Day trips, drives and the places behind them.
Black Dahlia DaysSix stops — a motel on Flower Street, a hydrant on South Norton, a parking lot on Crenshaw where a woman sat alone for half an hour, and a sign shop on Main where a showgirl’s face is being lit again.Eastside BabylonSix stops through Commerce — Rosewood, when most of this happened — and Montebello and East Los Angeles — a trunk carried seven-tenths of a mile, a park restroom, an incinerator behind a radio shop, and a rifle in the dark at Olympic and Atlantic.Hollywood AfternoonFour stops — a grave on Santa Monica Boulevard, then the boulevard the man in it spent thirty years defending: a bookshop named for someone who died in 1941, a city built in miniature by a cabinetmaker, and an alley where Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd all worked inside three years.Sixteen Bookstores in Eight-Tenths of a MileHollywood Boulevard, Highland Avenue to Argyle, as the Los Angeles Times mapped it in 1976The Lost Bookstores of Los AngelesForty-two shops, most of them drawn from seven Los Angeles Times articles, 1968–1977The Lost Bookstores of Westwood Village & Boulevard49 bookstores at 47 addresses, from Campbell’s on Le Conte Avenue in 1929 to Booksellers Row, south of Wilshire down to Pico.The Lost Bookstores of Westwood Village32 bookstores at 30 addresses in the Village, from Campbell’s on Le Conte Avenue in 1929.The Bungalow Courts of HollywoodEvery court named in Caroline Raftery’s 2016 survey of Hollywood’s bungalow courts — the designated, the merely surveyed, and the demolished. Her full survey counted 470 courts, 195 of them already gone. Schedules and arrival times for the day.