City of Angels, City of Vice

Los Angeles is my hometown. As a writer and historian for many years, I have come to believe that L.A. is “the West’s most Western city.” Yale University Historian John Mack Faragher’s groundbreaking research and conclusions in Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (W.W. Norton, $35) confirms the idea. Growing up and going to school in North Hollywood near the film and television studios from 1964 to 1981, I was acutely aware of the real and imagined history of