Long before she became a landscape architect, decades before she landscaped schools, ports, airports and parks, Lynn Capouya gathered discarded Christmas trees. “I was five or six,” she explains, “And I thought they were so beautiful. I went through my neighborhood and dragged them back to my house. It was [continue reading]
On Monday, April 4, 1960, the same day the 1959 Academy Awards were held at RKO’s Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, Peter Kiewit Sons Co. completed a bridge across the Sepulveda Pass. Ben Hur, still considered a landmark film, won the Best Picture award that year. The new Mulholland Drive Bridge [continue reading]
Bonnie Verdin loves spaghetti, although she wishes she saw less of it during her work day. Verdin is not a chef. For the I-405 Improvements Project, her title is Supervisor, Third Party Administration. But when she thinks of the tangle of underground utilities that must be moved to construct the [continue reading]
Commuters and neighbors can see that the I-405 uses a sophisticated system of lanes, ramps and signage to move hundreds of thousands of vehicles each day. What few see is the comprehensive drainage system beneath the I-405 road surface. Miles of drains under the I-405 carry runoff from rain falling [continue reading]
Kay Greeley freely admits that she is a tree hugger. She estimates that she has examined 50,000 trees during her career, which is a large number of hugs by any measure. Greeley even has favorite trees: two native oaks (coast live oak and valley oak) and the California sycamore. “I [continue reading]
