West Hollywood Ca

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's no conniving Amanda Woodward -- Heather Locklear's "Melrose Place" character -- in the building. Not yet, anyway. But residents of the Rob Clark, a new condo conversion in West Hollywood, say life there often imitates the campy '90s TV show where the overwrought dramas of successful, wildly attractive twentysomethings played out inside an L.A. apartment complex.

It was supposed to be a no-frills, no-fuss affair: Just a quick wedding and then get on with the day. Trying to avoid crowds in West Hollywood, Bill Walker, 51, and Kelly Ziegler, 40, hit the Airport Courthouse to get their license. They brought their children -- Elizabeth, 7, and James, 2. It was Walker's second same-sex marriage -- although the first was fictitious. Once a writer for the TV sitcom "Roseanne," he wrote what he said was the first gay wedding on TV.

As construction workers laid steel posts from which a bright red building will rise at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, architect Cesar Pelli inspected the progress and talked about how buildings had changed since the great Blue Whale first went up in the 1970s. Even the new structure's color -- a blaring, fire-engine red -- would have been a shock in those days, when most buildings were modernist and spare.

Back in 1966, the Sunset Strip was at the heart of the counter-culture music scene when the problems started. The famed row of nightclubs and hotels was hit by what became known as the "Sunset Strip Riots," when hundreds of young people waving "We're Your Children! Don't Destroy Us" and "Ban the Billy Club" signs protested a police-imposed curfew and anti-loitering laws.

A publicist who helped advance the careers of Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag -- the reality TV couple renowned for their courting of tabloid coverage -- got into a fistfight with paparazzi Saturday over their tactics in pursuit of celebrities in his West Hollywood neighborhood. Sheriff's deputies were summoned. One photographer went to the hospital. But there were no charges. Except irony.

A plan to turn a West Hollywood landmark into a $6-million senior citizens home suffered a setback Thursday when the state Supreme Court ruled that officials failed to follow proper procedures in evaluating the project's effect on the environment. City leaders have sought for some five years to use the leafy Laurel Avenue estate that locals call "Tara" for affordable housing. Critics contend that the place should be used as a public park and community center.

The Body Shop, a landmark strip club famed for giving Sunset Boulevard nude dancing and hundreds of struggling actresses work, was shuttered Wednesday after a dawn fire burned through its roof. A cleaning crew discovered smoke billowing from a side door of the West Hollywood building when they arrived at 6:45 a.m. No one was inside when the blaze began in the attic, the owner said. The kitchen, dressing room and office were seriously damaged.

Patients of a West Hollywood dermatologist became unwitting guinea pigs for an experimental drug when the doctor began secretly injecting them with an unapproved substitute for Botox, federal authorities allege. Dr. David Cary Hansen was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles in connection with an alleged scheme to treat patients with an experimental form of the popular wrinkle reducer that was labeled "Not for Human Use."

To paraphrase Clark Gable in "Gone With the Wind": Frankly, my dear, they didn't give a damn. That's the view of the state Court of Appeal on how West Hollywood officials acted when residents tried to protest a plan to turn a residential landmark nicknamed "Tara" into a 35-unit senior housing complex. Justices ruled Feb. 21 that city officials brushed aside locals' objections to the redevelopment project by obtaining federal funding for it before required public hearings were held.