The promises and conflicts faced by public figures, artists, and leaders of Northeast Los Angeles as they enliven and defend their neighborhoods Los Angeles is well known as a sprawling metropolis with endless freeways that can make the city feel isolating and separate its communities. Yet in the past decade, as Jan Lin argues in Taking Back the Boulevard, there has been a noticeable renewal of public life on several of the city’s iconic boulevards, including Atlantic, Crenshaw, Lankershim, Sunset, Western, and Wilshire. These arteries connect neighborhoods across the city, traverse socioeconomic divides and ethnic enclaves, and can be understood as the true locational heart of public life in the metropolis. Focusing especially on the cultural scene of Northeast Los Angeles, Lin shows how these gentrifying communities help satisfy a white middle-class consumer demand for authentic experiences of “living on the edge” and a spirit of cultural rebellion. These neighborhoods have gone through several stages, from streetcar suburbs, to disinvested neighborhoods with the construction of freeways and white flight, to immigrant enclaves, to the home of Chicano/a artists in the 1970s. Those artists were then followed by non-Chicano/a, white artists, who were later threatened with displacement by gentrifiers attracted by the neighborhoods’ culture, street life, and green amenities that earlier inhabitants had worked to create. Lin argues that gentrification is not a single transition, but a series of changes that disinvest and re-invest neighborhoods with financial and cultural capital. Drawing on community survey research, interviews with community residents and leaders, and ethnographic observation, this book argues that the revitalization in Northeast LA by arts leaders and neighborhood activists marks a departure in the political culture from the older civic engagement to more socially progressive coalition work involving preservationists, environmentalists, citizen protestors, and arts organizers. Finally, Lin explores how accelerated gentrification and mass displacement of Latino/a and working-class households in the 2010s has sparked new rounds of activism as the community grapples with new class conflicts and racial divides in the struggle to self-determine its future.

The promises and conflicts faced by public figures, artists, and leaders of Northeast Los Angeles as they enliven and defend their neighborhoods Los Angeles is well known as a sprawling metropolis with endless freeways that can make the city feel isolating and separate its communities. Yet in the past decade, as Jan Lin argues in Taking Back the Boulevard, there has been a noticeable renewal of public life on several of the city’s iconic boulevards, including Atlantic, Crenshaw, Lankershim, Sunset, Western, and Wilshire. These arteries connect neighborhoods across the city, traverse socioeconomic divides and ethnic enclaves, and can be understood as the true locational heart of public life in the metropolis. Focusing especially on the cultural scene of Northeast Los Angeles, Lin shows how these gentrifying communities help satisfy a white middle-class consumer demand for authentic experiences of “living on the edge” and a spirit of cultural rebellion. These neighborhoods have gone through several stages, from streetcar suburbs, to disinvested neighborhoods with the construction of freeways and white flight, to immigrant enclaves, to the home of Chicano/a artists in the 1970s. Those artists were then followed by non-Chicano/a, white artists, who were later threatened with displacement by gentrifiers attracted by the neighborhoods’ culture, street life, and green amenities that earlier inhabitants had worked to create. Lin argues that gentrification is not a single transition, but a series of changes that disinvest and re-invest neighborhoods with financial and cultural capital. Drawing on community survey research, interviews with community residents and leaders, and ethnographic observation, this book argues that the revitalization in Northeast LA by arts leaders and neighborhood activists marks a departure in the political culture from the older civic engagement to more socially progressive coalition work involving preservationists, environmentalists, citizen protestors, and arts organizers. Finally, Lin explores how accelerated gentrification and mass displacement of Latino/a and working-class households in the 2010s has sparked new rounds of activism as the community grapples with new class conflicts and racial divides in the struggle to self-determine its future.

Architect and urban designer Suisman lays out his views on the urban structure of Los Angeles, exemplified by the long boulevards that cut across the urban body that is Los Angeles.

Better Nate than Ever meets Love Sugar Magic in this spooky second novel in the Fearless middle grade series from Hamilton and Broadway star Mandy Gonzalez about a group of young thespians who time travel back to 1950s Broadway. Twelve-year-old Relly can’t wait for his beloved grandfather to finally see him on stage! Along with the rest of the Fearless Squad, Relly has just opened Our Time, a brand-new musical at the infamous Ethel Merman Theater. Though his grandfather would prefer his grandson pursue something more “practical,” Relly just knows when he sees the show, he will change his mind and come around on Relly’s love of theater and dance. But right before their night show, a member of the Squad loses their phone down an open manhole. When the entire Squad goes down to help retrieve it, they find themselves in 1950s Manhattan. A big problem, considering the curtain goes up in about two hours—and over sixty years in the future! With a series of clues, Relly discovers that his grandfather was a popular tap dancer, working the nightclub circuit and pursuing his dream of performing—something he’s been discouraging Relly from doing lately. Perhaps this accidental fall into a different time wasn’t so accidental after all. Can Relly help his grandfather and make it back in time for places in the show?

A collection of first-person narratives and anecdotes, close-up portrait photographs, and the author's personal and historical reflections capture the rich ethnic diversity of the people and landscapes of the borough of Queens in New York City, in a volume that comes complete with an audio rendition of the oral histories and music by composer Scott Johnson. Original.

Originally published in hardcover in 2005.

Faces of Sunset Boulevard: A Portrait of Los Angeles is a collection of photographs of the people who live, work, and play in Los Angeles. Some are making fortunes along the route; others are just trying to survive to see another day. Patrick Ecclesine captures the city's dreams, dreamers, and, at times, nightmares using the most famous boulevard in the world as the setting for his photographs. The individuals featured range from the famous (Governor Schwarzenegger, Larry King, Fernando Valenzuela) to the unknown (a street vendor, an undocumented worker, a bus driver) to the unwanted (a homeless man, a single mother on welfare, a drug addict). Other archetypal Angeleno figures--from a television weather-girl sensation to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to surfers in Pacific Palisades to the eccentric and outlandish denizens of the Sunset Strip--stand side by side in these pages, capturing the eclectic nature of the City of Angels and its most colorful thoroughfare, Sunset Boulevard.