Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall is an essayist, broadcaster, and speaker on cities and culture. He's currently based in Seoul and at work on the book "A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City."
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Mexican California's last governor built Los Angeles' first luxury hotel, the Pico House.
Vast, confusing, punctuated by curiosities neither beautiful nor ugly, and demanding of both endurance and optimism, Los Angeles' airport provides a tempting symbol for the city itself. But why only now has it felt the need to become "world class"?
This zone of missions, clinics, residential hotels, and sparse convenience stores hosts not just a large and unfortunate outdoor population but their many tents, shopping carts, and rickety wheelchairs besides. What does its presence, which troubles ev...
In the 70s, American downtowns turned away from the streets and toward the enclosed, the climate-controlled, and the monitored. Here, the movement produced Macy's Plaza and the Bonaventure Hotel. What separates the former, a decrepit mall soon to recei...
At six miles, Melrose Avenue, the world-renowned destination and longtime bastion of "alternative" shopping culture, seems almost manageable by comparison to other major Los Angeles streets. But however you travel it, should you take it in branded sect...
All who pass through Union Station, Los Angeles' 1939 memorial to the heyday of passenger rail, must dream of a distant, glamorous, lost era of American train travel. Having passed the post-WWII decades as little more than a curiosity, how has Union St...
Lincoln Boulevard, "everybody's ugliest street" that runs up the west of Los Angeles from LAX to Santa Monica, draws eyes for its "vitiated architectural typology" and "uncontrolled riot of signage." But past those freely eccentric structures, what doe...
However you know when a Los Angeles neighborhood has turned "cool," has Highland Park crossed into that territory with its mix of vinyl retail with typewriter repair, and gluten-free bacon donuts with fluorescent-lit old-fashioneds?
You can't go to a Japanese department store on the Miracle Mile anymore, but you can do it in Hollywood, which, together with downtown proper, increasingly seems to constitute the city's separate-but-linked urban core.
Whether you take your brew with a multi-hour writing session or take it out the door in one hand with your toddler in the other, Atwater Village has a coffee shop for you. As this latest Los Angeles neighborhood to draw comparisons to Portland grows ev...
For a high-profile metropolis, Los Angeles has a curious relationship with the word "city," especially in the brand of a "virtual place" like Universal CityWalk.
This four-block spectacle of imagemaking, from tourists conquering the commercial summit to brands projecting themselves as maximally expensive, would give any postmodern academic a field day.