Car Culture

In Paris, women clutch flirtatious little Chanel bags, so small they hold next to nothing. In New York, they take the opposite tack, lugging mega-tote bags that bend their backs into Quasimodo crouches, so they can keep their subway reading, gym clothes and other such sundries close at hand. But in Los Angeles, women breeze around town carrying nothing except a set of keys. That's because the quintessential California purse comes with four wheels and a trunk.

Ladies and gentlemen, don't start your engines… On Sunday, a city heralded for its car culture will turn its attention to bicycles as some 100,000 people hit the streets of Los Angeles for the sixth CicLAvia, an event that invites people to see the city from a different perspective. Fifteen miles of streets from downtown to Venice will be closed to motorized vehicles. A map of the route showing crossings open to cars is at www.CicLAvia.org . Between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. the bicycle will be kind of the road.

The Automobile Club of Southern California will sponsor an exhibition of vintage outdoor camping trailers and equipment June 10 at Hearst Castle in San Simeon. The Auto Club, in the midst of a yearlong centennial celebration, has been instrumental in promoting travel and tourism since its first maps were issued in 1908. The exhibition will feature photographs from club archives on early camping gear and two vintage camping trailers.

Hot Rod Homecoming is a love letter to the pompadoured car culture of SoCal. Gas your finest Impalas for a full slate of classic-car events and showcases celebrating Hot Rod Magazine's 65th anniversary of paying homage to chrome and tail fins. Pomona Fairplex, 1101 W McKinley Ave., Pomona. Sat.-Sun. Hotrod.com .

Representatives from 11 specialty auto car equipment companies based in California are traveling to Dubai this weekend, hoping to export some of the state's signature car culture products to new markets in the Middle East. Most of the companies are manufacturers of specialty equipment designed to boost the performance of stock cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles. Some of the products enhance the experience of owning a car. Others help protect them. The companies are Coverking, located in Anaheim, EBay Motors of San Jose, Gibson Performance Exhaust of Corona, Injen Technology of Pomona K&N Engineering Inc. of Riverside, and McLeod Racing of Placentia.

There is something reassuring about Michael Chapman's paintings and watercolors on view at Tatistcheff Gallery. Maybe it's because they depict ordinary things for which many of us hold fond associations: old-fashioned cars and lampposts, toy trains and boats, cute little dogs. Yet, at the same time, there is a noir quality to these highly stylized, spare landscapes and interior scenes that makes them all the more enticing. "They seem authentic.

The 2007 Rodeo Drive Concours d'Elegance on June 17 will honor "Cars of California," celebrating the art of the state's car culture and elite design, with vehicles exemplifying the spirit of California in some way. More than 100 private owners are expected to exhibit their vehicles, from convertibles to woodies. The Father's Day event will also honor Fisker Coachbuild, known for creating one-of-a-kind coach-built cars. Among the cars on hand will be the Latigo CS V10.

LONDON, WHEN I lived there, smelled of wet concrete, diesel fumes and fish and chips. My neighborhood now smells of cut grass, alyssum, jasmine and just the faintest whiff of creosote. Only walkers know this, of course. If you drive through in your car, you don't notice the smells. There's a lot you don't notice. The flock of green feral parrots, for example, hooting as they loop from one palm tree to another.

TO GET YOUR "bow-tie baby" (slang for Chevy) all spruced up and ready for cruising, you needn't scour salvage yards; just contact Danchuk Manufacturing, specialists in reproduction parts for the mid-'50s classics. Art and Dan Danchuk have expanded their line to include thousands of parts for 1955, '56 and '57 Chevrolets as well as a selection of parts for muscle cars, such as the 1964 to 1972 Chevelles and El Caminos.

Saturday night cruising in Jean Patton's Balboa Peninsula neighborhood used to be so bad that a trip to the grocery store meant getting out her old three-speed bicycle and pedaling alongside the rows of idling cars that clogged Balboa Boulevard. "I could never get my car through that gridlock. It would take an hour to go five blocks," Patton said. "The cruising was terrible. You had all these kids in their cars honking horns, shouting, cranking up the music. . . . It was the summer ritual."

Ford Motor Co. has announced a recall of some 230,000 older minivans in the U.S. and other countries to fix a corrosion problem that could prevent the fold-down third-row seats from locking in place. The automaker says the recall in the U.S. includes 196,500 Ford Freestar and Mercury Monterey minivans from model years 2004 through 2007. The U.S. recall only involves minivans that were sold and registered in the 20 so-called salt-belt states and the District of Columbia, where salt is regularly applied to roads during the colder months to impede icing.

Representatives from 11 specialty auto car equipment companies based in California are traveling to Dubai this weekend, hoping to export some of the state's signature car culture products to new markets in the Middle East. Most of the companies are manufacturers of specialty equipment designed to boost the performance of stock cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles. Some of the products enhance the experience of owning a car. Others help protect them. The companies are Coverking, located in Anaheim, EBay Motors of San Jose, Gibson Performance Exhaust of Corona, Injen Technology of Pomona K&N Engineering Inc. of Riverside, and McLeod Racing of Placentia.

On any Saturday afternoon, the unlikely mix of exotic coupes, vintage woodies and electric cars sharing Pacific Coast Highway makes clear why Southern California is the center of U.S. car culture. A similarly diverse array of machinery has made the Los Angeles Auto Show the premier stage for both cutting-edge green cars and sportier offerings designed to carve up that famous coastal road. This year's show, the first North American showcase of the model year, starts Wednesday for the media and opens to the public Friday at the downtown convention center.

About this series The boulevards of L.A., long dominated by the car culture, are gradually being remade to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists and urban street life. This is the third in a series of occasional articles about this transformation. latimes.com/boulevards An interactive map, photos and videos narrated by Christopher Hawthorne are available online.

FRESNO - What is old, and even older, will unite to return a roadside attraction in the shape of a giant orange to Highway 99. The San Joaquin Valley Paleontology Foundation, which runs the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County, has won a bid to rescue the Mammoth Orange food stand from where it sat rotting in a Chowchilla city storage yard. The Fossil Discovery Center is across the street from the largest deposit of fossils on the West Coast, according to the center's website.

Go ahead, play in the street. So say organizers of CicLAvia , an event Sunday that allows bicyclists, skateboarders, pedestrians and rollerbladers — second-class citizens in this car-dependent city — to dominate nearly eight miles of Los Angeles' streets. The ciclovia, which means bicycle path in Spanish, began in Bogota, Colombia, several decades ago in response to pollution and street congestion. Instead of driving elsewhere for entertainment, residents were invited to use the street as their playground.

On my last subway trip, five years ago in New York, people around me loudly snapped gum with irritating indifference. Even now, five years later, I can still smell the odor of sweat, old sneakers and cigarettes wafting through the stuffy New York train. As a former fan of mass transit--an L.A. native who didn't learn to drive until age 21--I spent years crisscrossing the city on buses and wishing for a subway. But the New York experience soured me on public transportation.

Introducing CulverLand ? for a limited time only. This newest attraction won't be confused with Disneyland, but it accomplishes the unlikely: creating a reason to celebrate Southern California traffic. Both artwork and game, CulverLand occupies an 18-by-90-foot stretch of unfinished sidewalk in front of the Culver Hotel in Culver City. Colored squares mark a rectangular path, with rules that riff on SoCal car culture and Candy Land, a child's game in which players advance by drawing cards of different colors.

The news that New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has finally, officially been named architect of the new Broad Collection museum in downtown Los Angeles proves a couple of things quite clearly. One is that in a design competition as constrained and carefully controlled as the one Eli Broad has been running, a few big conceptual ideas dramatically presented — rather than an inventive treatment of a building's shape — can go a long way. Another is that a little flattery never hurts.