Back from recess, the council committee spent three hours on four items and finished three: $4,850 for the bench move, 'pending counts as compliance' through December 31, and an up-or-down bike-lane vote set for September 16. The Walk of Fame motion ran out of afternoon — again.
Four weeks after he walked away from a Franklin Avenue care home, the 68-year-old was recognized at an all-night coffee shop counter by a server who did exactly what his family had asked: nothing, except a phone call. He is now in hospital care and back on his medication.
Seventeen Augusts after it began as a card table with 40 backpacks, the Franklin Avenue drive sent nearly all of its 1,200 bags out the basement door in a single Saturday. The scissors were solved, the calculators arrived with a day to spare, and the pencils, as ever, were not the problem.
Vernon Teague left a Franklin Avenue residential care facility on July 26, two days after moving in. He has schizophrenia, is without his medication, and is considered at risk. Police and family are asking the public to report sightings.
A week after this newspaper printed the words "blunt-tip scissors," the church basement on Franklin has more than two thousand pairs, some of them left-handed. What the drive still needs is duller: money, and two evenings of hands.
Summer at the Hollywood Bowl means 17,000 people arriving in a canyon with one road in. The residents up the hill have spent forty years negotiating over the last mile of it.
A supply drive run out of a Franklin Avenue church basement has become the largest in the neighborhood almost by accident. Its organizers can tell you the exact item that always runs short.
The heat wave took the power out twice on the same three-block stretch. The utility calls it a distribution issue. The residents have begun keeping their own record, in a group text with 41 people in it.
Two-person crews are walking the canyon lots above Franklin this month with a tape measure and a clipboard. What they keep finding is not brush — it is the stuff people store where the brush used to be.
Four days into the heat wave, the library's reopened reading room, two recreation centers and a senior center are running as cooling centers. Not everyone inside is there only for the air.
About 120 people came to the reading room Saturday. The volunteers kept the one rule — promise the building, never the hours — and the campaign left with a new commitment it did not plan to make: asking the system to publish how the 34 branches were chosen.
The street-furniture company's written answer reached the city Wednesday: ordinary service gets to Hollywood in late October, past the newsstand's deadline — unless someone invokes the contract's expedited clause and pays the fee. Everyone at City Hall wants the money found. Nobody wants it found in their budget.
Hollywood's permit counter is running ahead of projections; the county health queue behind it is not, and the difference lands on September 30. Meanwhile, the bus bench blocking the Boulevard's last newsstand turns out to have a clock of its own.
A motion filed Thursday demands a public accounting of the terrazzo restoration's third delay. Its authors say they have found no liquidated-damages provision in the contract — and the city cannot yet tell them whether one exists.
The measure heading to voters will fund construction and seismic work at 34 branches, Hollywood's among them. A clause promising to protect operating hours did not survive the drafting.
A proposal to require shade at transit stops and along new commercial frontage has been drafted twice and passed never. This week's heat put it back on an agenda, and produced a number nobody disputes: 61 percent.
Hollywood is the test case for the city's rewritten sidewalk vending system. The first fortnight has produced fewer permits than expected, for a reason nobody wrote into the ordinance.
Twenty-two years in one building, and the mixing stages now run until four. The owner says it is the only way to compete with facilities eight time zones away — and the people working nights have opinions about the arrangement.
Four days of triple digits pushed exterior work to nights, moved three shoots indoors and cancelled two outright. A crew on a weekly deal gets paid anyway. Most of the people on a Hollywood set are not on a weekly deal.
Permitted production days in Hollywood rose 9 percent over last summer — a headline the city is pleased with. Break the number apart and the scripted work is still going the other way.
The cooperative's August: revenue flat, which counts as a win; the 4 a.m. wholesale route still scheduled for an October vote; and a retired owner who has been caught fixing the proofer he no longer owns.
The racks are still wide apart and the fitting curtain is still unattended, but the buying is done, the mending has started, and the owner has made her annual guess about what the season will want. She gives herself even odds.
The late, compressed season arrived exactly where the shopkeepers said it would — all at once, on the weekend. The shoe store had its best Saturday since 2019, the uniform rack kept pace, and the happiest shelf off Highland is an empty one.
Three weeks after the July heat broke, Hollywood's refrigeration men are booked into September, the parts counter is still on allocation, and the machines that survived the wave are failing on a schedule of their own.
Two weeks out from the first bell, the shops that live on August say the traffic is there and the baskets are lighter. The resale racks are the exception, and they are having their best summer in years.
After two years of trying to find a buyer who would keep the ovens on, the owners sold the business to their own eleven employees. The financing took longer than the decision.
The Boulevard's vacancy rate ticked down again this quarter. The ledger behind the number is a good deal more mixed, and one line of it has not moved in five months.
Four teams, one Thursday, and a championship that comes down to which roster can field nine men who are permitted by their doctors to run.
Helmets only, no pads, one practice a day, and a heat index reading taken on the field before anybody runs. The Sheiks' first week is a science experiment that the coach says he wishes had existed in 1994.
Hollywood's district champions lost twice in three days to programs with year-round facilities. Then eleven boys rode down Franklin Avenue on the back of a flatbed, waving at a neighborhood that had paid for their season one churro at a time.
She sold popcorn to three generations of the same families, memorized a thousand standing orders, and maintained a private accounting of children who could not pay, which balanced to zero every night by her own method.
He serviced the ornamental double-lantern poles by route and by name, kept a notebook the city never asked for, and held that a street you can see is a street you can love.
For fifty-one years he parked the neighborhood's cars in a lot that was always somehow one space bigger than it looked, and held its keys, its packages and a fair number of its arrangements.
He ran a rental warehouse off Cahuenga for fifty-three years and kept, in his head, a catalog no one has ever been able to write down. Its contents went under the hammer last month.
She never worked a station but that one, never wrote an order down, and taught three generations of the diner's cooks a system that exists nowhere on paper.
She shot on set for thirty-eight years, produced perhaps two hundred thousand negatives, and spent her retirement in a fight with three studios over who owned them.
