D.J. Waldie
D. J. Waldie is the author of "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" and "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles," among other books about the social history of Southern California. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.
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California historian and former state librarian Kevin Starr died at 76 on Saturday. D. J. Waldie reflects on his legacy.
Parker Center’s empty corridors and offices are filled with memories, many of them painful.
L.A. was an adobe town when Harris Newmark arrived in 1853. It was a metropolis when he died there in 1916.
Shopping in old Los Angeles was not easy, pleasant, or cheap.
The boomtime of 1887 had a fluid, phantasmagoric quality, as if scripted by Tim Burton.
Uncertainty clouds our memory of Jan. 13, 1847, when Andrés Pico and John C. Frémont signed a document variously called the Capitulation of Cahuenga or Treaty of Cahuenga.
Something must be done with the LAPD's former home on Los Angeles St., either to make its presence more felt or to erase its image from memory.
Most Southern Californians have only a murky understanding of the groundwater aquifers they rely upon – and the political bodies that manage them.
We’ve gotten used to L.A.’s "littles" and "towns." In southeast L.A. County are lesser-known ethnic communities that continue to hybridize with suburban Los Angeles. Milk made two of them: Bellflower and Artesia, where Holland and the Azores met.
Why was the city of Los Angeles so scared of modern art in the mid-20th century?
Radio vastly expanded the reach of Los Angeles personalities like "Sister Aimee" Semple McPherson and "Fighting Bob" Shuler. Their radio ministries were controversial, however.
A proposed ballot measure seeks to slow down development in Los Angeles. As the city debates its future, D.J. Waldie considers the lessons we can draw from its past.