David Zahniser

Best City Staircase to Heaven Los Angeles is the quintessential freeway city, the place where a parkway to Pasadena spawned a four-level interchange, which in turn spurred a sprawling autobahn lifestyle. Yet the City of Angels was once a trolley town, sending streetcars down dozens of boulevards — Sunset and......

Best Purple Haze Not a whole lot of romance can be found while driving the streets of Los Angeles, what with the stop-and-go, the two-story mini-malls, the anonymous stucco boxes. But if anything can shake us out of our bumper-to-bumper torpor, it’s the sight of a blooming jacaranda tree, whose......

Best Words Carved in Stone Stucco may be the vernacular of Los Angeles architecture, but this city still has its share of marble, stone, terra cotta and brick. And where there is rock, there are inscriptions. Some salute long-gone businessmen — strangely familiar names like I.N. Van Nuys and Isaac......

With so many new libraries going up across Los Angeles, it’s not easy figuring out which one ranks above the others. There’s the one recently built in Chinatown, with its high ceilings and multitude of windows. There’s the stately Pico-Union branch, whose brickwork gives it the appearance of a historic......

Best Place to Get Drunk ­After ­Chewing Out the Planning ­Commission It’s been quite a while since there were so many homey little watering holes near the Civic Center, a section of town where the architectural style is quite often Late-Century Monstrosity — as in, the New Otani hotel, the......

Best Corporate ­?Coffee Break It might seem a tad, shall we say, unnecessaryto point out the charms of a particular Starbucks, given that there are at least 500 of them gracing greater Los Angeles, sometimes two within a single block. Yet it’s hard to ignore the design features of the......

Best Source for ?1923 Phone Directories The city’s oldest bookseller is Dawson’s, an antiquarian bookshop where buyers can find Californiana ranging from Sierra Club bulletins from the early 1900s to a rare book of engravings by the woodblock printmaker Paul Landacre. Ernest Dawson opened the business in 1905, setting up......

Best Dig Site for Civic Sleuths & History Nerds YEAH, YEAH, SO YOU’VE BEEN TO GRIFFITH PARK. Who hasn’t? But what do you know about Colonel Griffith J. Griffith, the occasionally delusional oddball who made the city’s biggest park possible? Go look for him on ProQuest, the database that contains......

Best Post Cards From the Lake’s Edge Los Angeles may sit next to an ocean, but it’s also chock-full of big-city lakes, from the sprawling one at MacArthur Park — cruelly bisected by Wilshire Boulevard in the 1920s — to ?Wilmington’s Machado Lake, which hit the big time once an......

Best Way to Spy on the Old Neighborhood ?(As Long as You’ve Got a Wad of Cash) You can’t go home again, especially in Los Angeles, where the old homestead you grew up in could be replaced by an offramp or, even worse, stuck next to a Rally’s burger place......