California Landmarks

When his hot-air balloon with "God Is Love" emblazoned on the side succumbed to desert rot, Leonard Knight knew he needed a better way to spread the good news. So he decided to paint a few biblical phrases on a hilly mound near the broken truck he calls home in a gravelly and desolate Imperial County squatters' encampment known as Slab City. That was seven years ago. Knight, 62, has been painting brightly colored religious messages and soothing pastoral scenes ever since.

You knew this was coming. Now that Californians have approved Proposition 30 to temporarily raise sales and income taxes, and now that voters have elected a supermajority of Democrats in the Assembly and the state Senate, a lawmaker has introduced a bill to require only 55% voter approval rather than the current two-thirds margin to adopt parcel taxes to pay for local schools. Advocates of Los Angeles County's Measure J, a sales tax extension for transportation funding, are frustrated that they fell just short of the required two-thirds in November, and they also are discussing a change to 55%, perhaps just for transportation sales taxes, or perhaps more broadly.

The millions of Americans tuned into the Academy Awards next month will be hit with a sophisticated new advertising campaign urging them to visit Hollywood and other California landmarks to bolster the Golden State's sagging tourism industry. In the new state-sponsored campaign, TV audiences from New England to the Northwest will see samples of the energy of Los Angeles, the romance of San Francisco and the diverse recreational attractions of San Diego.

With anticipation building for the space shuttle Endeavour's Southern California flyover, NASA officials are postponing the takeoff by one hour Friday morning because of fog in San Francisco. The delay will "give us a better chance of having the fog burn off," NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center said in a tweet. The new schedule calls for Endeavour to take off from Edwards Air Force Base in northern Los Angeles County at 8:15 a.m. instead of 7:15 a.m. That means Endeavour would fly over the Capitol in Sacramento at about 9:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m., before flying over San Francisco and Monterey.

For 33 years, David Engholm has had an unrequited love affair. And now the love of his life is sinking off the coast of Baja California. Engholm is enamored with the SS Catalina, a Great White Steamer that plowed the channel between San Pedro and Santa Catalina Island for more than 50 years until 1975. After a series of legal battles and failed business ventures, the 301-foot Catalina ended up in the Port of Ensenada, where it began sinking late last year. Now 50% of it is underwater.

HUSBAND-AND-WIFE AUTHOR TEAM KRISTAN LAWSON and Anneli Rufus are betting that your visiting aunt is less interested in historical monuments than the corner where Hugh Grant and Divine Brown conducted their business. The Bay Area couple's new "California Babylon: A Guide to Sites of Scandal, Mayhem and Celluloid in the Golden State" (St.

Little Lake Lodge, a landmark on U. S. 395 for Mammoth-bound skiers and other travelers to the Eastern Sierra, was gutted by a blaze that burned through the night, fire officials said Tuesday. Most of the interior of the 69-year-old, three-story structure was destroyed, said Capt. Fred Stump of the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. But the lodge's concrete and rock outer frame remains intact, he said.

A four-alarm fire has destroyed a Santa Rosa landmark, the Huntington House. The home, on the city's one-time Millionaires Row, was unoccupied and no injuries were reported, fire officials said. The blaze apparently started in the basement of the house, built in the 1850s, then rapidly spread up the walls and into the attic, Battalion Chief Carl Goodson said. The pre-Victorian house on Mendocino Avenue was being considered for designation as a historical landmark by both the city and the state.

Just east of Century City, the apartment house at the corner of Vidor and Beverly Green drives appears unassuming enough. On two sides, the faded white paint on the walls is obscured by a dense fence of foliage. From the courtyard, the view is of green corrugated plastic and unadorned steel beams. By Jan. 31, the last three tenants must leave so the building can be razed and a new condo complex constructed. They will not go willingly; they have been comfortable.

To halt a competing project near USC, Conquest Student Housing turned to a legal weapon that one of its co-owners allegedly compared to a crude bomb: cheap and destructive. Conquest owned 17 buildings that rented to USC students. When the developer Urban Partners proposed erecting a new complex to house 1,600 students, Conquest sued under California's landmark environmental law. It then filed similar challenges to unrelated Urban Partners projects elsewhere in the state. Conquest withdrew its challenges only after Urban Partners filed a federal racketeering lawsuit.

Nearly 40,000 acres of Orange County parkland stretching from the coast to the foothills -- once part of the historic Irvine Ranch -- has been deemed so ecologically valuable by state officials that on Tuesday they designated it the first California Natural Landmark. The program is designed to recognize significant open space areas by placing them in a statewide registry. Although the designation is only a title -- it does not require the land to be permanently protected or opened to the public -- officials hope the attention it brings will encourage long-term preservation.

A Fusion of Tastes. Thursday (19th century California cooking), April 17 (landmark Hollywood restaurants) and May 15 (modern California cuisine). 7 to 9 p.m. Autry National Center, Griffith Park Campus, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles. Series tickets $70 for members, $100 nonmembers; individual lecture tickets $30 for members, $40 nonmembers. For information and tickets, call (323) 667-2000, Ext. 300, or visit www.autrynationalcenter.org.

If ethnic relations in Los Angeles seem tense now, it is enlightening to know how much worse they were in the segregated, racist L.A. of post-World War II, when Jesse M. Unruh, an overweight, angry GI Bill vet, enrolled at the University of Southern California. Eventually, Unruh went on to hold state political offices and, for a time, was the most powerful politician in California. He was part of a generation of visionaries that included former governors Earl Warren and Edmund G. Brown Sr.

Kate Kennelly recalls the morning she looked at herself in the mirror, confronted the stress-induced age lines, and finally admitted that she hated her job. As a product liability attorney, the 33-year-old had come to despise the tedious 18-hour days, what she called the "conflict and drudgery of the legal profession." So she shed the shackles of lawyerdom and went to prison instead: Alcatraz, in its heyday the most notorious penitentiary on American soil.

HUSBAND-AND-WIFE AUTHOR TEAM KRISTAN LAWSON and Anneli Rufus are betting that your visiting aunt is less interested in historical monuments than the corner where Hugh Grant and Divine Brown conducted their business. The Bay Area couple's new "California Babylon: A Guide to Sites of Scandal, Mayhem and Celluloid in the Golden State" (St.

This vision has consumed half a life, so far, but John Olmsted isn't about to pack it in. For three decades, the gray-bearded naturalist has plotted and pleaded, begged and borrowed, told anyone who bothered to listen about his dream. Olmsted wants the state to establish a heritage trail across California's midsection. His reasoning is simple.

Huell Howser, the host of KCET's "California's Gold," lost his final bid in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday to prevent the Long Beach Naval Station from being demolished and turned into new cargo terminals. Judge Peter J. Lichtman dismissed Howser's lawsuit against the state Lands Commission, which the TV personality claimed was wasting public assets by allowing Long Beach to destroy historic structures on the naval base.