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."
Contrary to what its name might lead you to expect, the Arts District does, in fact, contain art, and not just the murals on its disused warehouses and factories. Artists once replaced its industrialists, and now the businessmen and "creative class" ha...
Neither urban nor suburban, Silver Lake, with its namesake reservoir and surfeit of fascinating houses, has become a space for style, wellness, and artisanal retail. But should we fear a rising monoculture?
One of Los Angeles' many formerly wealthy enclaves, one immortalized in song by Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb, MacArthur Park's Art Deco mansions have long since given way to pupusas and proselytizers. How should an Angeleno make best use of it all?
Traveling the nearly sixteen miles of the closest thing Los Angeles has to a a "main street" by bus reveals the boulevard's host of impressive parts, even seen standing at a smudged window. But what, long-awaited transit innovation or otherwise, will a...
An object of fascination for the writers of "When Harry Met Sally" to "The Simpsons", restaurant critics to Yelpers, Ethiopian cuisine has its Los Angeles center on a single block of Fairfax Avenue. We can easily visit Little Ethiopia for a satisfying ...
The "Wall Street of the West" when downtown first functioned as the center of Los Angeles, architecturally venerable Spring Street offers a window onto the urban revival that may well make it the center again. So what's with the faded bike lanes and al...
Built around one of the few traditionally strollable "cute streets" Los Angeles has to offer, Larchmont Village has undergone an intriguing, if subtle, process of cultural fragmentation since the era of the Three Stooges and Raymond Chandler.
The first line in Los Angeles' modern rail system, which Reyner Banham called "socially necessary," opened 23 years ago to great fanfare. A lot of people ride it today, but has it really achieved its goals?
Does the Jazz Age linear downtown, "America's Champs-Élysées" which once offered car-friendly shopping (and a huge Japanese department store), have a place in our urban renaissance?
The freeways fascinate in the same way the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinate: they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.
Why a walk through this both formerly and currently Jewish neighborhood, recently the incubator of first-rate revival cinema and a world-famous "willfully repugnant" hip-hop group, must naturally end with the contemplation of a tortilla full of chili, ...
The place to stock up on canned green tea, buy a genuine futon, burn an hour at the arcade, eat a heaping plateful of Hayashi rice, or gaze upon the finest men's style magazines: Little Tokyo remains all these, but does it, strictly speaking, remain Ja...