Submitted and Written By Dan Collins For ice cream lovers, Scoops is the frozen jewel in the Heliotrope Corridor crown (also called the Bicycle Districk and Hel-Mel), just around the corner from the legendary punk rock pavilion on Melrose known as the Ukrainian Center. Today’s urban sophisticate finds that nothing cools one down after a midnight bike ride’s next day sun-soaked hangover more than gourmet ice cream at bargain prices. And Scoops has all the......

The Old Spaghetti Factory on Sunset Boulevard is gone, leaving a trail of b'day party memories, indigestion and chain link fencing in its wake. The Sunset & Gordon neighborhood has a big wide sidewalk but not much street life. The sound of the helicopter hovering overhead competes with the police sirens, the music pumping from the adjacent apartment building, the traffic on Sunset. This neighborhood needs a park! All it takes is the Los Angeles......

East Hollywood will transform into Thailand West this Sunday, April 13th, as the Thai community comes together to celebrate Songkran (the Thai New Year) with festivals, parades, and ceremonies all day long (check out the general Thai Festival website here for more info). All along Hollywood Boulevard, from Western to Vermont, vendors and sponsors will be presenting a kaleidoscope of food, crafts, dancers, Thai boxing demonstrations, costume competitions, and even the largest international curry......

Remember that scene in I Am Legend where we see a gas station selling a regular gallon for $6.63. Well if we're lucky those prices won't hit us until 2012, along with vampire zombies. In the area baptized as Hel-Mel (Heliotrope and Melrose) you'll find this amazing mural. In it the major oil companies are depicted as blood thirsty hyenas. Appropriate for the area as it is the unofficial Bicycle District of LA. Well at......

After releasing a transportation vision on YouTube last week, the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council took yet another step in becoming a more transit friendly neighborhood, specifically in regards to bicyclists. The Bike Writers' Collective, a coalition of top bicycle bloggers in Los Angeles (which includes an LAist contributor) presented the "Cyclists' Bill of Rights" to the council, who unanimously passed a motion to endorse it. In a statement from the cycling writers group, it said......

Photo by Sonny I. LaVista/LAist This week the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council released their video (shown below) on transportation within their district (map), which is a small but dense 1.5 square miles with a population of 52,000 people that includes the neighborhoods of Thai Town, Little Armenia and the unofficial Bicycle District (some call it, ugh, Hel-Mel for Heliotrope/Melrose). They say the area is a multi-modal community with transportation opions such as the 101......

Square One Dining on Fountain Avenue, tucked behind the Scientology Center that extends from Sunset to Fountain in East Hollywood, is a restaurant of little pretension and noble purpose: it serves one of the finest breakfasts in Los Angeles. Although two years ago, LAist had careless service at Square One, despite the great food (it even made a staffer’s top ten list), the service on this and previous visits was attentive and polite –......

Mural of a dancing couple in Silver Lake....

Can we please do the OPPOSITE of adding fuel to these fires? A Sun Valley day laborer has been charged with arson after he was caught attempting to start a blaze in the Woodland Hills area earlier this week. Do you use your cell phone? Of course you do. The future of this important device lies in the hands of visionaries, such as the ones who are attending MobileCampLA on Sunday. And you too......

Imagine our surprise when we discovered from the LA Times' Buzz Bands blog last week that our friends Rocket were not only on the new tv show The Next Great American Band but they had made it pretty far already. Rocket is the all-female pop rock band from East Hollywood who we first told you about during the summer of last year when they were playing shows almost every day in LA. Then this......

If you heard the hysterical sounds of laughter coming from the Los Feliz, Little Armenia, Thai Town and East Hollywood section of Los Angeles Saturday night, it was me. First of all the UCLA Bruins lost to Notre Dame? The fact that Ben Olson got injured in the first quarter and they brought out walk-on quarterback McLeod Bethel-Thompson to replace him shows something fundamentally wrong with this Bruin program. When Patrick Cowan went down......

If you like spicy food, Jitlada is the place to go. Not only does LA Weekly's Jonathan Gold call the Southern Thai specialty restaurant "the most exciting new Thai restaurant of the year," he claims one of the dishes, the kua kling Phat Tha Lung (thick brown curry with shredded beef) "may be the spiciest food you can eat in Los Angeles." Jitlada recently gained popularity a few months ago when a Chicago blogger......

LA is home to dozens of classic, independent, rock clubs. Many of these clubs helped launch most of your favorite bands. But those bands would have never made it on stage if it wasn't for the booker, the person who actually schedules the bands to play the show on the particular date. We start this series in Little Armenia at Safari Sam's, a club that was originally created 20 years ago in Huntington Beach......

LAist Editor Tony Pierce has blogged here non-stop for more than a year deserving a well-earned vacation (and did he ever earn it). While out of town, we decided to have a little fun and bring some guest day editors in from around the blogLAsphere. Monday we had Green LA Girl and Tuesday saw Fred Camino of MetroRiderLA.Zuma Dogg took Wednesday and LA City Nerd yesterday. Today, former LAist Editor Carolyn Kellogg makes a comeback!......

LAist Editor Tony Pierce has blogged here non-stop for more than a year deserving a well-earned vacation (and did he ever earn it). While out of town, we decided to have a little fun and bring some guest day editors in from around the blogLAsphere. Yesterday was Siel of Green LA Girl, today is Fred Camino of MetroRiderLA. All Aboard! 1. Age and occupation: 26 yearz old. I'm a freelance motion graphics designer, whatever that......

This summer LAist is going to tackle an ambitious project. We are going to attempt to do a post about every neighborhood in Los Angeles based on LA City Nerd's 172 known designated communities. It might take us into the fall, but every neighborhood/community will be covered, in this lighthearted, and clearly not definitive, tour of LA. If you would like to send us information, tidbits, little known facts, or full blown posts about......

interview by Carolyn Kellogg A year ago Tony Pierce took over the reigns of LAist, and I have to say he's done wonders with the place. It's bigger and shinier and got a gorgeous crowd standing out front (that's you). Will he tell us what it's like behind the LAist editor's curtain? Can we ever really know the man, the blogger, Tony Pierce? Carolyn Kellogg: Where'd you grow up, Tony? I was born in......

A Memorial Weekend BBQ in East Hollywood was my destination yesterday. And since my recent habit has been to use public transit mixed with the bike, that's what I set out to do from my Sherman Oaks flat. First, I was off to Ralphs Fresh Fare at Ventura and Coldwater to pick up some food. I shop, exit and head to my bike. Right then, an escalade pulls up and parks in the fire......

I live in East Hollywood. I get my mail at the Los Feliz post office. The neighborhood sign near my apartment says Little Armenia. My zip code says 90027. You'd think a magazine called Los Angeles would know which part of the LA I lived in. But perhaps the publication is outsourcing its subscription-hustling duties to the same guys covering the Pasadena city council meetings because not only did Los Angeles mail me an......

John Marshall Evans became the US ambassador to Armenia in August 2004. Six months later he visited California and was convinced by Armenian-Americans here to cut the political B.S. and simply say that the 1.5 million Armenians who were the victims of genocide at the hands of the Turks from 1915 and 1923... were indeed victims of genocide. Today President Bush will tapdance around the word in fear of insulting our ally Turkey, a......

Here’s the thing: this book isn’t even out yet. But because we live in Los Angeles, and this book is about Los Angeles, you’re in luck. We’re all in luck. Denise Hamilton and the bevy of supremely talented noir writers that contributed stories to this book are signing all over town this week. And the book will be, yes, you guessed it – available for signing at the readings two weeks before the rest of......

The Norwegian new rave band Datarock graced LA twice this week. On Tuesday they played East Hollywood's Safari Sam's and yesterday they headlined Club NME's night at Spaceland. LAist was lucky enough to have local photographer Wathana Lim take some photos for us last night, way more after the jump.......

Last Saturday morning, the Board of Public Works invited all neighborhood councils to attend a meeting to kick start the go-happy 1950s Keep America Beautiful program. Los Angeles has been chosen as the kick off location for the national program, the Great American Clean Up, that takes place from March 1 through May 31. Along with a crowd of about 50 folks, bloggers/downtown neighborhood councilmen Eric Richardson from Blog Downtown and Brady Westwater of LA......

Council President Eric Garcetti represents the Thirteenth Council District which includes all or part of the communities of Glassell Park, Atwater Village, Elysian Valley, Echo Park, Historic Filipinotown, Silver Lake, East Hollywood and Hollywood. Otherwise known as LAist's 'Hood. Because we're represented brilliantly, when we sent our councilmember a request to take part in this collection of Best Of lists not only did he respond quickly and wonderfully, but he reached behind our ear and......

** LAist Exclusive ** Los Angeles natives the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be playing the official Zune Launch Party this Monday (11/13) from 8-11pm at a small venue here in LA - aka not in a stadium. The venue information will be posted on zuneinsider.com and LAist on Monday morning. Tickets are free to the public and EXTREMELY LIMITED. Tickets can only* be picked up tonight at the Circuit City at 4400 Sunset......

The Grates Gravity Won't Get You High Cherry Tree / Interscope Some records are just perfect. Some records you put on and you get it immediately and it speaks to you and you love it and you wear it out and you listen to it in the shower and you listen to it when you drive and you listen to it when you're writing the review in the middle of the night for your......

by Pam Shaffer Being somewhat broke, I figured I'd economize and go to dinner and a show all at once. I found myself at Safari Sams, land of comfy outdoor couches and crunchy indoor music. I found my accomplice in dinner crime, one Jana Pants, seated close to the stage. Though I really dug the music of Izzy Cox and the Eskimos, I felt like that scene in Batman where Bruce Wayne and reporter......

Let's just say that LAist likes to keep it real. So we live in a modest apartment in East Hollywood that doesn't have air conditioning, or a pool, or even a ceiling fan. And let's just say that LAist was up pretty late last night after the sweetass Raconteurs show at the Wiltern. And by late of course we mean early. So let's say at noon when we were thinking about getting up it......

The Silverlake Film Festival is on and, as you might guess, it features new independent films, many from local filmmakers (right on). But if you guessed that the Silverlake Film Festival was taking place in Silverlake, you'd be dead wrong. Most of the films are showing at the ArcLight — one of our favorite movie theaters, to be sure, but it's nowhere near Silverlake. According to GoogleMaps, the ArcLight is 4.6 miles from Spaceland,......

Many Angelenos seemed determined to take celebrating the Fourth of July into their own hands this year, and not just by perfecting their barbecue marinades. In East Hollywood, you'd never have known that some fireworks were illegal, as the air filled with crashes and pops, sparkles and smoke. M80s sat in the middle of the street, launching flashes of hot red, white, and blue close to the overhanging branches of palm trees. A friend......