David Zahniser

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......

Best Apartment Views at 40 mph So many boulevards, so little time. The city is lined with wonderful winding streets that just scream to be driven on: Linda Vista Avenue in Pasadena, Huntington Drive in El Sereno, Silver Lake Boulevard in — well, you know. But there’s a three-block stretch,......

Best Whimsical Public Aerospace Art Pity the Metro Green Line’s Aviation Station, a light-rail platform next to the 105 freeway that has been thoroughly derided on the grounds that, despite the name, it doesn’t quite deliver passengers into Los Angeles International Airport. (The name refers to the boulevard, not the......