Marc B. Haefele

Compare New York’s beleaguered City Hall with L.A.’s and be glad you live here. The last time I looked, Mad Rudy Giuliani’s charming Georgian headquarters was sealed off by cops and barricades. Protesters now get arrested and held overnight under the authority of Gotham’s power-maddened burgermeister, who — having begun......

These days it seems that most Angelenos don’t like how their city works. You stumble on this perception in the least likely places. When interviewed recently on the future of Los Angeles, for instance, some Chicano-studies academics said they saw the city splitting, others saw it staying together. Some said......

Photo by Ted Soqui Los Angeles’ organized-labor cadres seemed to be all over the metropolis on Tuesday in their quest for the living wage. Workers and union officials attended a meeting of the city’s Board of Airports to lobby for better pay at LAX, made a strong presentation to the......

Photo by Ted Soqui If only they had a choice, the people who work at the El Sereno Youth Center would like to forget there ever was a Los Angeles city councilman named Richard Alatorre. Failing that, they’d rather the world knew there’s no current association between the center and......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov They were sniggering together again, the Richards Alatorre and Riordan, at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority meeting late last month. And why shouldn’t they share some mirth, old buddies that they are? There is, in fact, probably not an adequate English word for their kind of closeness,......

AP/WIDE WORLD Graw, you may recall, is the former MTA construction executive who claims that, in part because he prepared the special panel of experts that rejected a certain dubious bid for a $65 million Eastside subway contract, he was fired out of hand in 1996. As we noted last......

Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter It was not, on the whole, a good month for lame-duck Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. There was, for instance, the April 13 election to pick his successor. About which two things were, from the incumbent’s point of view, noteworthy. The first was that......

Photo by Slobodan DimitrovBarbara Perkins may well have been the best candidate for the 7th District council seat in Tuesday’s city elections. Besides being up on the issues, she had the most experience in community activities, high recognition in the North Valley and the longest-standing connections at City Hall. She......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo What’s left to say about the CRA? Downtown Los Angeles is the graveyard of its mistakes. Over its 50-year history, the Community Redevelopment Agency became the favored scapegoat of anti-government critics from left to right. Now, sapped by its obligations for its many failed projects, the......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo So just the idea of a doctors union was worth a laugh. Yet it was probably the elevated prestige and prevailing remuneration levels that eventually helped to chip away at the American physician’s social and economic pedestal. Craving wealth and prestige, hordes of young people trained......