West Hollywood Ca

There was a booth selling Salvadoran pupusas a few steps away from one promoting adoption. Around the corner were lemonade stands, nestled a few feet away by a strip of kiosks educating the public about sexually transmitted diseases. And counselors talking to a young man about avoiding domestic violence rivaled dance music for his attention. That was the scene Saturday at the L.A.

For 50 years, the old box of documents collected dust in Twyla Martin's West Hollywood garage. She knew the cursive scribblings on stacks of crumbling, sepia-toned pages had something to do with Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, but never looked. In the 1950s, her husband, producer Ernest H. Martin, had briefly worked with Steinbeck, a longtime friend. Martin died in 1995, and after moving the box to a hallway closet, his widow finally peeked inside.

When you mingle with the beautiful and the well-appointed on the west side of Los Angeles and you discover that your dog's nape has run amok, there are choices to be made. "I mean, really," said Jeannie Hayden, 45, a Studio City illustrator and author, kneeling in the grass to bundle up the unusually large pile of extra skin atop her dog Chiclet's back and neck. "There's enough for a whole new dog here. We thought about giving her a lift."

The girl in the glass tank at the Standard lobby is looking needy. When the boutique hotel opened a decade ago, quickly becoming a hipster haven on the Sunset Strip, everyone talked about the models in the see-through box -- a sort of immobile go-go girl who could always be counted on to be too cool to acknowledge the presence of people outside her rectangular world.

Most everyone who has been to West Hollywood knows the "Blue Whale," that huge blue glass office building that opened at the Pacific Design Center in 1975. And you can't forget its bright green neighbor that came along in 1988. Now it's time for the red one -- really red, like a new Ferrari. Today, the $160-million office building starts to take shape with renowned architect Cesar Pelli on hand as decades of plans and dreams and skepticism give way to the formal groundbreaking.

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.

The driver of the Dodge pickup honked angrily at the double-parked Lexus SUV that blocked his way. He yelled an obscenity, gunned the truck and swerved into the oncoming lane, only to have to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting two women who were jaywalking in front of him as they nibbled from cups of frozen dessert. He honked and yelled again. One of the jaywalkers flipped him off as the pair ambled on to the sports car they had left sitting, illegally, beneath a no-parking sign.

The former West Hollywood headquarters of noted architect Charles Luckman was sold Wednesday for a near-record price per square foot in Los Angeles County, accentuating a run-up in local office values over the last few years. Los Angeles-based Mani Bros. Real Estate Group bought two Sunset Boulevard office buildings on the eastern border of Beverly Hills for undisclosed terms, said Chief Executive Simon Mani.

THE BEST TIME TO WALK around my West Hollywood neighborhood is at dusk, that magic hour of clear, soft light that Los Angeles is known for. Lawrence Weschler talks about it in a wonderful New Yorker essay on L.A. light that was anthologized in "Writing Los Angeles." He describes how he watched the O.J. car chase on TV in New York and cried -- not because of O.J.

Forget the bikini-clad musclemen waving from floats gaily draped in rainbow colors. Never mind the burly guys bouncing down the street in frilly pompom-girl costumes and flouncy wigs or the tight leather shorts worn by the beefcake bikers. West Hollywood's annual gay pride parade needs to be seriously beefed up. That's the conclusion of community and civic leaders who grumble that the 35-year-old salute to gay rights has become predictable and dull -- dare we say it?