them in the city’s history and lore, offbeat locales, and popular landmarks. 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A. promises three things: 10,000 steps in each walk, a blueprint for doing it each weekend of the year (52 walks equals a year’s worth of weekends), and a sense of fun and discovery about L.A. that will only make the 10,000 steps goal that much easier to attain. Readers need bring only their feet—pedometers optional.

Download or read book Ventura and Zelzah written by J.G. Bryan and published by Santa Monica Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of teenage friendships set in 1970's suburban Los Angeles In the haze of a hot San Fernando Valley summer in 1970’s Los Angeles, Douglas and his friends—Hank, Weddy, and Ronnie—struggle with their awkward teenage years during a confusing and highly permissive era. Weed and alcohol are regularly available, and most of the boys freely partake as they each navigate their own family dramas at home. Meanwhile, Douglas must also sort through the ups-and-downs of his relationship with his not-quite-girlfriend, Natalia. When not in the swimming pool trying to beat the intense Valley heat, Douglas and his friends spend their summer vacation taking the RTD into Westwood to see Jaws, watching the Fourth of July fireworks at Balboa Park, seeking thrills at Magic Mountain, checking out the head shop and the turquoise jewelry at The Sixth Chakra, eating hot dogs and facing Koufax in the batting cage at Flooky’s, and playing plenty of basketball. Ventura and Zelzah is a funny, poignant, and nostalgic coming-of-age tale of teenage friendships in a blissfully unhurried, pre-digital era.

Download or read book Paradise Palms written by Paul Haddad and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is October 1957. A time of Eisenhower conformity, police and mob strongholds, and Red Scare paranoia. A relic of Hollywood's Golden Age, the aging Paradise Palms Hotel is on the brink of change. David Shapiro-eldest son of recently widowed Max Shapiro-has assumed a leadership role. But the more he digs into the hotel's business, the more he questions who his father is. It's not just the tenuous ties to gangster Mickey Cohen, who is trying to commandeer "the Palms," but also the sudden appearance of a mysterious African American guest named Rae Lynn, who improbably rises in stature. As long-buried secrets come to light, David's battle to keep the family intact takes a tragic turn. His actions mirror an America lurching from the surface simplicity of the '50s to the turmoil of the 1960s in this riveting neo-noir family saga.

Download or read book 10 000 Steps a Day in L A written by Paul Haddad and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated and Expanded Second Edition Features Six New Walking Adventures! 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A. is for urban adventurers with a passion for healthy living who are also eager to explore Los Angeles--from its most legendary locations to its more hidden, unsung, and quirky sites. In this first-ever book to explore the 10,000-steps lifestyle in Los Angeles, author Paul Haddad takes readers on a journey through the city's streets, beaches, mountains, rivers, reservoirs, and parks. He includes 10,000-step walks from throughout the Southland, from Simi Valley to the South Bay, and Pasadena to Pacific Palisades. Tread the grounds of a defunct Disney attraction called Dwarfland. Trace the extinct canals of Venice Beach. Stroll the shortest Main Street in America. Discover hidden streams, secret murals, lost cities, Hollywood haunts, houses made of stone, and parks that time forgot! The second edition of 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A. features: - 57 walks containing 10,000 steps - Detailed maps and directions - Descriptions of the terrain, walking surface, and dog-friendliness of each walk - Ideal picnic spots - Parking suggestions - Sidebars with colorful trivia and anecdotes Most importantly, 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A. offers a sense of fun and discovery about Los Angeles that makes the goal of 10,000 steps easy to attain. Readers need only bring their feet--pedometers are optional!

Download or read book Preserving Los Angeles written by KEN. BERNSTEIN and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ken Bernstein, the City Planner for the City of Los Angeles and a national advocate for historic preservation shares how Los Angeles has led the nation in historic preservation and shares how other cities can do the same. Los Angeles has an image as the "City of the Future"--a city always at the cutting edge of change--but also as a "throwaway metropolis" that cares little about its history or architectural legacy. Yet thereality is quite different. Over the past decade, the City of Los Angeles has developed one of the most successful historic preservation programs in the nation, culminating with the completion of the nation's most ambitious citywide survey of historic resources. All across the city, historic preservation is now transforming Los Angeles, while also pointing the way to how other cities can use preservation to revitalize their neighborhoods and build community. Preserving Los Angeles:How Historic Places Can Transform America's Cities, authored by Ken Bernstein, who oversees Los Angeles' Office of Historic Resources, tells this under-appreciated L.A. story: how historic preservation has been transforming neighborhoods, creating a Downtown renaissance, and guiding the future of the city. While it is younger than many East Coast cities, Los Angeles has a remarkable collection of architectural resources in all styles, reflecting the legacy of notable architects from the past 150 years. As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is also breaking new ground in its approach to historic preservation, extending beyond the preservation of significant architecture, to also identify and protect the places of social and cultural meaning to all of Los Angeles's communities. Preserving Los Angelesilluminates a Los Angeles that will surprise even longtime Angelenos--highlighting dozens of lesser-known buildings, neighborhoods, and places in every corner of the city that have been "found" by SurveyLA, the first-ever city-wide survey of Los Angeles' historic resources. The text is richly illustrated through images by a prominent architectural photographer, Stephen Schafer. Preserving Los Angelesis an authoritative chronicle of Los Angeles' urban transformation-- and a useful guide for citizens and urban practitioners nationally seeking to draw lessons fortheir own cities.

Download or read book The System written by Ryan Gattis and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gripping, meticulously researched, and smartly plotted, I devoured this brilliant novel over the course of a weekend.” —Paula Hawkins, author of Into the Water “Fascinating, moving, and so very, very real. It grabbed me by the heart and mind from page one and never let me go.” —Marcia Clark, author of The Final Judgment An electrifying, multi-voiced thriller tackling our criminal justice system, from the writer Michael Connelly has called “one of our most gifted novelists.” On December 6, 1993, a drug dealer called Scrappy is shot and left for dead on the lawn outside her mother’s house in South Central Los Angeles. Augie, a heroin addict, witnesses the whole thing—before he steals all the drugs on her person, as well as the gun that was dropped at the scene. When Augie gets busted, he names local gang members Wizard and Dreamer the shooters. But only one of them is guilty. A search of Wizard and Dreamer’s premises uncovers the gun that was used in the shooting, and a warrant goes out for their arrest. They know it’s a frame-up, but the word from the gang is to keep their mouths shut and face the charges. With these two off the streets and headed for jail, Dreamer’s friend Little, the unlikeliest of new gang members, is given one job: discover how the gun got moved, and why. Played out in the streets, precincts, jails, and courtrooms of Los Angeles, Ryan Gattis's The System is the harrowing story of a crime—from moments before the bullets are fired, to the verdict and its violent aftershocks—told through the vivid chorus of those involved, guilty, the innocent, and everyone in between.

Download or read book Everything Now written by Rosecrans Baldwin and published by MCD. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER. NAMED A BEST CALIFORNIA BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles. Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts. Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out. Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.

Download or read book Becoming Los Angeles written by D. J. Waldie and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling author and beloved chronicler of Los Angeles D.J. Waldie reconsiders the city in a collection of contemporary essays. Nobody sees Los Angeles with more eloquence than D. J. Waldie. - Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed Editor Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie's particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It's through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city's seasons. In his exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city's image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city's conflicted past. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He measures the place of nature in the city and the different ways that nature has been defined. He maps on the contours of Los Angeles what embracing--or rejecting--an Angeleno identity has come to mean. Becoming Los Angeles draws on a decade of Waldie's writing about the intersection of the city's history and its aspirations. He asks, what do we talk about when we talk about Los Angeles today? In a global, cosmopolitan city, is there value in cultivating a local imagination? And he wonders how to describe a city that is denser and more polarized and challenged by climate change, homelessness, and economic disparity. There will always be romance in the idea of Los Angeles, but it requires renewed hope to sustain. Becoming Los Angeles is a further account of how Waldie gained a sense of place, which James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, described as "an almost sacramental act of attention." Becoming Los Angeles is ultimately a book about learning how to fall in love with wherever it is you are. Called a writer whose work is a "gorgeous distillation of architectural and social history" by the New York Times, whose essays and memoirs, said the Los Angeles Times, "conjure the idiosyncratic splendor of Southern California life," D. J. Waldie is the author of the acclaimed Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and other books that illuminate the ordinary and the everyday in lyrical prose. In collaboration with Diane Keaton, Waldie provided the text for two photographic explorations of home: California Romantica, dealing with homes in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style of the early twentieth century, and House, examining post-modern interpretations of domesticity. California Romantica became a Los Angeles Times non-fiction bestseller in 2007. D. J. Waldie's narratives about suburban life have appeared in BUZZ, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgetown Review, Salon, dwell, Los Angeles Magazine, Spiritus, Gulf Coast, Urbanisme, Bauwelt, and other publications. His book reviews and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in the home where he was born in Lakewood, California, where he was formerly the Deputy City Manager.

Download or read book The End of Print written by Lewis Blackwell and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2000-10 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection featuring one of the most innovative and controversial of contemporary graphic designers, Carson's career is documented with emphasis on his desire to forge a new aesthetic.

Download or read book A History of California and an Extended History of Los Angeles written by James Miller Guinn and published by Jazzybee Verlag. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few states of the United States have a more varied, a more interesting or a more instructive history than California, and few have done so little to preserve their history. In narrating the story of California, the author has endeavored to deal justly with the different eras and episodes of its history; to state facts; to tell the truth without favoritism or prejudice; to give credit where credit is due and censure where it is deserved. This accounts also for the prominence of Los Angeles in the second half of this volume. The consolidation of Los Angeles city and the cities of Wilmington, San Pedro and Hollywood has merged the history of these three into that of the Greater Los Angeles. The early history of these cities is given separately up to their consolidation. All over this book is a real treasure chest and every single of its more than 400 pages is a must-read for the people of California and Los Angeles County.

Download or read book City of the Future written by Sesshu Foster and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster's City Terrace Field Manual, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster's childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis. These poems are, in the poet's words: "Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation 'Wish You Were Here' postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can't live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can't live here now; you must live in the future, in the City of the Future." Poet, teacher and community activist Sesshu Foster (born 1957) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing and community organizing. His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the speculative-fiction novel Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers.

Download or read book The National Road written by Tom Zoellner and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of "eloquent essays that examine the relationship between the American landscape and the national character" serves to remind us that despite our differences we all belong to the same land (Publishers Weekly). “How was it possible, I wondered, that all of this American land––in every direction––could be fastened together into a whole?” What does it mean when a nation accustomed to moving begins to settle down, when political discord threatens unity, and when technology disrupts traditional ways of building communities? Is a shared soil enough to reinvigorate a national spirit? From the embaattled newsrooms of small town newspapers to the pornography film sets of the Los Angeles basin, from the check–out lanes of Dollar General to the holy sites of Mormonism, from the nation’s highest peaks to the razed remains of a cherished home, like a latter–day Woody Guthrie, Tom Zoellner takes to the highways and byways of a vast land in search of the soul of its people. By turns nostalgic and probing, incisive and enraged, Zoellner’s reflections reveal a nation divided by faith, politics, and shifting economies, but––more importantly––one united by a shared sense of ownership in the common land.

Download or read book Navigating With out Instruments written by Traci Kato-Kiriyama and published by Writ Large Press. This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With their second book, Navigating With(out) Instruments, traci kato-kiriyama uses her present-political unrest, family love and loss, her own cancer diagnosis-to join the traumas of the past generations with the hope of the future ones. Often seamless, often with a loud bang, kato-kiriyama moves from genre to genre, from poetry to essays to plays and to letters, framed by the history of US colonialism and war mongering, to urge readers to protect and to share their legacies, both personal and communal, as a means of global survival.

Download or read book Bones of a Saint written by Grant Farley and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Northern California in the late ’70s, this timeless coming-of-age story examines the nature of evil, the art of storytelling, and the possibility of redemption. Fifteen-year-old RJ Armante has never known a life outside his deadend hometown of Arcangel, CA. The Blackjacks rule as they have for generations, luring the poorest kids into their monopoly on petty crime. For years, they’ve left RJ alone, but now they have a job for him: prey upon an old loner in town. In spite of the danger, RJ begins to resist. He fights not only for himself, but for his younger brother, Charley, whose disability has always made RJ feel extra protective of him. For Roxanne, the girl he can’t reach, and the kids in his crew who have nothing to live for. Even for the old loner, who has secrets of his own. If RJ is to break from the Blackjacks’ hold, all of Arcangel must be free of its past.