Every good book is essentially a mystery. What secrets might be revealed between the covers? Whose story is it that is being told? Where are we going? How will it all end? Can we ever really understand? Why is so much so easily forgotten? What is it that we are longing to remember?

R. M. Schindler's Bethlehem Baptist Church, built for an African American congregation in South Central L.A. in 1944, was a rare project for Schindler and a significant contribution to the history of Los Angeles Modernism.

Writer Esther McCoy (1904–89) arrived in Los Angeles in 1932 and reckoned it was the wrong place to be. She stayed, however, and for over fifty years her sharp-eyed writing explored the radical politics, modern architecture, and sidelined literary ambitions of the endlessly compelling city.

Artist Don Bachardy, who was born in Los Angeles in 1934, has remarked that LA was the best place to live because it’s where movies are made. “I’m convinced,” he wrote in 2000, “that my interest in looking at people came directly from gazing, when I was very young and impressionable, at close-ups of movie actors several hundred times larger than life.”