Palos Verdes Estates Ca

For three months and 12 days, the video camera panned the waves that peel across one of Palos Verdes' most popular surf spots, displaying the images over the Internet and beckoning anyone who saw them to visit the beach. The "surf cam" was the police chief's idea. He thought that if it were trained on the beach it would help deter fights that had been breaking out between local surfers fiercely protective of their turf and outsiders brazen enough to crash the beach.

A Palos Verdes Estates woman who upset neighbors by renting out her 7,000-square-foot house for weddings, film shoots and other large gatherings, including an art and furniture auction, pleaded no contest Friday to creating a public nuisance. Melahat Uzumcu was sentenced to three years' informal probation and fined $500. She is not allowed to rent the home for commercial purposes and must give the city 72 hours notice if more than 50 people visit her at once. Uzumcu was charged with four misdemeanors before agreeing to a plea with the city prosecutor.

Besieged Rancho Palos Verdes officials have decided to fly the pied piper of peacocks from Iowa to give angry residents advice on how to live with screaming, flower-eating and ever-multiplying peafowl. Nearby Palos Verdes Estates officials are also contending with residents upset about peacocks and peahens. But their efforts to round up birds and ship them to better homes have been met by angry confrontations between police and bird lovers determined to prevent the trappings.

In Palos Verdes Estates, where the first home builders 80 years ago had to pass muster before an "art jury," it came as little surprise when city fathers nixed wireless telecommunications contraptions that would clash with the community's carefully nurtured ambience and obstruct ocean vistas. "When you move to a community, you want cell coverage, but you also want beauty and aesthetics," said attorney Scott J. Grossberg, who helped the city wage a legal battle against Sprint. Earlier this month, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the seaside community, ruling that city officials could bar the construction of unsightly cellular towers.

The question is whether Melahat Uzumcu will have to move from her big house, to the other big house. Uzumcu's 7,000-square-foot house in Palos Verdes Estates sits on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with a view of the South Bay laid out in front of it. There are seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and floors custom made with wood from Brazil. The bathrooms have granite tile and marble counters. There are three fireplaces and three living rooms. Two life-size statues guard the front door.

The squawking continues over the peacocks in Palos Verdes Estates. Some residents are fond of the birds, which roam freely over parts of two neighborhoods in the upscale, semirural community. Others detest their shrill cries in the night, their appetites for flower beds and the messes they deposit on lawns and cars.

In Palos Verdes Estates, where the first home builders 80 years ago had to pass muster before an "art jury," it came as little surprise when city fathers nixed wireless telecommunications contraptions that would clash with the community's carefully nurtured ambience and obstruct ocean vistas. "When you move to a community, you want cell coverage, but you also want beauty and aesthetics," said attorney Scott J. Grossberg, who helped the city wage a legal battle against Sprint. Earlier this month, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the seaside community, ruling that city officials could bar the construction of unsightly cellular towers.

Peacocks may be aesthetically pleasing, but the birds are anything but pleasant to live with, according to some disgruntled residents in Palos Verdes Estates. Now a judge has sided with those residents, ordering the removal of more than 40 peafowl wandering two neighborhoods. "The peafowl have been very disruptive. They keep us awake at night," said Bill Goldman, a 15-year Espinosa Circle resident and plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city.

Whoever buys this Palos Verdes bluff estate had better like Flora, because she could be here for the long haul. She weighs 240 pounds and would be a challenge to move. Flora, a large marble bust carved in France during the 1700s, is among the artwork that's part and parcel of this 2002 estate. Another is a courtyard statue that the home seller had carved to look like one in a Naples museum.

Construction has begun on a memorial to two Palos Verdes Estates police officers who were gunned down during a botched robbery attempt in a Torrance hotel last year. Volunteers have begun grading a small area across from City Hall where the memorial will be built. It will honor Capt. Mike Tracy and Sgt. Tom Vanderpool, who were killed at the Holiday Inn on Hawthorne Boulevard on Feb. 14, 1994. So far, private donors have contributed about $75,000 to the memorial, city officials said.

The question is whether Melahat Uzumcu will have to move from her big house, to the other big house. Uzumcu's 7,000-square-foot house in Palos Verdes Estates sits on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with a view of the South Bay laid out in front of it. There are seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and floors custom made with wood from Brazil. The bathrooms have granite tile and marble counters. There are three fireplaces and three living rooms. Two life-size statues guard the front door.

Police responding to a call Monday from a woman injured after she drove over a cliff in Palos Verdes Estates discovered the body of a man killed in a separate incident, authorities said. The man was not identified, but he was described as white and nearly 40 years old. Authorities, who found his body about noon, said it appeared as though he had died in recent days. Police said they were trying to determine whether the man had jumped or accidentally fallen down the cliff.

Whoever buys this Palos Verdes bluff estate had better like Flora, because she could be here for the long haul. She weighs 240 pounds and would be a challenge to move. Flora, a large marble bust carved in France during the 1700s, is among the artwork that's part and parcel of this 2002 estate. Another is a courtyard statue that the home seller had carved to look like one in a Naples museum.

At least two of the five peacocks found dead in Palos Verdes Estates were poisoned, the city's Police Department announced Tuesday. A necropsy of the two birds concluded that they had eaten food laced with diazinon, according to separate releases put out by the police and by the community organization Friends of the Peacock. The exotic peafowl have long roamed the streets of the city but not without provoking controversy and even a lawsuit.

It's mating season for the colorful peafowl of Palos Verdes Estates. But instead of advancing the species, some of the exotic birds are turning up dead. Five lifeless birds have been discovered in the city since Jan. 23, and no one has been able to figure out who or what is killing them. Laboratory tests have ruled out disease, and residents who have found the dead birds said they don't appear to have any physical injuries.

A knife-wielding teenager's attack on her younger sister was the only act of felony violence in Palos Verdes Estates last year, easily ranking the coastal community as the least violent city with a population of 10,000 or more in California.

You can call them cliff dwellers, because Vickie Terry and her cousin, Robin Christian, hold their kaffeeklatsches perched like eagles on the tops of cliffs. They started 23 years ago. They used to convene once a month on the bluffs near Point Mugu, looking out over the ocean while they discussed their families, their childhoods, events in the news--anything, really. Now that Terry lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., it is tougher to maintain the tradition, but they try when they can.

One's home may be one's castle, but in Palos Verdes Estates, it's one's neighbors who reign over that castle's size and shape. This control has been honed over eight decades, since the meticulously planned community emerged on the hillsides of southwestern Los Angeles County. So entrenched is neighborhood resolve to preserve the country ambience and sweeping vistas that the Palos Verdes Estates Homes Assn.

La Venta Inn, a Mediterranean-style villa with a 53-foot watchtower overlooking Santa Monica Bay, began as a sales tool for one of Los Angeles' wealthiest areas, the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Despite its posh surroundings -- and a glamorous connection to the Hollywood crowd in the 1930s and '40s -- this historic landmark owes its existence to a con artist and felon. Edward Gardner Lewis was a visionary, though. Newspapers of the era described him as "the man who dreamed in $50-million figures."