As a teenager growing up in Orange County, I knew how to get to two and only two places in L.A.: the Third Street Promenade and La Cienega Boulevard. On the rare occasions that my friends and I escaped the ‘burbs, these were the two places we journeyed to in order to — in our [...]

My article about the ‘Hel-Mel‘ neighborhood — an enclave at the intersection of Heliotrope and Melrose near LA City College — appeared in the LA Times today. It was fun writing about this little ‘hood because, as someone who’s taught for nearly a decade at LACC, I watched it grow before my eyes. For several [...]

Drive just 20 minutes northeast of downtown L.A., and you can be in the rural, rolling foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, where horses outnumber Hummers and quiet cul-de-sacs dead end into the wilds of the canyons. I wrote about two of these foothill communities, La Canada Flintridge and Sunland-Tujunga, recently for the LA Times. [...]