Hadley Meares
Hadley Meares is a writer, historian, and singer who traded one Southland (her home state of North Carolina) for another. She is a frequent contributor to Curbed and Atlas Obscura, and leads historical tours all around Los Angeles for Obscura Society LA. Her debut novel, "Absolutely," is now available on Amazon.
After its first burial in 1906, the park quickly became the chosen resting spot for many of Southern California's early aristocracy.
In the past decade, the arrival of some of L.A.'s most innovative restaurants, hip bars, and progressive art galleries have transformed the long-depressed area of the Old Bank District in downtown's Historic Core.
The ruins of the once world famous public gardens of Adolphus and Lilly Busch, of "Budweiser" beer fame, are scattered around Pasadena.
Behind the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House near Los Feliz lies a fascinating and complicated story, and at its center, a woman whose dreams were often dashed by bureaucracy, difficult collaborators, and herself.
Before Eva Longoria's Beso and Rose McGowan's Dominick's, there was Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café. But the story of Todd's life as a pioneering businesswoman has long been overshadowed by her 1935 death in a garage above the restaurant that was supposed...
A cozy, enchanted cottage on a transitioning stretch of Figueroa Street in Highland Park has close connection to Sycamore Grove Park -- and to the famed composer John Phillip Sousa.
The now defunct theme park was home to hundreds of animals, including a somersaulting bear, a roller skating macaw, and poker playing koi fish. Unfortunately, many of them did not go out with a happy ending.
Grand Central Market has existed in the same downtown location for almost 100 years. This is its story.
Art clubs, luxury shops, and oil corporations have all occupied the intricately detailed spaces of the 1926 Fine Arts Building in downtown L.A.
Next to the bustling MacArthur Park, the once vibrant interiors of the Westlake Theater are now silent. But all around it, there is life.
Now a public park, the stone-faced Tudor mansion is a palace of dreams and illusions that was once the site of a double murder, involving one of the city's most prominent families.
Every day busy Californians drive right over the spot where the first steps toward American statehood were taken many moons ago.