The neighborhood, block by block, since 1925.
Aurelio Renteria spent thirty-eight years keeping a private census of Hollywood's ornamental lamps. His daughter delivered seven notebooks and fourteen albums to the Bureau of Street Lighting last week. The bureau has already used them once.
A July that cured the grass a month early sent brush inspectors back through Beachwood, Outpost and the canyons in late August. Nine in ten parcels passed. The rest belong mostly to people who are not there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
