John, at right, and Duncan Ireland fostered and then adopted siblings Emma and Giovanni.

As we prepare to celebrate our nation’s dads this weekend, how’s this for a heroic (not to mention exhausting) feat of fatherhood? For three consecutive months in mid-2005, Los Angeles County social workers delivered three tiny foster children to a couple who’d once tucked away any hope of being parents.

The oldest of the children was 18 months. The middle one was 4 months. And the youngest had been in the world for just 3 days.

“We made it through that glorious summer, a scorcher without air conditioning,” says John Ireland, as he recalls the diapers and feedings and joys of it all. “It was such a tremendous, intensive parenting experience”—one made even more complicated by the demographics of the household. For there were two men of the house, “Dad” and “Daddy.” John is married to Duncan Ireland, his partner of 20 years.

Like many gay men, John, 42, says he’d come to believe the subtle and overt messages in society that parenthood was out of reach for people like him. His own parents, he says, “let go” of their hopes of having grandchildren through him after he “came out.”

But all that changed, John says, after he and Duncan talked to social workers from L.A. County’s Department of Children and Family Services  and the Southern California Foster Family & Adoption Agency during an informational fair at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

“We were not only welcomed, we were actively recruited,” John says, noting that he and Duncan, 40, promptly underwent nine training sessions for certification as foster parents. That training included an emphasis on family transparency. “What they need is honesty. You don’t avoid any topics with a foster child,” says John, who was wed to Duncan in 2008, before California voters banned same-sex marriage through Proposition 8, which is under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In all, the couple provided foster care to four children, eventually adopting a sister and brother, now 8 and 5, respectively. “We would have adopted them all, if we could have,” says John, a consultant and fundraiser for non-profit groups who served as the stay-at-home dad while Duncan continued his law practice. Today, John helps lead an organization called Raise A Child, which works with the county and others to spread the word about opportunities for gays and lesbians to become foster and adoptive parents.

County child welfare officials know that some people may not approve of the government actively seeking gay and lesbian parents. But those officials say the county needs every willing and qualified adult possible to provide a safe and caring environment for the more than 16,000 foster youth who must be removed from dangerous homes.

“We need to recruit everyone who can help us”—including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender couples and individuals—says DCFS supervising children’s social worker Bryan Miller. “The LGBT community has been an underutilized resource for many years. We’re just catching up.” Miller says a UCLA study last year concluded that foster children do equally well when placed with gay, lesbian or heterosexual parents.

As for the critics, Miller offers this challenge: “If you’re going to complain, I want to see you at our next foster/adoption orientation.”

In recent years, the county’s foster care system has come under intense scrutiny and criticism for sometimes failing to protect the welfare of children living in group or individual homes. Just this week, the Board of Supervisors voted to end a decades-long relationship with Teens Happy Homes amid allegations of financial improprieties and child abuse detailed in the Los Angeles Times. But what rarely rises to the surface are the many profound and touching stories of success. As John explains: “These victories are small and only celebrated by those of us observing them happen.”

On an East Coast swing last year, a stop at Niagara Falls.

The experiences of John and Duncan, both as foster and adoptive parents, deserve a wider celebration.

As foster parents, John says, you’re trained to brace for the reality that the children you’ve grown to love may be reunified with relatives. That’s what happened with two of those first three youngsters to enter the couple’s life in rapid succession—Marisol and her infant brother, Isaías. Five months after coming to the Ireland home, the children were adopted by an aunt living near Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. “We thought we’d never see them again,” John recalls.

When he and Duncan arrived at the aunt’s apartment, siblings in tow, she asked whether they had a keepsake photograph of the children and their foster parents. In fact, John had stashed a framed picture in their suitcase. He dug it out and handed it to her. To the men’s astonishment, she removed an image of the Virgin Mary from a wall and replaced it with the new photo.

“You are part of their lives and we want you to be part of our family,” she told them, a vow to which she’s stayed true during the past eight years by inviting the couple to birthday parties and other special occasions. “That was the best thing for those children,” John says in hindsight. “It worked exactly as the foster system was meant to be.”

As for baby No. 3, Emma, the couple adopted her in late 2005, six months after she first came to their home. And she remained an only child for nearly seven years, until John got a mid-morning call while driving along Laurel Canyon Boulevard. “Pull over and turn off the car,” an excited social worker advised. Emma’s 4-year-old brother, she reported, had entered the foster care system. Little Giovanni, who joined the family as a foster child in July, 2012, was adopted last month.

“He was so excited about being adopted,” John says, “that for two weeks when he woke up in the morning he’d ask: “Am I still a foster kid?” I’d tell him, ‘Nope, you’re no longer a foster kid.”

John is under no illusions that his family choices will be widely embraced, especially by those outside “the bubble” of Los Angeles. Not only are there two dads, but they’re white with African American children. “We don’t walk into a restaurant undercover,” he joked.

Asked what unique challenges gay couples confront, John says: “The biggest challenge is helping our kids navigate a society that is very focused on us. The spotlight is trained on our families. It’s still very controversial in our culture for gays and lesbians to parent.”

“The hardest part,” he continues,”is when we go into public. The kids are old enough to see the looks or be posed the questions in school. ‘Why do you have two dads?’ We have to prepare them to answer those questions.”

Two weeks ago, he says, he and his husband took the youngsters to a gay pride festival in the Antelope Valley. Along the road to the fairgrounds were protest signs warning, “Homo sin. Turn back.”

“How do you prepare a 5-year-old or an 8-year-old for that? We tell them that people have the right to express themselves. Some people do not agree with our family. Some people do not like families with only one parent.…The truth is that every kid has something they can be picked on about. Kids need to be taught resilience.”

This Sunday, none of those questions or pressures will be in the air when John, Duncan and their two high-energy, toothy-grinned kids who love handball and running attend “The World’s Largest Gay Father’s Day Celebration,” which includes brunch and a children’s concert.

The event is sponsored by, among others, John’s Raise A Child group, the City of West Hollywood and the Pop Luck Club, an organization of gay dads, prospective dads and their families. John is the current president, with duties that include storing the club’s banners in his garage and making sure there’s plenty of Capri Sun juice boxes for monthly potlucks.

Says John: “I think I’m the luckiest guy in the world…besides my husband.”

A summer adventure: John and the kids make cupcakes this week in West Hollywood.

Posted 6/13/13

Natural History Museum “citizen science” yielded the first L.A. sighting of this gecko species. Photo/Gary Nafis

When the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County launched its recent renovation, one of the goals was to make room for more science. Turns out it also made room for more scientists—of the backyard amateur variety, no lab coat required.

With the addition of the new Nature Lab and Nature Gardens as part of its centennial celebration,  the museum’s growing involvement in so-called “citizen science” projects has gained new prominence, enlisting Southern Californians by the thousands in projects to catalogue the region’s biodiversity.

From insect counts to inventories of freeway roadkill, the museum has more than a dozen initiatives that are either ongoing or in the works now in which the public is playing a key role in the study of wildlife in Los Angeles County.

“It’s like crowdsourcing, and it can be an amazing resource,” says Lila Higgins, manager of citizen science and live animals at the museum.

Also known as participatory science, citizen science has become increasingly common as technology has made it easier for scientists, professional and amateur, to share observations and collaborate.

“In some ways, it isn’t new,” says Greg Pauly, curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum, noting that volunteers at the NHM’s Page Museum have been helping process fossils for many years. “But with the Internet and smart phones and other digital devices, anyone can, say, photograph an organism and send it over the net to be included in scientific research. And people of all ages can help that way.”

Worldwide projects, such as the extraterrestrial life site SETI@Home, and the ornithology database eBird, have been reaching out to the public for more than a decade, and the Natural History Museum has been among the local pioneers of the concept. As far back as 1994, for instance, museum ornithologists enlisted the public in a study of feral parrots in Southern California.

The California Parrot Project, which is still ongoing, asked birdwatchers to let the study’s organizers know about local parrot sightings, and eventually yielded one of the first reliable counts of the numbers—upwards of a dozen species—of parrots breeding in the wild here, says Kimball L. Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the museum.

“It was extremely primitive—we’d mail out newsletters,” says Garrett. “But all this research from the mid-1990s gave us a baseline to figure out whether these populations are expanding or contracting now.”

Of the museum’s current batch of citizen science projects, the oldest is the 11-year-old Spider Survey, which asks the public to collect spiders in their homes and gardens, take down some data and bring or send what they find to the museum, Higgins says.

“At the time, it was the cutting-edge thing,” she remembers. “We launched it in 2002 at the museum’s Bug Fair, and the first week, a thousand spiders came in.”

Since then, some 6,000 spiders have been sent into the museum from throughout Los Angeles County; among the project’s findings was the first sighting of a brown widow spider in L.A.

“We’re a port city with people and goods coming and going on a daily basis, and with them, creatures sometimes hitch a ride,” Higgins explains.

Other citizen science projects have yielded even more exciting data. In 2010, Will and Reese Bernstein, a father and son from Porter Ranch, submitted a photo of a tiny reptile they’d seen at a backyard dinner party to the museum’s Lost Lizards of Los Angeles project. The critter turned out to be the first documented discovery of a Mediterranean House Gecko in L.A.

Although the non-native gecko (also known as Hemidactylus turcicus) has been spotted in the southeast United States, the L.A. sighting was so significant that the Herpetological Review plans to publish the finding this fall, says Pauly: “So Reese Bernstein, who is 12 years old now, will already have published a paper in a scientific journal.”

In April, the Lost Lizards project turned up yet another out-of-state reptile, an Indo-Pacific Gecko that was found in a backyard in Torrance. The project has been so successful, in fact, that it’s being expanded to include amphibians.

Greg Pauly’s Lost Lizards of Los Angeles project worked so well that it’s expanding. Photo/SoCal Wild

“Maybe you see a turtle at the park, or an alligator lizard in your yard, or maybe a salamander in the Santa Monica Mountains,” says Pauly. “You submit a photograph of it to our project, and that data will be available to scientists for generations to come.”

Coming up will be the citizen science component of Bioscan, a 3-year look at, among other things, the diversity of Los Angeles insects. Project Coordinator Dean Pentcheff is looking for a homeowners willing to host bug traps in their backyards and volunteers willing to sift through the take, sorting beetles from butterflies. A special side project in August will count bugs drawn to porchlights.

“We’re about three months in,” says Pentcheff, “and already we’ve found new species unknown to science.”

Pauly, the herpetologist, says such projects are especially important in places like Los Angeles County because the interface between the wilderness and the expanding urban landscape is on the cutting-edge of science these days.

“When you ask people here where they go to see nature, they say things like, ‘Sequoia’ or ‘Anza Borrego.’ But we’re surrounded by incredible diversity, and you don’t even have to leave L.A.”

The California Parrot Project was one of the museum’s early citizen science initiatives.

Posted 6/13/13

Starting next week, gates on L.A.'s subway system will be locking for good after years of debate and tests.

If you lock it, they will pay.

After extensive testing of latched turnstile gates and rollout of a new TAP card fare payment system, Los Angeles’ long, free trip on a subway without barriers is finally reaching the end of the line.

Next Wednesday, the subway gates at Union Station will be locked as a new era of public transportation rolls out in L.A., following more than two decades on an honor system that critics say unfairly penalizes paying passengers while leaving millions of dollars in revenue on the table.

David Sutton, Metro’s deputy executive officer in charge of the gate-latching project, said the lengthy testing period has been “a real eye-opener,” with consistent results in every test location: fewer boardings but a lot more paying customers using TAP cards.

“The data doesn’t lie,” Sutton said. “When we latch gates, we see less riders, more TAPs, more [vending machine] activity and more revenue.”

In 30 tests at Metro stations conducted earlier this year, sales at ticket vending machines spiked by nearly 30%, with 6,919 additional passengers paying to board trains, compared to the normal volume of paying passengers at each location.

Trains were less crowded because 14% fewer riders got onboard.

And as gate-latching tests intensified and enforcement was heightened, it seemed to create a lingering deterrent to would-be fare beaters. From October through December of 2012, fare evaders made up an estimated 18% of subway riders; from January through April of this year, with testing underway, that number dropped to 13%. So-called “fare checks” by sheriff’s deputies or security officers more than doubled—from 36,588 in October to 74,482 in April. And citations went through the roof, from 881 issued in October to 2,451 in April.

Overall, the testing results suggest that the agency could be able to recover between $6 million and $9 million annually in lost revenue once the subway and existing light rail gates are latched system-wide.

Supervisor and Metro Director Zev Yaroslavsky, a leader in efforts to get the gates latched, has made the case that it’s more than just a matter of money.

“It’s not fair to those people who pay to have a significant percentage of people who don’t pay,” he told the media last month. “The credibility of the enforcement system is undermined. It’s human nature to say, ‘If he’s getting away with it, why should I pay?’ ”

No tap-dancing around it: It will be mandatory to TAP to enter subway gates at Union Station starting Wednesday. Photo/Metro's The Source

It’s been more than 20 years since L.A.’s first subway—the Red Line—opened on an initial stretch of 4.4 miles. And it was five years ago that Metro’s Board of Directors voted to install gates in the subway and some light rail stations, citing security concerns and revenue losses of an estimated $5.5 million a year due to fare evasion.

“Metro remains the only subway operator in the country to operate a barrier-free system,” Yvonne B. Burke, then a Los Angeles County supervisor and Metro board member, said at the time. “That freedom has come at a significant cost to the agency’s bottom line as a result of fare scofflaws.”

Next week’s latching of the first subway gates can be seen as a coming of age moment in the progression of L.A.’s public transit system, which has grown exponentially in recent years and moved from comedian’s punch line to nationally-recognized point of pride.

But getting from there to here has been anything but an express trip when it came to getting the turnstiles locked.

One big stumbling block was the move from paper tickets to the TAP cards needed for passengers to be able to open locked gates. The transition initially prompted widespread confusion and complaints among would-be users, particularly seniors unable to find a way to buy their reduced-priced tickets in the new TAP system. New signs were installed and instructions on vending machine screens were retooled to simplify the process.

Regional transit agencies also needed to be recruited to join the TAP system; by the end of next year, 24 providers will be onboard. Integrating Metrolink passengers’ paper tickets with the TAP system proved to be a special challenge. Eventually, a special chip embedded in Metrolink tickets was developed so that passengers on the commuter rail system can get through locked gates when transferring to a Metro subway or light rail line.

A final test will be run Friday at Union Station, before the Red and Purple lines there are permanently latched on Wednesday, June 19. After that, work will begin on individual subway stations, with locked gates expected to be in place at all Red and Purple line stations by the end of August.

From there, the process moves to the transit system’s light rail stations, which cannot be completely locked because not all of those stations are equipped with gates. Light rail stations with gates on the Gold Line will be latched in October, on the Green Line in December and on the Blue Line in January, 2014.

Metro’s Sutton said the agency has heard some complaints during the lengthy gate-latching testing process but has received far more positive comments, chiefly along the lines of:

“Thank God. Why did you wait so long?”

Posted 6/13/13

Deborah Murphy and her Los Angeles Walks crew found strength in small numbers at April’s CicLAvia.

Deborah Murphy’s first experience with CicLAvia was no smooth ride. She was walking her Jack Russell terrier down the sidewalk in East Hollywood when she decided to make a move to the car-free streets.

“Get out of the road with your dog, lady—this is for cyclists, stay off the street,” she remembers someone yelling.

When the next CicLAvia brought more shout-downs, the long-time pedestrian advocate and founder of Los Angeles Walks decided to form WalkLAvia, a group aimed at staking pedestrians’ claim to a share of the roads during the events.

“This is an open streets event and people should be out there walking or on bikes or doing cartwheels or whatever they want to do,” Murphy said.

No one would love to see that more than CicLAvia’s organizers, who’ve been pushing for that kind of inclusivity from the beginning. To make that point abundantly clear, they’re billing the upcoming

June 23 event along Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile” as “the most walkable CicLAvia ever!”

“This all feeds into the ultimate purpose of CicLAvia—to connect people with their community in a way that is not possible in a car,” said CicLAvia spokesman Robert Gard. “On bike and, more specifically, on foot, you are really able to interact with your fellow Angelenos.”

But turning that long-held aspiration into a reality has proven increasingly elusive as the event’s popularity has grown. The last event, which opened a 15-mile stretch of streets from downtown to Venice Beach, drew a crowd of about 180,000 people, according to Gard. The overwhelming majority of them were on bikes. “There are so many bicyclists now, walking appears to not be part of it,” Gard said.

Unlike the last route, however, the new one along Wilshire Boulevard will be just 6 miles,  with pedestrian-only zones at each end. Although architecture tours and other walker-friendly activities are planned, organizers think the location itself may lure more walkers. The Wilshire route will offer more street life and more sights—from MacArthur Park to Koreatown to “Miracle Mile,” with its museums and vibrant arts scene.

Of course, any event with “cycle” in its name is bound to attract a bike-heavy crowd. But part of the challenge is simple growing pains, Gard said. CicLAvia was inspired by ciclovías in Bogotá, Colombia, which began in the mid-1970s. L.A.’s first event was held just three years ago, and local cyclists jumped at the chance to freely ride streets, where automobile traffic normally makes biking nerve-wracking, even perilous.

Once people realize CicLAvia events are here to stay, bike riders won’t jump at the chance to ride every one of them for fear they’re missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “In talking with our peers in Central and South America, once they were more established, people understood it better,” Gard said. In time, serious bicyclists came to accept that ciclovías were for riders of all ability levels—and for pedestrians, too.

Alissa Walker, a member of Los Angeles Walks’ steering committee, said attitudes have already started to change.

“It has gotten a lot better,” Walker said. “At first, people didn’t understand that it wasn’t a race or something. It was possibly dangerous.”

CicLAvia organizers, in hoping to encourage that evolution, highlighted the problem using a video of a disabled man describing how he was verbally abused and directed off the streets because he was on a special, motorized device to accommodate his disability.

The City of Los Angeles’ first-ever pedestrian coordinator, Margot Ocañas, has participated in all six CicLAvias—sometimes on foot, sometimes on bike. She believes that continued, heavy interest from cyclists will mean that the roads “below the curb” will probably remain dominated by bikes, while pedestrians will take the sidewalks. For safety’s sake, she said, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Creating more pedestrian-only areas could help bring out more walkers, Ocañas said. She also envisions using the main route as a “launch pad for walking activities that tentacle off into other areas.”

No matter how CicLAvia evolves, everyone agrees that it should keep on rolling, stepping and hula-hooping.

“The fact that the bikes and pedestrians are having that conversation,” Ocañas said, “I’ll take it any day over bikers or pedestrians having that conversation with a car.”

There were so many cyclists at April's event that they became walkers, like on this stretch of Venice Boulevard.

Posted 6/6/13

A shift in direction by air quality officials could keep fires burning on Dockweiler State Beach. Photo/L.A. Times

A hotly contested proposal to ban wood burning in Southern California’s iconic beach fire rings appears to be going up in smoke.

An official with the South Coast Air Quality Management District said in an interview on Wednesday that “an alternative proposal” had been developed that would continue to allow bonfires on the region’s beaches so long as certain measures were undertaken by June, 2014, to minimize the known harmful effects of burning wood.

“From our standpoint, we have better and more information than we had two months ago,” said AQMD project manager Tracy Goss. “A one-size-fits-all doesn’t necessarily apply in this case.”

And that’s good news for the popular pits at Dockweiler State Beach, which, under the earlier proposal, would have fallen victim to a dispute flaring 50 miles south, where Newport Beach officials are determined to remove 60 fire rings. Some residents there have complained of respiratory problems and smoke-drenched homes. At Dockweiler, the neighbors include LAX, a sewage treatment plant and an oil refinery, and they’re not complaining.

Restricting fires at Dockweiler for health reasons “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Goss acknowledged, noting that the latest proposal would take a more nuanced beach-by-beach approach based on such things as topography, wind and proximity to homes. Goss declined to provide specifics until the plan’s public release, scheduled for Thursday. Already, the agency has two “public consultation meetings” set for next week on the new proposed amendments to Rule 444, which regulates “open burning.”

Of the national attention the AQMD’s earlier proposal attracted, Goss, a 25-year veteran of the agency, said: “When they make a political cartoon of your issue, that doesn’t happen very often.”

Kerry Silverstrom, chief deputy director of L.A. County’s Department of Beaches and Harbors, welcomed the news that Dockweiler’s fire pits will likely be spared. “We’re delighted,” she said. But she questioned why they were ever at risk. “On the scale of what’s bad for us,” she said, “fire rings at Dockweiler wouldn’t be the first thing I’d be talking about.”

She said the concrete rings have been there since at least the mid-1970s, when the county began running the beach at the foot of Imperial Highway. As much as 43 percent of Dockweiler’s annual parking revenues, or $570,000, comes from fees after 4 p.m., Silverstrom said—clear evidence of the popularity of the rings. “They provide a low cost recreational opportunity for a diverse population,” she said. “We see it as an access issue.”

So did the staff of the California Coastal Commission when, in February, it recommended denying Newport Beach a permit to remove fire pits that the mayor and city council contended were jeopardizing residents’ health. (Critics accused homeowners of simply trying to discourage undesirable outsiders from flocking to their affluent neighborhood.)

The commission staff stated that the removal of the rings would “deny the public access to this popular form of lower cost public recreation.” It also said the city had failed to demonstrate that the rings were “directly responsible” for health problems.

It was around this time that the AQMD entered the fray at the urging of board chairman William Burke, who also sat on the Coastal Commission—a job from which he’d resign as questions arose in Sacramento over a potential conflict between his positions on two agencies at odds with each other.

More specifically, Burke’s departure came after he said during an AQMD meeting in February that a nighttime aerial picture of the Newport fire rings reminded him of “carpet bombing” in Viet Nam, where he’d served in the armed forces. “This is Viet Nam revisited,” Burke said, but then quickly added: “Now it’s not really that bad because Viet Nam was horrible.”

As the AQMD continued to push for a regional ban, other cities pushed back, most notably Huntington Beach, which said its fire rings were a source of pride and commerce; they help “surf city” reap $1 million annually in parking revenues.

On Tuesday, the city’s community relations officer, Laurie Frymire, appeared before members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. “Our fire rings have been enjoyed for more than 60 years by folks from all over,” Frymire said, as she thanked supervisors for passing a motion by Don Knabe, whose 4^th District includes Dockweiler Beach. The motion called on the board to oppose any action by the AQMD to ban fire rings region-wide and to leave such decisions to local jurisdictions. The Orange County Board of Supervisors, among other local government bodies, had earlier passed similar measures.

Now, given the shift in position by the AQMD staff, it looks increasingly likely that, at least in L.A. County, fire pits will no longer be a burning issue.

Posted 6/5/13

With the launch of a bus lane on Wilshire, a new chapter in the street's storied traffic history was opened.

Every two minutes during rush hours, Metro buses roll—or, rather, crawl—down Wilshire Boulevard, carrying tens of thousands of riders along one of Los Angeles County’s most clogged arteries.

But beginning Wednesday, those passengers may find a modest measure of relief from the blockage with a new 1.8 mile stretch of curbside bus lanes between MacArthur Park and Western Avenue. By late next year, according to Metro officials, the Wilshire Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes will span 7.7 miles—with a one-mile gap through Beverly Hills—ending at Centinela on the border of Santa Monica.

Metro predicts that the $31 million project could improve peak-hour travel times for riders by as much as 24 percent, or 15 minutes, between downtown and Santa Monica.

During a media briefing and ribbon-cutting on Tuesday, Metro board member and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who’s long championed dedicated bus lanes, called the introduction of the Wilshire BRT’s first segment “a signal day for Los Angeles.”

With quicker, less stressful trips for bus riders, Yaroslavsky said, “there’s no question that their quality of life will be improved significantly.”

Yaroslavsky acknowledged that there’s been speculation and anxiety among some commuters over the potential traffic impact of eliminating a lane for cars in each direction during rush hours. “I hope people will give it a chance,” he said, then added: “I know they will.”

Dedicated bus lanes are seen as a crucial component in Los Angeles’ multi-faceted effort to reduce the region’s legendary traffic and encourage the use of mass transit—from subways to light rail to dedicated busways—all of which have increasingly been embraced by the public. Metro officials hope that the Wilshire Boulevard BRT will coax even more drivers out of their cars when they see a potentially faster alternative.

Metro’s project manager for the Wilshire BRT, Martha Butler, acknowledged that there could be some initial congestion in the “mixed use” lanes as drivers adjust to the famous boulevard’s new peak-hour realities. “But they’ll get more used to it,” she said, as the project progresses, one segment at a time.

Butler also said there’ll be “a grace period,” during which Los Angeles police officers will give warnings to drivers who improperly use the lanes on weekdays between 7- 9 a.m. and 4- 7 p.m. After that, they’ll get ticketed.

In all, the Wilshire BRT will encompass 12.5 miles, although only 7.7 miles will have designated bus lanes. The project, funded with a mix of federal and local monies, will also include street and signage improvements.  

Before the Wilshire BRT project, the only other designated bus lanes in L.A. were along Figueroa Street from Adams Boulevard to 7^th Street in the Downtown area. For more information, click here.

Supervisor Yaroslavsky said the first segment of the Wilshire bus lanes represented "a signal event in Los Angeles." Photo by Josh Southwick/Metro

Posted 6/4/13

An artist's rendering of the Natural History Museum's new entry, with a fin whale skeleton suspended above.

Los Angeles was a hard-partying hick town when top-hatted civic leaders opened its first museum, toasting it with water from the then-day-old Los Angeles Aqueduct. The fairground where the new landmark stood had been a nest of saloons and gamblers. L.A. was so culturally young that, for its first acquisition, the museum touted a goldfinch nest from the San Gabriel River bottom.

But a century can make such a difference.

On June 9, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will kick off its centennial with a day and night of hoopla in the rowdy ex-fairground that is now called Exposition Park. The festivities—with kid-friendly activities, food trucks, garden tours, live music, scientists and a nighttime concert by DEVO—will not only honor one of the nation’s largest and best-known natural history museums, but also will mark a milestone in the decade-long renovation and restoration.

The museum’s hallmark 65-foot fin whale will welcome guests from the top of a dramatic new glass entrance. Two Expo Line Metro stops will ferry visitors who prefer to arrive via L.A.’s burgeoning mass transit system.

Parking lots were removed to add gardens and habitat.

A 3.5-acre Nature Garden will blossom outside a companion, state-of-the-art Nature Lab, where visitors can study wildlife, see it in action and then collaborate with science lovers region-wide in crowdsourced “citizen science” projects. Nearby, the museum’s acclaimed new Dinosaur Hall and award-winning Age of Mammals exhibits, both already opened, will be joined in July with the unveiling of the renovation’s final piece, “Becoming Los Angeles,” a permanent installation on the development of Southern California.

Meanwhile, visitors will be able to get a local history fix in the halls and rotunda of the 1913 building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and which has been restored and seismically strengthened.

“If you haven’t visited the Natural History Museum in a while, you should be prepared to find a vastly different institution,” says President and Director Jane Pisano.  “This is a museum that has transformed itself.”

Pisano says the remodel arose from a change of philosophy at the museum.

“The old philosophy was very typical of natural history museums everywhere,” she says. “It was all about us—how we do research, how we take care of collections—and we changed that mission to focus on the visitor.”

The new aim, she says, is not to be “a book on a wall,” but to inspire wonder and a sense of discovery and responsibility in those who come to the museum. “We were doing a good job on wonder, but not so well on discovery and least well on inspiring a sense of responsibility for the natural world.”

Nor, she says, was the museum working as well as it could with Southern California’s natural landscape.

“There are very few cities that have the kind of climate we have,” she noted. So with the help of a new, county-funded garage that has consolidated parking, acres of paved land were transformed into wildlife habitat and gardens. Meanwhile, the building’s grand architecture was tweaked to create an easier flow between indoor and outdoor wonders.

Now visitors can take in the museum’s longstanding highlights—the dinosaur bones, the marine fossils—but also enjoy workshops led by master gardeners in the edible garden and unleash their kids in a “Get Dirty Zone.” The remodel also has set the stage for a long-term “citizen science” study of local biodiversity that museum experts expect to stretch throughout the Los Angeles Basin.

“This is a place where living things will come in and we can appreciate them in the wild,” says Karen Wise, the museum’s vice president of education and exhibits. “We don’t have to just have dead things on display.”

The new Natural History Museum isn’t the only cultural institution in Southern California to be reimagining the museum experience ways that are more authentic to L.A.  The Los Angeles County Museum of Art under Director Michael Govan also has taken a more indoor-outdoor approach with installations such as Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” and Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” on its campus. In fact, on the same day as the Natural History Museum celebration, LACMA will unveil a proposed architectural remodel that would make the county’s 50-year-old art museum literally transparent to visitors.

“I love letting the light in,” says Pisano. “I think it changes everything about the museum. I love that it’s fun, and I love that it has become a destination where visitors of all ages can come and spend the day and still not see it all.”

And, she says, there’ll be more to love as the next century gets underway at the museum. Pisano says the renovation has upgraded about 60 percent of the public space on the campus, with plenty of projects on the horizon.

“We need to redo the auditorium,” she says. “There still are exhibit galleries that need to be re-presented. We need to redo our Gem and Mineral Hall. We’ve talked about a Hall of the Americas for a long time.

“There’s a lot to be done,” says the museum director, “but I’m so optimistic about the future of this place.”

The Natural History Museum's newly renovated and acclaimed Dinosaur Hall.

Posted 5/29/13

James Turrell's stunnng "Breathing Light" is part his new LACMA retrospective. Photos by Florian Holzherr

When Denver art dealer Adam Gildar heard about the James Turrell retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he went straight to the museum’s website for advance tickets to the widely anticipated show. Bound for L.A. with some collectors during the July 4 weekend, Gildar was particularly hoping to see “Light Reignfall,” a mind-blowing, one-person-at-a-time Turrell light show in a spherical tank that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Unfortunately for him, so, apparently, is just about everyone else.

The Turrell show—packed since its opening last week, with “Light Reignfall” reservations sold out until late August—is shaping up to be one of this summer’s hottest tickets, and not just at LACMA.

On June 9, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will showcase a cross-section of large and small works from its collection by the pioneering, Los Angeles-born artist. In New York, starting June 21, the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum will be turned into a gigantic Turrell light piece.

Over on La Brea Boulevard, Turrell’s gallery, Kayne Griffin Cocoran, last week opened a new space designed by the artist, with a show tracing the 37-year history of his still-incomplete magnum opus, “Roden Crater.” The new gallery also has a signature Turrell “skyspace,” a part-skylight, part-lightshow creation that has become the new must-have architectural feature for art lovers. More than 80 have been installed worldwide, mostly for private collectors, including at least a half-dozen in homes and galleries in Los Angeles County.

Turrell's "Key Lime" covers a wall in a pitch-black room.

“It is sort of a festival of James Turrell,” says LACMA Director Michael Govan, who co-curated the LACMA show and whose relationship with the white-bearded artist dates back to Govan’s last job at the Dia Art Foundation in New York.

And, Govan adds, the festival will be a long-running one.

Turrell’s medium is light, colored and natural, manipulated in ways that are designed to engulf and disorient the viewer. But because many of his artworks are built so that only a limited number of people can experience them at once, LACMA is expecting crowds to move much more slowly than usual through the exhibition.

“Tickets to that show are like Stones tickets,” an artist’s liaison for a large L.A. gallery confided earlier this week. “Everybody wants in.”

As a result, the museum is selling timed tickets, both to the retrospective and to high-demand pieces such as “Light Reignfall,” and extending the show for almost a year so that anyone who wants to can eventually see it. The exhibit also will stay open until 11 p.m. on Fridays from July 5 to August 30 as part of extended summer hours at LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.

For some, the thrill is in seeing the artist’s work on its home turf. Now 70, Turrell pioneered Southern California’s Light and Space Movement and made his name in L.A.

Others are looking forward to literally immersing themselves in the pieces.

At a press preview this week, a woman—helped by a pair of attendants in white lab coats—emerged from “Light Reignfall” dazed and comparing the experience to the aura from a somehow-painless migraine. Meanwhile, crowds of donors and arts writers stood in line for up to an hour for a chance to take off their shoes and climb a black-carpeted pyramid into “Breathing Light,” a 5,000-square-foot installation that creates the sensation of being suspended in a fog of luminosity.

Still others are curious about “Roden Crater,” the massive installation and “naked-eye observatory” that Turrell has been building for decades in a volcanic crater near Flagstaff, Az.

“There was a time when I was kind of worried about my career, like many mid-career artists, and thinking maybe I was going nowhere,” the artist chuckled at Wednesday’s press conference. “Now if you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, you’re probably somewhat near my work.”

Turrell jokingly compared the crater installation to an unfinished doctoral thesis, and kidded that he was raising money for its completion by “selling blue sky and colored air.” More seriously, he said this summer’s exhibition of his work has drawn attention to the multi-million-dollar project. And, he noted, his skyspace commissions not only have helped underwrite his larger work, but also have informed it, capturing light in its infinite variety.

“I remember when we had backyard burning in Pasadena, and tremendous smog here, but it’s a special, soft, beautiful sky we have here now,” he said. “Arizona has a crisp, clear, hard sky. Each of these places is different, city and country, and I like to celebrate all the different kinds of skies.”

Back under the Denver sky, Gildar the art dealer is looking forward to the retrospective, with or without “Light Reignfall.” It is, after all, the largest-ever survey of the artist’s work and the first in nearly 30 years.

And a fan can hope. Shut out at LACMA’s web site, he ran an ad offering $20 over the ticket price on Craigslist to anyone willing to sell their 12 minutes of Turrell immersion. “But it doesn’t look like there’s much of a possibility that that’s going to work out,” he says, “and that’s okay. It’ll be amazing to see any of his work.”

Tickets for the immersive "Light Reignfall" are sold out until August. Seen here in Moscow in 2011.

Posted 5/29/13

As the gunfight exhibit winds down, it grabs the attention of Karen Lopez and her children.

For a bunch of fabled Western gunslingers, they’re a pretty static bunch, lurking laconically in the dark until somebody walks by, pushes a button and briefly illuminates one of the most notorious street fights in American history.

For the past quarter century, the nine life-sized mannequins that make up the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” exhibit on the lower level of the Autry Museum have kept a low profile as tens of thousands of visitors traipse by and listen to a 2-minute recording about what happened in Tombstone, Arizona on that fateful day in 1881.

“Step back with us,” the narrator intones, “for a legendary moment, frozen in time.”

But now, at long last, those stationary figures in the old-school diorama are on the move—on their way to that Great Shootout in the Sky. (Or perhaps to the Burbank Historical Society.)

The O.K. Corral exhibit is closing on Sunday, June 2, to make room for a new exhibition, “Western Frontiers: Stories of Fact and Fiction,” which opens in July and will provide a showcase for historically significant firearms and related items from the museum’s collection, including recent donations from noted collector George Gamble.

Since the O.K. Corral exhibit didn’t fit neatly into any official school curriculum guides, field trip groups at least in recent years have tended to pass it by, or leave it up to individual students to check it out on their own. But some docents have had a soft spot for the diorama—which depicts the Earp brothers and their ally, Doc Holliday, in a deadly showdown with rivals—and made sure to always route their groups toward it as they toured the museum.

“It’s been a sort of kitschy favorite of visitors over the years,” said Stacy Lieberman, the Autry’s vice president of communications and visitor experience.

The curatorial staff has been, umm, less enthusiastic.

One former curator, when he learned of its impending demise, offered to come back to be “the first person to swing the ax,” said Jeffrey Richardson, the museum’s current curator of Western history, popular culture and firearms.

Richardson goes so far as to call it “a huge waste of space,” pointing out that the exhibit makes no attempt to provide any context for the event it so briefly describes.

“One thing that people simply overlook more than anything else is that the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was fought about gun control,” he said. “You had one group that was illegally bringing arms into town and you had another group that was trying to stop them.”

Plus, “there was a love triangle between two individuals in the group,” he said. “All of this, you don’t get that context from what we have here.” (For more on that love triangle and a fascinating woman of the West, check out the new book “Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp.” The author, Ann Kirschner, appears Saturday, June 1 at the museum.)

For all of the O.K. Corral exhibit’s shortcomings, the reasons for phasing it out do not include concerns about showcasing firearms in the current era of profound divisions over the role of guns in American life.

In fact, the tenor of the times and the museum’s mission demand an even-handed exploration of guns and culture, Richardson said.

“It is not only appropriate, it is imperative that a museum like the Autry, that looks at the larger history of the American West, deal with an issue like firearms because firearms were absolutely essential in the history of this particular region,” Richardson said. “To tell the story of the American West without addressing firearms, not only is it inaccurate, but it does a disservice to people on both sides of the debate.”

“We’re not saying it should be glorified, or condemned,” he added. “What we are hoping to do is take an approach that puts the firearm in its appropriate historical context.”

Thus the new exhibit will deal with guns and personalities from the “historic and the mythic West,” including Annie Oakley, described by Richardson as “the most famous sharpshooter to come out of the Wild West.”

Curator Jeffrey Richardson with Steve McQueen's gunbelt from "Wanted Dead or Alive."

It also will include the gun belt—with its preposterously oversized bullets—worn by Steve McQueen in the TV series “Wanted Dead or Alive,” which ran for three seasons ending in 1961.

The bullets “were huge and they looked really intimidating,” Richardson said. “Those bullets would never fit into the actual gun, but they looked really, really cool on TV.”

Such elements in the new exhibit “get to the notion of what we know about the West,” he says. “People 100 years ago knew about the West because of Wild West shows. We know about the West because of TV and film.”

And now, of course, because of the Internet, where YouTube is keeping alive what will soon be a part of the Autry’s own history: the disappearing O.K. Corral diorama, which opened when the museum did in 1988.

As the exhibit ticked down its final hours this week, small groups paraded by. Even on its last legs, it commanded attention—and even a certain level of respect—from those who stopped to take a look.

“I hate that,” whispered four-year-old Kayleen Lee, who hid behind her mother as the exhibit narrator launched into his spiel. “I’m scared about them talking about guns.”

“Scary!” said her brother, six-year-old Derrick Lee. “They talk and I think they’re going to move.”

Their mother, Karen Lopez, found it a teachable moment.

“I hate guns. They don’t even have water guns,” she said of her children. But giving them a chance to learn about firearms and history “is very important. They’re like, ‘Why don’t you like guns?’ and I try to tell them the history behind it. I try to explain to them why it’s a sensitive subject.”

Annie Oakley's gold-plated gun, engraved with the sharpshooter's name, will be on display in the new exhibit.

Posted 5/30/13

Mandy Patinkin sings Broadway classics and popular songs at the Ford on June 9.

Oh sure, millions know Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson, the charismatic and intense CIA chief on Showtime’s critically acclaimed  “Homeland,” with its legions of obsessive fans. Multitudes have howled at Bill Hader’s brilliant impersonation of Patinkin’s character on Saturday Night Live, and some have even liked the Facebook page “One Million Fans of Mandy Pantinkin’s Beard.” Zach Braff was no doubt speaking for many when he praised two of Patinkin’s most famous roles when he recently added him to the cast of his new Kickstarter-financed movie:

“When I was a child, my favorite movie was ‘The Princess Bride.’ Now that I am an adult, my favorite TV show is ‘Homeland.’ They have one thing in common: one of my favorite actors of all time is joining us to play my father: Mandy Patinkin.”

But this is not just some pop culture flavor of the month—this is Mandy Patinkin we’re talking about. And in between the childhood delights of “Princess Bride” (with the enduring catch phrase “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”) and the grownup pleasures of “Homeland” lies Patinkin’s vast and distinguished career as a star of the Broadway musical stage.

It will be this Mandy Patinkin—winner of a Tony for his role as Che Guevara in “Evita,” nominated for his star turn in “Sunday In The Park With George”—who takes the stage of the county’s Ford Amphitheatre on Sunday, June 9, at 8 p.m. to perform an array of Broadway classics and popular songs with the Pasadena Pops.

Patinkin’s performance inaugurates the Zev Yaroslavsky Signature Series, in which nationally renowned artists play the Ford as a complement to the amphitheatre’s traditional programming showcasing homegrown L.A. talent. A second Signature Series performance on August 10 will feature the New York-based Complexions Contemporary Ballet troupe, appearing with Los Angeles’ own Lula Washington Dance Theatre. Proceeds from both concerts will benefit the Ford Theatre Foundation.

Even though Patinkin’s repertoire stretches from Shakespeare to Sondheim to Showtime, this performance marks his first appearance at the Ford. Tickets for this slice of showbiz history start at $50; click here to order. After all, Season 3 of Homeland doesn’t start until September 29.

Patinkin plays opposite Claire Danes in "Homeland." Showtime photo/Ronen Akerman

Posted 5/29/13