Preservationists

Los Angeles is gradually losing its priceless trove of Craftsman and other architecturally significant homes. The exteriors are generally safe; many are protected under the city's Cultural Heritage Ordinance, which requires property owners to wait six months to a year before getting a permit to demolish or significantly alter their buildings. That gives owners time to come to their senses -- and to realize that their historic homes are worth far more to them, and to potential buyers, intact.

It's safe to say that billionaire investor Charles T. Munger's idea of historic preservation does not jibe with the Los Angeles Conservancy's. At the site of the Barry Building, the mid-century modern landmark on San Vicente Boulevard that for years housed Dutton's bookstore, he envisions a bustling new Brentwood Town Green filled with restaurants and shops. To get there, Munger proposes to raze the building, put parking below, then construct a two-story complex in the same style but three times the size of the original.

Gap founder Donald Fisher assembled a collection of some of the best contemporary art from the last 50 years and decided he wanted to build a museum for it in the heart of the Presidio, a historic landmark and national park. After a two-year battle with preservationists, Fisher, 80, abandoned that ambition last month.

Moviegoers in the 1960s and '70s flocked to Westwood Village, where they had their pick of first-run films on nearly 20 screens. With parking scarce, patrons stashed their cars at the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard and took shuttles into the village. A-list celebrities turned out for frequent splashy openings. The occasional premiere still brings red carpets and klieg lights, but the neighborhood near UCLA is no longer the movie hub it once was.

Ah, summer at Coney Island: Carnies beckoning passersby to try their luck shooting the freak. Wild screams coming from the Cyclone coaster. Elephants taking on humans to see who can eat the most hot dog buns.

Preservationists and developers are wrangling over the future of an abandoned theater in East Los Angeles that represents a Spanish-baroque style rarely found in the city. Activists, developers and local business people presented two starkly different visions this week of what could be done with the abandoned Golden Gate Theater near Whittier and Atlantic boulevards.

Minutes after their return from the moon in 1969, the three Apollo 11 astronauts gazed out the window of their isolation chamber as President Nixon welcomed them home and invited them to a state dinner in their honor. The setting would be a magnificent ballroom in the Century Plaza hotel in "Los Angeles' space-age Century City complex," as the Los Angeles Times described it.

The bridges that span the Los Angeles River offer a history lesson of how Los Angeles became a modern city. There's the Cesar Chavez Bridge, with its colossal porticoes, embellished with spiral columns and a replica of the city seal. The bridge, decorated with elements of the Spanish Baroque style, is an architectural nod to the historic El Camino Real, of which it is a part, and to the city's Spanish heritage.

Long before Santa Monica Canyon became prime real estate for successful Angelenos, it served as a serene resting place for some of the area's early and prominent landowners. In the late 1840s, Francisco Marquez, the Mexican co-holder of the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica land grant given by his government, established a burial ground on the canyon's wide-open upper mesa.