The Saints of Skid Row

The Stories of Saints and Streets Intersect All Over L.A., and Especially at San Julian Street

A dozen years or so ago, I set out to find connections between the stories of 100 saints and the streets that bear their names here in Los Angeles, a city which itself is named for a saint. (Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, Our Lady of the Angels—that is, the Virgin Mary.)

One thing I was fairly certain of at the outset: Nearly all our saint-streets were, counterintuitively, named neither by Spanish explorers nor Mexican settlers seeking to invoke a saint’s watchful blessings over their turf. No more than a handful …

Architecture Critic Greg Goldin

Greg Goldin, coauthor of the forthcoming book Never Built Los Angeles, is a curator at the A+D Museum. From 1999 to 2012, he was the architecture critic at Los Angeles …

Architecture Does Matter—Even In Crazy L.A.

But How To Use It For Our Benefit Is Another Question

We accord both architects and their buildings celebrity status, but how much do blueprints ultimately influence the way we live or the way our cities develop? Architects, planners, designers, and …

Art Historian Martin Schwarz

Winter In Chicago Beats Winter In L.A.?

Art historian Martin Schwarz curated the Getty Museum exhibition “Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages” before moving to the University of Chicago. Before participating …

Getty Director Timothy Potts

A Careful Driver Who Just Failed His DMV Exam

Timothy Potts became the director of the Getty Museum in September; previously, he was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England. Before participating in a …

Heaven’s Nice, But Hell’s More Fun To Paint

Our Depictions of the Afterlife Are As Varied As Our Cultures

Where’s heaven? What’s it like? Who gets in? And what tortures await those of us who land in the alternative destination?

Scholars of religion, history, and art asked these questions during …