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Much of the magic that the desert utopia of Palm Springs holds has to do with its prominent mid-century aesthetic, much of it created by Los Angeles photographer Julius Shulman.
When Minerva Hamilton Hoyt moved to Southern California, she was taken with its desert landscape and went on a quest to protect it from increasing tourism and looming commercial interests.
What's the right balance between public land use and preservation? As a young filmmaker, David Vassar unexpectedly filmed an uprising in Stoneman Meadow.
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If the idea of a waterfall made of fire seems too good to be true, that's because it is.
KCET has partnered with USC Libraries, the UCLA History-Geography Project and the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.
The tireless work of Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, who was dedicated to the often-misunderstood delicate desert landscape, was critical in establishing Joshua Tree as a national monument. She paved the way for its continued preservation today.
Muscle Beach started near the Santa Monica Pier as a haven for Southern California fitness advocates, frequented by some of the most well-known names in fitness today. In spite of a wildly popular reception, politics drove it to relocate to Venice.
From bad-guy shooters to gold and silver bonanzas, there’s much that has been lost from the once-thriving mining town of Bodie. There’s still more that's left to protect in the ghost town that survived the Wild West.
Urban environments are a necessary part of our culture and evolution — and so is the desert wilderness. It allows us to remember a part of ourselves as we journey into this forgotten realm of imagination and fantasy.
Early Hollywood film production pioneer Carl Laemmle dreamed up a city that’s now become the billion-dollar empire known as Universal Studios. Once doubted as “Laemmle's Folly,” its famous behind-the-scenes studio tours still operate today.
In the early 1960s, Walt Disney proposed a Polynesian-themed restaurant featuring a musical floor show with trained birds. With technology purchased from the nuclear weapons program, mechanical performers would make his vision a reality.
For the Fantasyland episode, I met an Imagineer, sat down with the director of the Walt Disney Archives and went through photos of Universal's original studio tour. We also visited the restaurant that inspired Walt Disney's fantasy theme.