Illustration by PJ McQuade

Why all the hate for the 818?

Midafternoon at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Santa Monica's Main Street, an impromptu conversation sparks between two strangers just feet from me -- he a cheerful, swarthy, well-fed, balding accountant originally from New York City, she a pretty, willowy, 20-something brunette, just arrived from the Boston area and looking for housing.

She mentions parts inland and his face flickers with mild concern. "There are some areas that are OK, I guess," he says. "But I live right around here. And this is par-a-dise."

He savors the word like it's a white truffle.

She assents with a smile, then asks about the area around Sherman Oaks: "What's that like?"

His head tremors from side to side. "Oh my Gaaaawwwdddd. No! I never even go north of Mulholland. Never!"

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Louisette Geiss

ROLL UP ROLL UP FOR THE MYSTERY TOUR! RIGHT THIS WAY!!!!!!!!!!

You're standing on the corner of Third and San Vicente in a silly hat on a Sunday morning, sipping a Bloody Mary from a blue Solo cup, ready for anything. You were told to bring a beach towel, a $2 bill, a vegetable and your favorite movie candy, among other things, but you have no idea why. This is a Mystery Trip, after all, and you've placed control of the next six and a half hours of your life in the hands of Chief Mysterious Officer Dave Green, 41, also known as Mysterious Dave.

"We're going into Cedars[-Sinai Medical Center], to massage people's bed sores!" Green tells the 35 Mysterions who gathered May 6 for a private tour to celebrate Tara O'Brien's 33rd birthday. Just kidding! Instead, the group heads across the street to Third Street Dance studio, where Dancing With the Stars is filmed, for a private break-dance lesson with JT Tyler, an assistant choreographer on So You Think You Can Dance. Tyler pops and locks in reptilian black-and-red sneakers, dark jeans with a red belt and a red hat with a black brim, urging Hollywood-thin women in animal prints and klutzy overweight men alike to push out their pelvises for a closer approximation of the aggressive b-boy style.

Mysterious Dave is the type of boisterous guy who thinks the adult world should be more like summer camp -- more cheesy bonding, more goofy competition, more unexpected field trips -- and so in 2003 he began organizing an alcohol-laced version of his favorite activity from Camp Saginaw: Hop on a bus without knowing where you're going! What began as an annual excursion for friends to learn more about L.A.'s quirky nooks and crannies transformed a few years ago, with a $1,000 grant from the Awesome Foundation, into Mystery Trip L.A., a raucous BYOB bus tour customized to fit the needs and hobbies of participants using Green's database of hundreds of potential destinations, including eccentric neighborhoods, museums, performances, restaurants and attractions ("L.A. Weekly is my bible," he says).

Past Mystery Trips have mostly been private affairs -- birthday parties or corporate retreats -- featuring stops at offbeat tourist spots like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, picnic dinners at Barnsdall Art Park and behind-the-scenes tours at Dodger Stadium, but this summer Green plans to host monthly Mystery Trips open to the public; $65 tickets are already on sale for the first of these, to be held June 9.

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Wendy Gilmartin

The building that housed the LAPD's headquarters between 1955 and 2009 starred in TV shows like Dragnet in its heyday, but its slow, 50-year slide into disrepair gave it a real-world stigma that's left it tarnished and crumbling from the inside out -- most obviously because the community doesn't care to defend it.

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Alissa Walker

Daniel González hand-carved these porcelain scenes of Ballona Creek history, from Native American settlements to oil rigs. Each stop's signage features public art about the surrounding area

A forecast of insultingly high gas prices, paired with a buoyant burst of car-free optimism (including an ambitious bike-share program just announced by the city), make the timing perfect for L.A.'s newest rail line to debut. Starting April 28, the Expo Line will travel the eight miles from downtown to La Cienega and Jefferson in less than 30 minutes, relieving some commuters from the daily migraine that is the 10 freeway, and creating access to a corridor of transit-adjacent food and culture. After months (and months) of delays, it turns out the Expo Line was worth the wait.

It's possible that some people -- up to 27,000 people a day, Metro says -- will ride our new Expo Line for transportation: to run errands, to go to work or school. But our transit lines are also urban theme-park rides, rolling us into different corners of the city for $1.50 per trip.

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Jeri Koegel

Hello handsome! You're a good-looking fellow, do you know that?

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As the lease was set to expire on the Pasadena condo we're currently renting, I, my husband and our young spawn were in the market for a home to buy. Spring selling season is upon us and we wanted to buy while the market is still crapped out. Plus, having just closed escrow on our old place back in Chicago, we were eager to again experience that thrilling sensation of taking a multi-thousand-dollar hit on a home investment. It's a character builder, y'know?

We putzed around on the real estate website Trulia. And we've been in touch with a Realtor friend who set us up to receive automated emails from the MLS for listings that match what we're looking for.

Have you guys seen some of the shit people have done to their houses? Perfectly good Spanish revivals, midcenturies and Craftsman-style bungalows in perfectly awesome locations, cankered by a grotesquely out-of-proportion marble fireplace here, an arbitrary Doric column there and, eye-rape of eye-rapes, sponge painting all over the walls.

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Amanda Lewis

Past and present clash at Echo Fuels, where the new owners were pressured to put back up the station's quirky old sign.

When Victor Abraham's friend Stan bought a troubled gas station on the corner of Echo Park Avenue and Morton Avenue in early February, everything seemed to be broken. Defunct credit card scanners irked customers on a daily basis, all the snacks inside the mini-mart had expired and the dysfunctional pumps were so old that replacement parts were no longer being manufactured. The place screamed makeover.

And yet when Stan, Abraham and Abraham's brother, Leo, replaced the equipment and renovated the station, "Some guy came in and actually told us that, 'No no no no, this is not good. The old thing was better!'" Abraham says, bewildered as to why anyone would prefer busted pumps to gleaming new ones.

But the backlash didn't truly begin until the men took down the faded white, blue and orange Magic Gas sign and rebranded the station with bright red paint and a slick new name and logo: Echo Fuels.

"People were so offended. ... Everybody was, like, in an upheaval," explains Susina Bakery & Café owner Jenna Turner, who, together with Fix Coffee owner Marc Gallucci, purchased Chango Coffee, across the street from Echo Fuels, in early January. "We were bummed," she added. Turner even joked with Brent Harris, who works at the convenience store next door, about renaming Chango "Magic Coffee."

"I just hated that change over to that bright red," says Erin Tavin, adding that her boutique, Tavin, a few doors down from Chango, has been abuzz in recent weeks with complaints and comments about the loss of Magic Gas. "Aesthetics mean a lot to me, and I thought it was so much more old-fashioned looking before, and I loved that."

Most Angelenos encounter the city through a windshield, elevating idiosyncratic local signage like Magic Gas and Happy Foot/Sad Foot, on Sunset Boulevard at Benton Way, to sacrosanct icons of the daily commute. But what happens when time passes, businesses fail, owners sell and the signs come down?

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Wendy Gilmartin

There's a Waylon Jennings song called "Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for L.A.," and that goes for these twin towers, dubbed Elleven and Luma (yes, that's how it's spelled), in downtown's quickly developing and gentrifying Southpark district too.

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Ted Soqui

L.A. Weekly's guest columnist, the 405 freeway.

I get you to the airport, I get you to the Valley, I get you out of the Westwide, and what do I get in return? Nothing but loogies and cigarette butts.

Well, suck it, L.A., because I hate you too.

Oh, I've overheard you on your fancy iPhone, calling your family back in the Midwest while you sit there, sweating, cramping up, getting angrier and angrier. "I hate the 405," you whine to Mama. "It's sucking the soul from my body. The traffic's gonna make me kill myself. Waaa, waaa, waaa." Well, the feeling is mutual, you Westside, Audi-driving pricks.

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Alissa Walker

When I got a message from a friend that a car had plowed into Sunset Triangle, I ran the few blocks from my house. No one was hurt; it had happened early in the morning when the plaza was empty. But the damage to the new pedestrian-only thoroughfare was extensive. Giant planters had toppled and rolled, their drought-tolerant succulents scattered across the asphalt -- asphalt that only two weeks before had been painted in blinding acid-green polka-dots to help signify that cars were not allowed.

The Silver Lake plaza opened on March 4, the first of many planned for the city as part of the program Streets for People. This particular plaza is a pilot project that will close a tiny strip of Griffith Park Boulevard, from its intersection with Sunset Boulevard to Edgecliffe Drive, for one year. Declaring this single Los Angeles block unfit for cars, even temporarily, is a sign of coming-of-age for our auto-bound city. But it's a decision that many Angelenos are not too happy about.

As I examined the squished plastic planters and scuffed through the piles of dirt, a range of scenarios ran through my mind. Did a driver simply not see the planters in the dark? Did they follow Google Maps' suggestion that this was indeed still a street? Or worse -- my eyes widened as I considered the suggestion -- could someone hate the plaza so much they'd pilot their car directly into it to prove a point?

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Wendy Gilmartin

No doubt oodles of festive fun have been had within this faux fortification in the heart of the Valley. But Anoush's banal, mixed references to the gateways and stonework of historic Roman, Persian and Islamic architectural forms is confused at best, tacky at worst, and amounts to a cultural stereotype on par with Bravo's new reality TV series Shahs of Sunset.

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