Posts by Mike McPhate

Miles Davis lived his final years in Malibu. The jazz legend drove a yellow Ferrari and would get repeatedly pulled over by the police. “They ask me who I work for,” he said in a 1985 interview for SPIN. Davis preferred living in New York, “where the shit is really happening,” as he described it in his…

If Los Angeles freeways are arteries, the Stack functions like a pumping heart. The world’s first stack interchange — a meeting of freeways akin to a boating knot — became fully operational in September of 1953. The Stack, as it became known, diverged from the cloverleaf design common at the time. Faced with the challenge of…

Silicon Valley began with a bad boss. In 1956, the physicist William Shockley opened Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, recruiting some of the brightest young engineering minds. Shockley was a brilliant inventor and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. He was also, by many accounts, a lout. Before long, a core group of lab…

Along the slopes of the Sierra west of Lake Tahoe, several oddly symmetrical groups of trees rise from the middle of the forest. Shaped like wagon wheels, they are known as nelder plots and were planted in the 1990s as part of a study at the Blodgett Forest Research Station. The aim was to glean insights into resource…

Frederick Roberts is a major figure in California history whom few people have heard of. Born to a prominent businessman on this day in 1879, Roberts became the first Black graduate of Los Angeles High School. He attended USC and later worked as a school principal, mortician, and news editor. Then in 1918, at a…

A football-crazy institution, the University of California was desperate for a modern sports training facility in the early 2000s. The perfect place to put one, it decided, was next to the football stadium in a plot that also held a grove of stately trees — redwoods and pines, but mostly coast live oaks. Berkeley had…

Jenny Sampson, a Berkeley photographer, had been taking pictures of skateboarders for years. Then one day in early 2017, during a visit to a skate park in the Bay Area city of Emeryville, a new phenomenon caught her attention: about half a dozen young female skaters holding their own in a subculture traditionally dominated by…

On Aug. 31, 1986, Huntington Beach descended into chaos. A crowd of roughly 100,000 people had gathered for the annual Op Pro surf competition. The trouble started, reports said, after some men tried to rip the bathing suits off of two young women behind the bleachers. When officers came to the women’s aid, they were…

In Sequoia National Park in 1975, Michael McQuilken, 18, and his little brother Sean, 12, were climbing Moro Rock when they noticed the hair on their head was standing. They thought it was funny. Then — thwack! — a deafening flash of white light. Michael, he later recalled, felt the sensation of being lifted off the ground for…

As a marine biology teacher at the Ocean Institute in Dana Point, Stephen Hillenburg created a comic book called “Intertidal Zone” as an educational tool. He later studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts, then got a job at Nickelodeon, where he developed his “Intertidal Zone” characters. The result was “SpongeBob SquarePants.” The…

In 1992, a couple in Monrovia found a 500-pound American black bear soaking in their hot tub. He returned often, earning a nickname around town: Samson. When wildlife officials made plans to euthanize the bear, the outcry was so intense that Gov. Pete Wilson intervened, offering Samson a stay of execution. He was given a…

They used to smash trains into each other for amusement at California fairs. From the 1890s through the 1930s, head-on collisions of steam locomotives were a favorite pastime at festivals across America. Showmen would lay a stretch of tracks in a field and place two old trains at either end, facing each other. Engineers would then go full…

Presented as a gift from Osaka in 1960, the Kanrin Maru Monument on the northwestern edge of San Francisco commemorates the voyage of Japan’s first diplomatic mission to the U.S., which had been escorted to San Francisco by the Kanrin Maru warship a century earlier. Reporting on the historic 1860 encounter, the Sacramento Daily Union depicted…

When California added antislavery language to its constitution in 1849, it was motivated by greed as much as moral decency. Weeks before the convention, a Texan named Thomas Green had shown up along the Yuba River to join the Gold Rush. With him were 15 slaves, whose names Green used to establish grandiose mining claims. Appalled,…

I’ve got good news. When I started the Californian Sun more than two years ago, there was no guarantee it would succeed. But it’s become popular, considered a must-read among California journalists, policymakers, and everyday news junkies. The Sun is now in a great position to thrive for years to come. But to make that…

In the small town of Selah, Wash., a scuffle over the street chalk art of Black Lives Matter protesters drew national attention in 2020. Local authorities said chalk is graffiti, no matter how ephemeral. But protesters called it protected free speech. The clash was a familiar one, surfacing from time to time in cities across the…

Above is a public high school. Opened in 2009, Grand Arts High School has been called among the most controversial pieces of architecture to be built in Southern California in a generation. Rising from downtown Los Angeles, its most dramatic feature is the performing arts building, which includes a soaring fly tower wrapped in a waterslide-like form.…

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the U.S. government moved frantically to bolster its defenses along the Pacific Coast. Among the more ingenious projects: A giant fake suburb draped atop the Lockheed plant in Burbank. Initially rejected as harebrained, the idea was to convince potential airborne attackers that the known target…