Lotus Garden

My Secret Spot

Lake Balboa

In tribute to his career of public service, Lake Balboa Park in Van Nuys, California was renamed as the "Anthony C. Beilenson Park". The park is an 80-acre water recreation facility, holding Balboa Lake in the center, an artificial 27-acre lake filled with water from the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant.

Rustic Canyon Trail

with Blake!

Murphy Ranch Nazi Camp, Hartford Artists Colony

The Ranch of 55 acres was purchased in 1933 by a (fictious?) "Jessie M. Murphy, widow," with that name appearing on no other public records. 

By 1938 it was clear that the real owners were Winona and Norman Stephens, a wealthy American couple with a marked affinity for National Socialism and Hitler's New Order in Germany.

Winona, who was seriously into "the para-normal," came under the spell of a mysterious Rasputin-like Nazi known in local lore only as "Schmidt."

 The Stephens spent more than 4,000,000 dollars to develop the estate into a sealed off utopian Nazi hide-a-way which would include a huge mansion designed by Lloyd Wright.

Schmidt, with his psychic powers, had determined that in the coming war with the axis, America would be destroyed by the German Master Race. 

 One year after America's downfall, it would be safe to re-emerge into the waste land that had been Los Angeles, and establish an Aryan Civilization allied with Hitler and his Third Reich.

 The day after Pearl Harbor, according to the L.A. Times, the F.B.I. came and took Mr. Schmidt away.

In 1948 Huntington Hartford (his H.H. Foundation) bought the ranch (and adjacent land), hired landscape architect-architect Lloyd Wright, and built an "Artists' Colony". 

It operated from 1951 until Hartford stopped its funding in 1965.

 The city of Los Angeles bought the property in 1973 for open space. 

The 1978 Mandeville Canyon brushfire destroyed all burnable structures in 1978. 

(source: wikimapia)

Lil Tokyo at Nite

Little Tokyo is an ethnically Japanese American district in downtown Los Angeles and the heart of the largest Japanese-American population in North America. It is one of only three official Japantowns in the United States, all in California (the other two are in San Francisco and San Jose).

Ghost Kitty in the Arts District

4th Street Bridge

DTLA

The Southern California Association of Governments has estimated that workers commuting from outside bring the daytime downtown population up to 207,440 people. At night, it is a different story: The 2000 U.S. census found that just 27,849 residents lived in the 5.84 square miles of Downtown—an average of 4,770 people per square mile, among the lowest population densities in the city. The population increased to 34,811 by 2008, according to city estimates. The median age for residents was 39, considered old for the city and the county.

Downtown Los Angeles is almost evenly balanced among the four major racial and ethnic groups – Asian Americans (23%), African Americans (22%), Latinos (25%) and non-Hispanic Whites (26%), according to an analysis of 2010 census data.