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."
A private space that functions essentially like a public one, the venerable Farmers Market at the corner of 3rd and Fairfax provides a variety of specialized foods, a respite for paparazzi-weary celebrities, a quaint backdrop for photo-snapping tourist...
Cross the river out of downtown, and you immediately find yourself in Boyle Heights, gateway to East Los Angeles. Often described as formerly Jewish (back when Cesar E. Chavez Avenue had the name Brooklyn) and currently Latino, the neighborhood emerged...
This place "Where Hollywood Movies Are Made" once, indeed, had the bulk of the Los Angeles film production industry. More importantly, to my mind, it also once had the Tokyo 7-7 Coffee Shop, perhaps the only Los Angeles eatery ever to attain perfection...
When the New Yorker's "far-flung correspondent" Christopher Rand came to Los Angeles in 1964, he based himself in Sawtelle, the quiet "satellite Japanese quarter" which let him observe the city's cultural hybridization with Asia and Latin America. What...
Since its riots nearly 50 years ago, troubled Watts has drawn the pens Clive James, Jan Morris, Reyner Banham, and Thomas Pynchon. But even these astute observers had to contend with the surprising placelessness they found there, given the neighborhood...
In only 56 years, downtown's Bunker Hill went from the formerly grand but still dignified shambles that housed Arturo Bandini, down-and-out protagonist of John Fante's "Ask the Dust", to the stand of gleaming high-rises that itself simulated a virtual ...
With its cheerful if often decrepit architecture, its highly curated retail, and its famously freakish boardwalk, Venice offers its own version of reality more than do the other coastal neighborhoods. But after a glimpse into the sociology of the place...
Angelenos talk about Echo Park as a neighborhood which, over the past half-century, has suffered. But this century's elements of peace and prosperity, not least in the form of boutiques, pedal boats, craft beers, and kale salads, haven't wholly overwri...
"Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future," said Robert Hughes of Brazil's midcentury planned capital. He could have said it about Century City, Los Angeles' midcentury planned business district. What does a walk down the increasin...
As far out of fashion as dining in the former tourist trap of Chinatown has become, eating a curry beef pie amid the neighborhood's Hello Kitty-filled underground malls and weary concrete plazas makes for a rich experience of its own. But might a new g...
You may find the Third Street Promenade a bland retail experience, but you'll also hear a wider variety of languages spoken there than anywhere else in Los Angeles. A piece of Southern Californian urbanism that came well before its time, it at once poi...
Tourist guidebooks may direct Los Angeles' visitors from abroad to the Walk of Fame, but just two miles east on Hollywood Boulevard, they'll find a much more fruitful cultural experience -- certainly a spicier one -- in Thai Town, a neighborhood with l...