Thanks to $100 million in money from a royal family of Dubai, the Frank Gehry residential and retail project along Grand Avenue is finally getting its go-ahead, months after delay due to worries of the economy, downtown's real estate market, project details and plan approvals. The first phase of the plan takes place directly across the street from Disney Hall where starting next month, crews will begin to dismantle the parking garage and lot, making......

Photo by Peggy Archer via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr 60-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura "was arrested Friday while visiting Saipan, a U.S. commonwealth territory in the Pacific" for the murder of his wife, which took place in Los Angeles in 1981. Miura is awaiting extradition. The LA Times takes a look at two major Downtown projects that remain delayed, Park Fifth and Grand Avenue. Financing woes and pushed back start dates have led......

Since the recent opening of LACMA's Broad Contemporary (BCAM) a flurry of international eyes have been on Los Angeles, and an ensuing flurry of words have issued forth in review. It seems irresistible to review the Broad without also reviewing the city that houses it, which was precisely the tact taken by Chris Haslam in London's Sunday Times today. It takes Haslam seven paragraphs into his article to even mention the precise reason he......

With the near completion of the Central Los Angeles High School #9, or the LAUSD High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, on Grand Avenue more folks are talking about the architecture stylings of Coop Himmelblau and the monument to the arts that they’ve created. Driving along the 101, people have speculated as to the meaning and purpose of the tall structure that creates an entry along with the Cathedral bell tower across......

I wouldn't normally encourage anybody to go out and gorge on a Whopper, but today, the Burger King downtown at Cesar Chavez and Grand Avenue is donating 100% of its sales to the family of SWAT officer Randal Simmons, who was killed last week in a deadly shoot-out in Winnetka. The fundraiser will be running all day today, until midnight tonight. A donation box will also be available at the restaurant for those who......

One of the first murders in 2008 happened in the parking lot of Crash Mansion on Grand Avenue, an up-and-coming downtown music venue. A fight broke out in the club and continued into the parking lot where one person shot an 18-year-old dead, injuring two others. Saturday night saw a murder outside Safari Sam's in Hollywood. An employee of the Hollywood music venue (more specifically, it's in Little Armenia) passed this message on to us:......

Grizzly Bear, via Grizzly-Bear.net Of all the indie bands with some sort of animal in their title, Grizzly Bear might be the top dogs. After all, can Deerhoof, Deerhunter, Caribou, Panda Bear or even Animal Collective claim they are co-headlining a show with the Los Angeles Philharmonic? Nay. It is just the Brooklyn-based quartet who will share a stage at the Walt Disney Concert Hall for a one night only performance with the L.A.......

Eli Broad and Antonio Villaraigosa at the Grand Avenue announcement Almost two years ago, Frank Gehry, Eli Broad and the big developer folks from Related Companies announced the Grand Avenue Project. A blocklong development of housing, a hotel, retail & greenspace -- all designed by Gehry -- would complement Disney Hall. Getting the development together was tremendously complicated, and it probably wouldn't have happened without Broad's power and support. Since the exciting, fancy unveiling......

Tomorrow is the ribbon cutting of the third and newest downtown Famima!! at the California Plaza on Grand Avenue near MOCA. It's about time this part of downtown receive some new food options, even if this is quasi Japanese 7-11 style. However, a made-to-order sushi bar will be the centerpiece of this location. In addition to the few food options at the California Plaza, Performance Row (as we once dubbed it) has a Koo Koo......

Rain rain has gone away...so Tuesday we'll go out to play. Here's what's going on around town tonight: MUSIC The LA Phil’s Concrete Frequency series continues tonight. “Songs of the City” is being billed as a program where “urban troubadours share lo-fi songs about city life.” We’ll believe it with a lineup that features: Marc Bianchi, Biirdie, Franklin Bruno, Zooey Deschanel, John Doe, Inara George, Stevie Jackson, Sondre Lerche, Kyp Malone, Bob Mould, Zach......

We comb through tons of event listings so you don't have to. LA events have come back from its winter doldrums tonight. Big time. Here's what's happening around town tonight -- there's lots of learning mixed in between all the great entertainment stuff. CLASSICAL The LA Phil's Concrete Frequency series -- combining music, film and symposia -- begins tonight. It's a Casual Friday, which means shorter programs with no intermission. On tap tonight is......

CLASSICAL: There's other classical music about town tonight besides Chanticleer. The Calder Quartet is the Colburn Conservatory’s first quartet-in-residence, and these new faculty members will show their chops with a program that includes Philip Glass, Quartet No. 2 “Company” by Philip Glass; Quartet in A minor “Rosamunde” by Franz Schubert and Terry Riley's “Cadenza on the Night Plain.” 7:30 pm // The Colburn School: Zipper Hall // 200 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles //......

MUSIC: The Los Angeles Master Chorale performs Handel's Messiah tonight at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. But the audience has a part in this fun sing-along. So get your "hallelujah" ready. 7:30 pm // Walt Disney Concert Hall // 111 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles // $16-$69 (Cheaper tickets are getting scarce). OUTDOORS: Santa Monica pretends its Pershing Square with an ice rink of its own. It’s a stone’s throw away from the Third Street......

The LA County Fair comes to end tonight, and if you can't make it or county fairs just aren't your thing, there's plenty of festival happenings today around Los Angeles:Swerve Festival @ Barnsdall Park National Geographic's All Roads Film Festival Feast of San Genaro Italian Festival Abbot Kinney Festival Grand Avenue Festival West Hollywood Book Fair Just Lives Festival Santa Clarita Street Arts Festival Polska Parafia Bazaar SGV Greek Festival Nigerian Independence Day Celebration......

Monday Will Beall presents L.A. Rex 7pm @ Book Soup Robert Alter & Jonathan Kirsch discuss The Book of Psalms with David Ulin 7pm @ Central Library Mark Schapiro signs Exposed 7pm @ Dutton's Richard King presents Spirituality in the Workplace 7pm @ Vroman's Alan Alda presents Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself 7pm @ Borders, Westwood Tuesday Bill Clinton presents Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World 2pm @ Vroman's......

Crash Mansion, a live-music venue and nightclub owned by the Bowery Restaurant Group and located at 199 Bowery in New York City , is opening their Los Angeles outpost tonight. They have transformed Myron's Ballroom downtown into a club. We read that is has a capacity for 1200 guests, 5 bars and two stages. Bands that have performed in the New York venue include: Beyonce, Janet Jackson, Norah Jones, Joss Stone, Usher, Gavin DeGraw,......

Show Date: Tonight, Friday June 22nd, 2007 Venue: Grand Performances, California Plaza, 350 South Grand Avenue $0 @ 8:00 p.m. Artist:Ojo de Brujo Album: Techari + Techari Remixes Label: Six Degrees Records Barcelona-based flamenco-fusion-epxerimentalists Ojo de Brujo kick off their North American tour tonight in Los Angeles with a FREE concert at Grand Performances, California Plaza, 350 South Grand Avenue. This band of gypsy instrumentalists and DJs is touring in support of their most......

The new models for Frank Gehry's massive $900 million Grand Avenue project downtown have been unveiled. We're not sure that we dig them completely, but we're not sure that we don't. What do you think? Certainly more interesting than the bland FBI-ish towers he presented in the first round of design. While the project is progressing rather quickly since that announcement made two years ago by city officials, Gehry, and architect wanna-be Brad Pitt, there......

USC Free Culture is hosting a panel discussion this evening on reinvigorating Los Angeles' open space. What we can do with artistic expression, do-it-yourself technology and the public domain to preserve and enhance LA's 500 square miles of diverse culture before our greatest spaces are swallowed up by thinly veiled corporate interests? What type of “knowledge ecology” is possible in a city devoted to fame, celebrity and image? USC's Taper Hall, Rm 301 3501......

It's hard to find people as passionate about LA's underrated downtown as some of the folks at LAist, but we have to admit the readers of Los Angeles Downtown News might give us a run for our money in the downtown passion department. In particular a reader by the name of Frederick, who had a "glass half empty" response to the downtown BID's recently published (and very self-congratulating) 2006 Demographic Study of New Downtown......

Gentlemen (and real estate robber barons), start your engines! Today’s LA Times reports the city plans to sell 9 million square feet of unused air rights above the LA Convention Center to developers, and at the bargain basement price of $20 per square foot. For the unacquainted, air rights are what developers like Donald Trump usually have to quietly buy up in order to build a ginormous new tower. Turns out the land around......

I call it Performance Row. That stretch downtown along Grand Avenue between Temple St. and the California Plaza. You can easily walk between 9 performance spaces in 5 minutes. Starting at the Music Center Plaza at Temple and heading South, you first are at the Ahmanson, Center Theatre Group's (CTG) proscenium stage that is used for dance, musicals and other traditional performances. Next is the Mark Taper Forum, a theatre used for newer theatrical......

This time, we're not talking about USC fan woes or UCLA fans who got shot with rubber bullets. We're talking shootings with real bullets: Eagle Rock On Friday, December 1, 2006, at approximately 8:40 p.m., officers responded to the 4800 block of Wiota Street in Eagle Rock. Officers found Randy Duane Rogers’ lifeless body lying on the driveway. Paramedics made several attempts to resuscitate him but he had already died from his injuries. According......

If you see the LA City Council around any of these intersections, may we suggest that you honk if you're horny. According to CBS2, they've got the green light to put digital cams in 22 intersections and these 22 are on their radar. -- Griffin Avenue and North Main Street -- Beverly Boulevard and Western Avenue -- Broadway and Vernon Avenue -- Arlington Avenue and Venice Boulevard -- Balboa Boulevard and Vanowen Street --......

Eli Broad (with glasses) and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stand in front of one of the models of the new Grand Avenue at today's press conference. We admit, we are entranced by shiny, pretty things, and in this case that goes for things encased in translucent glass, too. We're talking about debut of the design of Grand Avenue, phase 1, by a team of architects led by superstar Frank Gehry. The design includes two towers, a......

a grand idea The LA Times gets a preview of the Frank Gehry design for the Grand Avenue development downtown, which will be unveiled at a press conference this morning. That's Gehry and partner Chris Webb in the photo above, with their model. remembering atrocities Today is Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day; from 1915-1917, about a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. A lecture about Germany's involvement in the mechanics of the genocide drew a......

Another step has been taken in transforming downtown with the Grand Avenue project. Now we're not sure we're going to get the technicalities of municipal development right, but as we read in the Daily News, an agreement to begin design on the park (see illustration) that will stretch from the Music Center to City Hall has been approved. A gallery of park proposals from the people has been put together by good-intentioned rabble-rousers at......

This is part two of our three part LAist Interview with the founders of the Fallen Fruit Project. Dave, Mathias and Austin fight for the betterment of Los Angeles on a number of fronts. In addition to their work with the Fallen Fruit Project, the collaborators submitted a proposal for an Endless Orchard to the Grand Intervention Grand Avenue park design competition organized by the Norman Lear Project and the Los Angeles Times. Dave......

Eric Lynxwiler is the Indiana Jones of Los Angeles. He braves hostile bureaucrats, crumbling building sites and dangerous junkyards to ferret out Los Angeles's lost treasures. Characterizing himself as an "urban anthropologist," Eric shares his knowledge of the city's past with those lucky enough to get a seat on one of his Museum of Neon Art’s Neon Cruises, a nighttime open-air bus tour of LA neon signs. Eric's latest research project is the book,......

Have company coming and lack the burning desire to prepare a feast in your own kitchen? Need an excuse to spend that holiday bonus check all in one place, just like everyone always told you not to? Or, are you going to be hungry this weekend? In any event, several LA restaurants have something going on Christmas Eve (or, "Saturday Night" for those who don't believe in Santa or the baby Jesus). Here's a......