La Brea

The seekers went back into Pit 91 Wednesday, digging through the asphalt for treasures large and small. Since 1969, scientists and volunteers have been removing the remains of extinct ground sloths, saber-toothed cats and many smaller Ice Age fossils from Pit 91, one of the still-oozing La Brea tar pits in Hancock Park. The dig has been an annual summer event since 1984, the only excavation of its kind in the United States.

Methane or no methane, fossils or no fossils, workers have begun readying the site of an $8-million, four-story parking structure beneath the park that surrounds the La Brea tar pits. They have daubed red blobs of paint to mark several dozen trees that are to be taken out to make way for the excavation, but county officials said Hancock Park will be restored once construction is complete sometime next year. Landscaped to look like a big bump in the grass behind the George C.

It's a good thing Nancy Silverton still has her day job. The La Brea Bakery founder and queen of L.A.'s restaurant scene is among the legions of investors who've lost their fortunes in the alleged $50-billion fraud attributed to New York financier Bernard L. Madoff. The financial pain is bad enough, Silverton says, but what makes it worse is that she ignored the advice of her father and others who warned her to diversify her investments.

The originals of world-famous contemporary art--paintings that have been reproduced thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times--are hanging on the walls of a new gallery on La Brea. Unless you have children, you probably have never seen them. The Every Picture Tells A Story gallery deals exclusively in art from contemporary children's books.

Something strange is happening on La Brea Avenue. Here and there, in between the car lots and synagogues that occupy large chunks of this classic Los Angeles thoroughfare, people are out walking the street--and having a surprisingly good time. "I feel like I'm in SoHo or the Left Bank," said Bel-Air resident Jani Baldridge, who was wending through the shops along the wide avenue on a recent afternoon, as the taped voice of a French chanteuse drifted from one of the businesses.

To accelerate its national expansion plans, Los Angeles bread maker La Brea Bakery has agreed to be acquired by Irish food giant IAWS Group for $55 million. The deal would give La Brea Bakery, a local institution among food lovers, the capital and expertise to build a production plant in Philadelphia and expand further along the East Coast, said Philip Shaw, the company's chief operating officer.

Despite the rich abundance of animal life in California 30,000 years ago, a predator's life on Wilshire Boulevard apparently was no picnic. Pickings were so lean in prehistoric Los Angeles that the lions, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves who formed the local lunch rush in the eons before fast-food fajitas and buffalo wings literally broke their teeth in the fierce scramble for the catch of the day, a new study by two UCLA researchers shows.

Take the path behind the Los Angeles County Museum, past the "psychic cats" (whose owner claims they can predict the future), past the outdoor jugglers, musicians and mimes, and you'll find life as it was lived 40,000 years BC (Before Canter's) at Wilshire and Fairfax. The George C. Page Museum is filled with oddly endearing skeletal remains of creatures that once roamed the streets where we live--and that had a much more limited choice of cuisine. They ate each other.

It all started, as often happens, with a restaurant. Having helped turn Melrose Avenue from a lackluster strip of boarded-up storefronts and furniture refinishers into a funky, neon-lit retailing mecca, the co-owners of City Cafe set their sights on unproven territory on nearby La Brea.

Xtra Heat may be the fastest 3-year-old filly in the country, but Affluent is easily the most versatile. A chestnut daughter of Affirmed owned and bred by Janis Whitham and trained by Ron McAnally, Affluent now has a Grade I win on dirt to go along with another on turf after her come-from-behind victory in the $200,000 La Brea Stakes Saturday at Santa Anita.