img_1654

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/glazed-silver-lake/"></div><p>What’s more honest than glass? It swept cities like a moral revolution with modernism, a century ago now. Land of natural luminosity! Air and light! Hygiene! Transparency! <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/glazed-silver-lake/#more-3220" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/glazed-silver-lake/"></div>

Glazed Over in Silver Lake

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/century-plaza-hotel-50-years-leisure/"></div><p>$2.5 billion, it will cost, to turn this hotel into another hotel. To reimagine leisure. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/century-plaza-hotel-50-years-leisure/#more-3067" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/century-plaza-hotel-50-years-leisure/"></div>

The Century Plaza Hotel: 50 Years of Leisure

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/wondrous-immensely-bizarre-olive-5th-downtown-la/"></div><p><strong>13.7 billion years ago: </strong>Silent, but meltingly loud. From nothing, the possibility of movement. Rushing to the outside of what can be, eternally, which began a second ago. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/wondrous-immensely-bizarre-olive-5th-downtown-la/#more-2989" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/wondrous-immensely-bizarre-olive-5th-downtown-la/"></div>

Wondrous and Immensely Bizarre at Olive and 5th, Downtown LA

1-3-construction

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/disgust-glendale/"></div><p>Under the ground there’s a shadow city. It thunders and gurgles down where it can&#8217;t be heard, a silent bassline to the dances we dance as neighbors and rivals and friends and workers and judges. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/disgust-glendale/#more-2900" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/disgust-glendale/"></div>

Disgust in Glendale

img_1272

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/small-units-hip-design-mid-wilshire/"></div><p>Half a mile away, a giant rock is suspended in the air. Suave creatives stroll beneath it while their children scamper, daring the fatal weight to crush them, not yet conditioned out of showing their fear and joy. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/small-units-hip-design-mid-wilshire/#more-2824" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/small-units-hip-design-mid-wilshire/"></div>

“Small Units,” “Hip Design” in Mid-Wilshire

orchard-supply-hardware

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/east-hollywood-shrine-safety/"></div><p>Frantic pregnant nesting. Giddy rebellion against gender norms. Duty amplified to the pitch of existential dread. A protective impulse flicking its forked tongue out from the lizard brain. FOMO. The clandestine joy, in the midst of a trying weekend, of imagining your spouse’s neck snapping like a twig in a drought. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/east-hollywood-shrine-safety/#more-2776" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/east-hollywood-shrine-safety/"></div>

An East Hollywood Shrine to Safety

robins-construction-2

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/construction-sites-los-angeles-regional-connector-transit-corridor-1st-alameda/"></div><p>Underworld. In London in 1863, sulphurous gas belched from the new Tube tunnels up to the streets, and families feared they’d be poisoned. In Portland in 1870, a hole could open under a robust young man, and he&#8217;d be whipped into the Shanghai Tunnels and out to indentured servitude at sea. Here in downtown Los Angeles, 11 miles of secret subterranean passages once trafficked prisoners, secret money, and mob victims’ corpses. It&#8217;s dark down there. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/construction-sites-los-angeles-regional-connector-transit-corridor-1st-alameda/#more-2682" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/construction-sites-los-angeles-regional-connector-transit-corridor-1st-alameda/"></div>

Construction Sites of Los Angeles: Regional Connector Transit Corridor, 1st and Alameda

435-west-los-feliz-road

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/construction-sites-of-los-angeles-435-west-los-feliz-road/"></div><p>MILL CREEK, say the site’s barriers. PEOPLE · PLACES · RELATIONSHIPS. Words like this repel thought, which seems not-accidental. Has anyone ever stood here, beside five lanes of traffic, and plugged the URL into a phone? They have now: 20,000 apartment homes built since 2001, apparently. Twenty thousand lives being lived right now in six-, 12-, 18-month installments all around America, laid out in space and time by Mill Creek. And soon another 220, here. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/construction-sites-of-los-angeles-435-west-los-feliz-road/#more-2464" class="more-link">Read more</a></p>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/construction-sites-of-los-angeles-435-west-los-feliz-road/"></div>

Construction Sites of Los Angeles: 435 West Los Feliz Road

Ask Ellie: “Should I choose my home or my marriage?”

<strong>Ellie Robins is a writer and the translator of Alan Pauls’s<em> A History of Money</em> (Melville House, 2015). She lives in Los Angeles.</strong>

Ellie Robins

Ask Ellie: “Help! I’m a writer spread thin.”

Ask Ellie: “How can I be free?”

Ask Ellie: “How can I evaluate potential relationships?”

Ask Ellie: “What can I do about my apathy?”

The Rain Heron

Sacrificing Eyeballs to Save the Earth: On Robbie Arnott’s “The Rain Heron”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

Desert Oracle, Volume 1

Salvation in the Desert

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Ellie Robins is a writer and the translator of Alan Pauls’s<em> A History of Money</em> (Melville House, 2015). She lives in Los Angeles.