The City of Downey has purchased The Avenue, Downey’s smallest, most vacant movie house–a single-screen theater on Downey Avenue in the heart of the downtown.
That’s according to Samantha Gonzaga in this morning’s Press-Telegram–part of which was once prepared in a small office next door.
The city’s cost: $1.2 million for the 850-seat theater which is housed [...]

The city’s 1923 Spanish Colonial Revival bandshell in Bixby Park reopened this weekend–despite not being a shell at all, but rather a building with an open stage.
And the Los Angeles Times, which last took note of Long Beach when all those manhole covers went missing a couple of weeks ago, sent its “L.A. Then and [...]

Mon | APR 28 “Goodbye, palm trees,” reports the Press-Telegram in a story with its first sentence ghost-written by Kurt Vonnegut explaining how a debilitating fungus is about to wipe out a palm-tree population that costs too much to preserve. Replacements for the 2,900 reportedly unsalvageable Phoenix palms infected by fusarium—famous for killing thousands as [...]

You can kill the Assemblyman’s rail yards bill, but his heart will go on … talking air quality

It was 10 a.m. Tuesday morning and eighteen hours earlier, Assembly Bill 2332–fledgling 55th District Assemblyman Warren Furutani’s (D-Long Beach) try at banning construction of new or expanded railyards within a quarter-mile of schools–had rather quietly burned to [...]

Its civic motto has changed from “Tomorrow’s City Today” to “Times Change, Values Don’t”, but at just 54 years old, Lakewood is still new enough that some of its founders still survive.
Sadly, their numbers are becoming fewer. As Samantha Gonzaga writes in today’s Press-Telegram, Lakewood lost a former mayor and one of its founders, Jacqueline [...]

Midnight Basketball–the late-night, city-sponsored basketball league–is under increased scrutiny since a fight at a game April 3, and the popular series may be in trouble.
That’s according to the Press-Telegram’s Greg Mellen, who writes this morning that the fight, between roughly 15 Crips, and a league player and volunteer coach–at least one of whom may have [...]

Opening statements were yesterday in Long Beach accountant Yasith Chhun’s trial on charges of allegedly spearheading a coup attempt in Cambodia, and jurors got a chance–so the Assistant U.S. Attorney said–to go inside Operation Volcano.
The Press-Telegram’s story today is from Greg Risling of The Associated Press.
Operation Volcano is reportedly the name of the group Chhun [...]

Remembering when the Press-Telegram was the most important paper in town

Burt Fleischman was a man of perpetual motion and one-track mind—perfect characteristics for a single-copy sales manager, the guy in charge of selling the Press-Telegram’s street edition more than a quarter-century ago. All the dailies used to have a street edition, a paper sold only [...]

A month after the corporation that owns the Press-Telegram fired its publisher and managing editor and put Long Beach’s once-grand daily newspaper under the control of the publisher and managing editor of the Torrance Daily Breeze, longtime P-T columnist Tom Hennessy finally checked in Sunday with his take on the traumatic events.
And? Amazingly, the man who has been [...]

A great man is gone: Cambodian-born photographer and reporter Dith Pran, whose personal story of escaping the enslavement and genocide of 1970s Cambodia under dictator Pol Pot became the film “The Killing Fields,” died Sunday of pancreatic cancer.
Dith, 65, is credited with coining the terrible term “killing fields,” according to The Associated Press, whose obituary [...]