Neighborhoods

When Laurel Canyon native Noah Stone went looking for a place to call his own last year, his thoughts first turned to Silver Lake and Atwater Village. But then Stone, 35, remembered an ad he had seen in Dwell magazine about a new part of downtown near the corner of Industrial and Mateo streets, where a couple of old industrial buildings had been converted into lofts. There, he found the Biscuit Co.

When Richard Nixon made San Clemente his western White House, the late satirist Art Hoppe described the population as "15,000 conservative Republicans, 2,000 surfers, five poor people [and] roughly the same number of liberal Democrats." That was in 1972; today the population is 65,000 or so and it's possible they've chased off the last of the poor people and the liberals. As a matter of politics and philosophy, San Clemente has long been friendly to business, to growth, to builders.

She'd tell him, time and again: Don't walk at night. The place has changed. It's not safe. They'd been married, though, for 44 years. After a certain point, it wasn't really a conversation; it was like a song they'd played a thousand times, enjoyed more for routine than anything else. "Ne perezhivaitye," he'd tell her. "Don't worry." He left their little apartment in West Hollywood at 9 p.m.

There were seven wakes. Seven funerals. For nine days in a row, residents of this town of nearly 2,000 wore the same suits and black dresses each day, and carefully hung them up at night to wear again the next. They all knew -- or were related to -- the six young people slain here at a homecoming house party in October, a fusillade of violence that changed this logging town forever.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa ordered a comprehensive report Monday to find out why illegally dumped refuse has been allowed to sit for weeks in alleys in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. "The mayor's view is that people should not have to wait for weeks to have trash picked up," said Gil Duran, a spokesman for Villaraigosa, who was traveling in Israel.

In the wake of a Times report that illegal trash dumping is plaguing some of Los Angeles' poorest neighborhoods, state officials announced Tuesday that they would give the city a $500,000 grant to help crack down on violators in the hardest-hit areas. The grant, from the California Integrated Waste Management Board, will help fund a special enforcement zone in South Los Angeles, where about half of the illegally dumped refuse in the city is discarded.

On the West Side of San Bernardino, most everyone knew Johnny and Gilbert Agudo. They'd grown up in the tight-knit barrio. Handsome and charismatic, they were the presidents of two cliques of the West Side Verdugo street gang: Johnny, 31, of 7th Street Locos and Gilbert, 27, of the Little Counts. United, they led their gangs in feuds with rivals from other parts of town. But then things took an unexpected turn.

When this city declared the aging Bohemian Hill neighborhood blighted and opened the door to the possibility of using eminent domain to redevelop it, social activist Jim Roos decided to protest in a big way. He hired an artist to paint a two-story-high mural on the outside of a duplex, turning a late-1800s brick facade into a massive declaration of outrage easily spotted from the city's major arteries.

French Park, a residential neighborhood northeast of downtown Santa Ana, is an architectural wonderland -- a place where historic homes are spared the wrecking ball or given a safe haven. Built from the late 1890s through the 1920s by some of Orange County's most prominent movers and shakers, the community has a cornucopia of home styles, including Victorian, Craftsman, Colonial Revival, English Tudor and Spanish Colonial Revival.

ANTIQUE STORES and thrift shops rule Magnolia Boulevard -- the main artery of Burbank's Magnolia Park neighborhood -- but that doesn't mean the area is stuck in a dusty past. Founded in 1923, the quarter roughly bounded by Hollywood Way on the west and Buena Vista Street on the east still has Eisenhower-era storefronts, ranch-style homes dating to the 1940s and a small-town feel unblemished by chains and big-box stores.