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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Even Angelenos who "don't need a car" may want to borrow one to go to Torrance, the South Bay town that has a surprising concentration of Japanese culture.
Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world, if only at night and from a distance. This observation resonates with many Angelenos, and when they quote it, they often refer to the city as "L.A." But what do we mean by "Los Angeles," and what do ...
In the early 1980s, a young Jonathan Gold decided to eat at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He never completed this impossible task (though things worked out for him anyway), but what does the now-famous food critic's attempted "map of the senses" ...
This urban emporium has, since 1917, provided downtowners a place to buy their produce; more recently, to buy moles, dried chiles, and herbal medicines; even more recently, to buy a quick office-worker's lunch; and more recently still, to buy thirteen-...
Angelenos between forty and fifty years old remember Westwood not just as a place, but as the place. People agree that the neighborhood just south of UCLA felt livelier before, but disagree about whether to blame policy, architecture, distance, or viol...
How many degrees separate any given Angeleno from someone who has lived in Park La Brea? The famously dense WWII-era housing complex also illustrates the city's unfortunate tendency to corral what density it has into near-isolated pockets. But the more...
Those bewildered and disoriented by Los Angeles can make a retreat to its satellite cities like Pasadena, and thus to a more traditional look, feel, and form they can readily comprehend. Yet even these, in their downtowns, once had to return from the b...
Noted architect and urbanist Jan Gehl endorses one piece of city-building advice in particular: "Make sure there's never quite enough room." Olvera Street, the Mexican simulacrum now at the origin point of Los Angeles, raises an uncomfortable question:...
Head south on Alameda from downtown, watch the buildings drop in height and expand enormously in width, aim toward the American Apparel factory, and you'll find yourself in the Fashion District, not just one of the cores of hardworking Los Angeles, but...
Drawn over by names like Neutra, Schindler, and Lloyd Wright, the architectural tourist who descends from the hills will find the highly crafted by the throwaway, the once-glamorous by the unapologetically scuzzy, and the world-famous by the near-secre...
The daily cyclist in this supposedly "bike-unfriendly" city gains a command of quiet back streets like 4th, the backbone of so many of my own trips. The pace, rhythm, and perspective of rides along these bike routes open up the mental space to ponder a...
"The black Greenwich Village," "the Left Bank of early-90s underground hip-hop," and more grew from the unlikely origin of a predominantly white suburban community planned in the 1920s. But despite prominent appearances in films like "Baby Boy" and "Co...