Dan Koeppel's Blog

The Effie-Mohawk Stairway has been reopened, and the illegally-placed gates that were put up there over this past Thanksgiving weekend have been taken down.
Sort of.
My friends and stair-climbing partners Andrew Lichtman and Ying Chen were the first to report this, and sent these pix (click to enlarge.)
In the tradition of not being overly thankful for [...]

QUICK SUMMARY: a new gate has been put up – illegally – on one of Echo Park’s historic stairways. Read the full report, below, to find out what you can do about it.
Friday, November 27. Working on new stairway routes with a bunch of friends; we take a late-afternoon walk that mainly runs north and [...]

13 miles, Shrine Auditorium to Venice, party afterward – Saturday, Nov. 21.
Learn more: The Great Los Angeles Walk: The Great Los Angeles Walk 2009 is Tomorrow!.
Planning to use mass transit? Here’s an info packet I made (PDF file, password for downloading is “glaw”.

Most beautiful milk carton ever, from Finland’s Valio supermarket chain, even after an apparent attack by the helmet mafia…

From Dump.com.

I just got the awesome new Tweetie 2 twitter client for the iPhone. My favorite feature is the ability to automatically search for nearby tweets and put them on a live Google map. I live near the busy Hollywood freeway. This is what’s happening at 5PM on a Friday afternoon:
BTW, according to Sigalert.com, traffic speeds [...]

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

Heinous. Fake signs, fake laws, intimidation. That’s not DIY – that’s theft. Great job from the KNBC reporter, though I think she could have focused blame a bit harder on restaurants that hire the valets.

Possibly the most beautiful – and dysfunctional – 70-year-old in America; I’m a guest contributor to Streetsblog LA today, and wrote about it…

Read it here: Streetsblog Los Angeles » A Bitter Ode to Union Station.

Last July, I wrote an article in Bicycling magazine about our hometown “Department of DIY,” the group that painted a much-needed bike lane on bridge that crossed the Los Angeles River - a spot that where a lane had been proposed, promised, and even funded by the city, over and over again, but where no facility [...]

It doesn’t include stairways, but it is a neighborhood parade – we’re going, and so should you. The route travels down Sunset Blvd., roughly from Alvarado St. to Elysian Park Ave. Perfect for kids, jingling bells, and supporting what is (arguably) the most walkable section of our city’s most important thoroughfare. You can even create [...]

I’ll be talking about the Cavendish banana – our supermarket breed – and why it is an economic, political, and culinary dead end – organic, fair trade, or conventional. I’ll be offering a picture of what a future banana – one that helps correct a century of social and environmental justice – might look like. [...]