In Nomine - The Sets

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== Notable Locations: ==
=== Los Angeles: ===
# Downtown -
#* Downtown has been L.A.’s heart for about 100 years despite Hollywood and its other suburbs trying to draw talent away. The oil boom of the 1920’s and the banking boom of the 1980’s both built their share of skyscrapers, but Downtown is still a place in search of a purpose. At its fringes, Downtown becomes seedy and shop-worn with affluent neighbourhoods directly bordering some of its poorest and most run down. Notable locations include:
#** City Hall, A tall white building about 95 years old. The Mayor of Los Angeles has an office in room 300. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 am, the Los Angeles City Council meets in its chamber.
#** The Metropolitan Detention Centre: 10-story state-of-the-art prison, holding up to 980 prisoners. Holds the top narcoterrorism managers and financiers in California, but resembles a hotel from the outside.
#** LAPD Headquarters - Opened in 2009, this building looks like a large glass cube inserted into a grey wedge. The LAPD have been regularly accused of racism, corruption, violation of civil liberties and excessive use of force. Recently they have begun to use drones and AI based "predictive policing", which have been heavily criticised by civil liberties groups.
#** University of Southern California (USC or SoCal): The grand rival university to the nearby UCLA, with a greater focus on the liberal arts. Its courses include: Cinematic arts, Architecture, Engineering, Communication and Journalism, Dentistry, Sports sciences and Dance.
#** The Financial District: Contains a number of corporate headquarters and is a mix of modern and early 20th Century designs. These include;
#*** Wilshire Grand Centre - Tallest building (335.3 m) West of Chicago. The building is part of a mixed-use hotel, retail, observation decks, shopping mall, and office complex.
#*** US Bank Tower (AKA Library Tower) - A 310.3 m tall skyscraper. The tower has a large glass crown at its top that is illuminated at night. It has a skylobby, exhibit hall, observation deck and the tallest rooftop helipad in the world. Primarily commercial spaces, with some hotel and rare residential floors.
#**The LA Central Library (AKA Richard J. Riordan Central Library) - Renovated in 1993 to overcome accessibility issues and cramped reading rooms, it now has an enormous, eight-story atrium wing dedicated to former mayor Tom Bradley. Now, the library contains an area of 538,000 square feet (50,000 m2), and has nearly 89 miles (143 km) of shelves and seating for over 1,400 people. It has famous collections of both maps (the 5th largest in the US) and photographs "The Shades of LA collection".
#**Elysian Park: A large urban greenspace on a slight hill. Contains the Dodger Stadium, the LAPD Police Academy, event spaces, an arboretum and a swing suspended from a tree that offers great views of the city.
#**Chinatown: Created around 1938, a replacement for the original which was bulldozed to make way for the construction of Union Station. Home to primarily Chinese-Vietnamese residents, but heavily gentrified and features bazars, art galleries and a large wishing sculpture. The current Chinatown was designed by Hollywood film set designers more than representing actual Chinese architecture. On the outskirts is a smaller Italian ghetto which contains; Phillipe's, the oldest restaurant in the city. Famous for its French Dip sandwiches.
#**Little Tokyo - Unlike a traditional ethnic enclave, there are relatively few Japanese residents in the area because of evacuation and internment. It is mainly a work, cultural, religious, restaurant and shopping district, because Japanese Americans today are likely to live in nearby areas. What is left of the original Little Tokyo can be found in roughly five large city blocks. Contains several Buddhist temples, Christian churches, schools, public museums, two Japanese public gardens, Sculptures, monuments, live performance theatres and galleries.
#**Skid Row - The original Skid Row for which all others are named. Surrounded by more affluent neighbourhoods. It is home to thousands of homeless people and has a high rate of violence and theft causing it to be one of the most heavily policed areas in downtown. Some artists in the area including the Los Angeles Poverty Department and artists who collaborated on a large mural in the area.
#**The Last Bookstore - One of the largest independent new and used bookstore, famous for using sculptures made from books to make interesting displays.
#**It also holds numerous small districts too numerous to mention here including: The Arts District, Fashion District, Flower District, Gallery Row, The Historic Core (contains the Broadway Theatre District and Old Bank district), Industrial District, Jewellery District, Toy District and Wholesale/Warehouse District
#*
# Beverly Hills
#* Beverly Hills not only lives up to its stereotype as the home of wealthy stars and extravagant parties, it exceeds it. The city of Beverly Hills – and the similar L.A. neighbourhoods of Brentwood, Bel Air, and Westwood – welcomes the rich and famous. Rodeo Drive holds the ultimate in luxurious, fashionable shopping, and tourists come to gawk at the shops as much as the homes of the stars. These homes sit well back on emerald lawns along winding, tree-lined streets; sprawling haciendas, Tudor mansions, and sleek, modernist temples to hedonism. For all its civility, Beverly Hills has been the site of uncivil events. Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family on Cielo Drive in Beverly Glen; the brutal murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Brentwood added to the area’s notoriety. The city of Beverly Hills widely opposed Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure which repealed legal recognition of same-sex marriages. In the midst of the 2015 drought, Beverly Hills was found to be one of the largest water consumers in California. This region is also the site of:
#** The new Getty Museum: Dedicated in 1997 on a hilltop between Brentwood and Westwood, the Getty houses a $1 billion art collection.
#** The Armand Hammer Museum, in Westwood, houses still more riches, including a da Vinci manuscript with 360 drawings.
#** The main campus of the UCLA is likewise sheltered in the 420 acre Westwood campus. Rivals to the USC which are based further downtown. They offer courses in: Arts and Architecture, Engineering and Applied Science, Music, Nursing, Public Affairs, and Theater, Film and Television and advanced degrees in: Medicine, Dentistry, and Public Health. Its three remaining schools are Education & Information Studies, Management and Law. 
#*** Overall the University enrolled about 31,600 undergraduate and 14,300 graduate and professional students each year, though it does have numerous satellite campuses elsewhere in LA. It is the most applied to university in the US.
#*** It has its own traditions including The Midnight Yell (During Finals Week, UCLA students yell as loudly as possible for a few minutes at midnight to release some stress from studying.) and the Undies Run (during the Wednesday evening of Finals Week, students run through the campus in their underwear or in skimpy costumes.) The LA Hacks (an annual hackathon where students from around the United States come to build technology products. LA Hacks established itself as the largest hackathon in the United States with about 1500 students entering).
#*** Its students and alumni have made major contributions to medicine (The Discovery of AIDS and the first PET scan, the first nerve and kidney transplants, ), Physics (Discovering 16 elements, including every element from neptunium (element 93) to seaborgium (106) including Californium (98)) and contributed its members to the Manhattan project. To Computer Sciences (Pioneering technologies that would be the foundation of the modern internet), Several important chemical reactions and Mathematics (partial differential equations, analytic number theory and arithmetic combinatorics.)
# Santa Monica: 
#* This region includes the city of Santa Monica and the L.A. neighbourhood of Venice. South of Venice, the houseboats of the middle class and the pleasure boats of the rich ride at anchor in Marina del Rey. The “People’s Republic of Santa Monica,” a very liberal yet very middle-class city, hugs the coast and offers a small slice of California nostalgia. “Homelessness is not a crime,” boasts Santa Monica’s liberal citizenry; it is not surprising that Santa Monica has a greater proportion of homeless than any other region of L.A.
#**Santa Monica’s walkable downtown and the attractive buildings and apartments reflect the open and accepting nature of the artists who live there (although opinions differ on the hyper modernist Edgemar business park on Main Street).
#** Santa Monica Pier is the West Coast’s oldest surviving pleasure pier; its carnival atmosphere dates from 1908.
#** The Santa Monica boardwalk pales in comparison with the human circus of Venice Beach to its south. Bodybuilders, rollerbladers, leather boys, jugglers, tarot card readers, and gaping tourists swarm the increasingly garish shore on warm summer days. Oddball shops line the boardwalk, although behind this façade lies a shabby neighbourhood in decline. Eccentric developer Abbott Kinney built Venice, complete with canals, in 1905, but after L.A. annexed the town in 1925, it paved over all but three canals and cracked down on the speakeasies that flourished there. Urban decay and the crack plague have further eroded Venice’s substantial charm.
#***
# Hollywood:
#*This region includes not only the actual neighbourhood (once a city itself) called Hollywood, but the whole stretch of the Westside intimately involved in what locals call “The Industry.” From south to north, this region includes Culver City (home to Columbia/Sony Studios), Century City (20th Century Fox Studios), Park La Brea (with CBS Television City on its north side), West Hollywood (Warner Bros. TV), Hollywood proper (CBS Radio/TV and Paramount), Los Feliz (ABC TV), Studio City and Universal City (CBS Studio Centre and Universal Studios, respectively), North Hollywood, and Burbank (Warner Bros., NBC. and Disney).
#*Although Hollywood itself is little but a seedy, touristy shadow of its former glory, the Westside remains the capital of the world’s media. This is also the region of L.A.’s “alternative” scene. Leather and piercing shops dot Melrose Avenue, incongruously in the heart of L.A.’s Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood. The famous West Hollywood Sunset Strip of nightclub and trendy bars is also the billboard capital of the world, with garish placards showing off hit movies, actresses’ talents, or fashionable vodkas.
#*West Hollywood is the gay and lesbian capital of L.A., with gay and lesbian clubs centred on Santa Monica Blvd. Artists focus on the “Design Triangle” between Santa Monica, La Cienega, and Beverly Blvds.; 200 showrooms fill the gigantic “Blue Whale” Pacific Design Centre, and the surrounding area contains300 design shops and showrooms.
#*Finally, the Antiquarius art and antique mall offers potential bonanzas for the artist seeking a fashion statement and the celestial seeking a missing talisman. The “Radio Free Hell” van, staffed by Soldiers of Janus (p. 83), mostly roams these streets.
#*Griffith Park, in the Hollywood Hills between Los Feliz and Burbank, has something for everyone. Forest Lawn Cemetery and the Los Angeles Zoo flank the north side of the park while the Griffith Park Observatory (with its statue of James Dean) guards the southern entrance. Watching over the whole is the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, on the west side of the park on the slope of Mt. Lee. 4,200 acres of wilderness, an antique carousel, and two golf courses complete the scene.
#*This area also has the La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
#San Fernando Valley
#*A million people live here on land that went from desert to farm to suburb in less than 50 years. The formerly independent towns of the Valley range in character from the stereotypical “Valley Girl” communities of Encino and Sherman Oaks to the poorer Hispanic towns like Pacoima, Tujunga, and Sun Valley. Near one such town, Chatsworth, Charles Manson’s family set up housekeeping on the abandoned Spahn movie ranch. Woodland Hills is home to the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, where aged and indigent actors spend their forgotten years. Major factories have closed down, leaving the Valley a patchwork of prosperity and poverty much like the rest of L.A. Small, anonymous buildings hold everything from technology startups to pornographic video studios.
#**
#South Central
#*Around a million black people are ghettoized into L.A.’s South Central region. Although some areas, like the middle-class black Baldwin Hills neighbourhood, still have hope and promise, the majority of South Central is the very image of urban decay. Cities and neighbourhoods like Watts, Florence, Lynwood, Compton, and Inglewood have become synonymous with gangs, drugs, and never-ending violence. To some extent, South Central is the inverse of Beverly Hills. South Central has other attractions, of course. 
#**Watts Towers: Perhaps the nation's best known work of folk art sculpture. Using simple hand tools, cast off materials (glass, shell, pottery pieces and broken tile) Italian immigrant Simon Rodia spent 30 years building a tribute to his adopted country and a monument to the spirit of individuals who make their dreams tangible. In 1990 it was designated a National Historic Landmark and a California Historical Landmark), 
#**St. Patrick’s church on the north edge of South Central. A Church built in 1907, destroyed and rebuilt after the 1933 Earthquake destroyed again in 1971 and not rebuilt until 2007. It has a long history of serving immigrant or marginalised communities including Irish and Germans in the 1900s, African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s, Mexicans in the 1950s and now Central Americans since the 1980s. 
#**The Kia Forum (Formerly "the Fabulous Forum" or just "The Forum"), a multi-purpose indoor arena in Inglewood. It's home to the L.A. Lakers basketball team and the Los Angeles Kings National Hockey League team. In 1984, the Forum hosted the basketball tournaments and the men's handball finals of the 1984 Summer Olympics.
#**LA Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park (a memorial to Los Angeles veterans of World War I. Completed in 1923). It will become the first stadium to have hosted the Summer Olympics three times when it hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics (it hosted previously in 1932 and 1984). Renovated in 2019 by the University of Southern California)
#**California African American Museum (CAAM) A Museum of African-American Art and the anchor the burgeoning Crenshaw neighbourhood of jazz clubs and coffee shops. Not even all the evil in Hell (or City Hall) can totally destroy the spirit of South Central.
#***
# Long Beach
#* This region includes the city of Long Beach and a mixture of elite privilege (Palos Verdes) and industrial grunge (San Pedro harbor). The west end of the region holds upper middle-class areas like Torrance, Manhattan Beach, and Redondo Beach. The dockyards of San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, are in the centre of the region, and the oil wells of Long Beach and Signal Hill abut Orange County on the east. This region is famous for the ocean liner Queen Mary, now a tourist attraction in Long Beach, and for the legal poker houses of Gardena. In Gardena, poker is officially a game of skill, so playing for money is not, technically, gambling. Gardena also holds a large part of L.A.’s Chinese and Tibetan communities – the cramped back alleys behind Gardena fantan parlours and Asian restaurants are a more genuine Chinatown than the Downtown neighbourhood of that name. 
#** The Palos Versed Peninsula is home to the height of Hollywood elite like Steven Spielberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Oprah Winfrey, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas.)
#** The port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach: A pair of deep water ports that supplies the state with the majority of its goods from China and beyond. This includes vital oil imports, as it doesn't have pipelines connecting it to the oil networks of the rest of America. This is also the cause of the much higher gas prices in the state. 
#** Long Beach Airport - Whilst LAX handles the majority of international passenger flights, Long Beach Airport carries much more domestic flights and carries the bulk of cargo flights, so they are a hub for UPS and Fed-Ex. It also includes a satellite launch site for Virgin Galactic. 
#** The Queen Mary was retired as an Ocean liner and became a stationary hotel on the coast. It is reputed to be haunted, whilst it was in need of very serious restoration work, not all of this has been completed yet, so it remains open only to limited tours. 
#***
#Orange County
#*Famed as the capital of suburban whitebread Republicanism, Orange County is perhaps best summed up as the home of John Wayne International Airport. There are some exceptions – Santa Ana has a large working-class Hispanic population, and Huntington Beach (home of the International Surfing Museum) is as full of slackers as West Hollywood – but Orange County is boring and built to stay that way. Its spiritual heart Disneyland, “the happiest place on Earth,” in central Anaheim. The Richard M. Nixon Birthplace and Library in Yorba Linda pretty much says it all. 
#**Disneyland - The Happiest Place on Earth and even more than its HQ, the spiritual centre of the Disney corporation, the first of its parks. With a larger attendance than any other theme park in the world.
#**Christ Cathedral (Garden Grove, California) - Former home of Crystal Cathedral Ministries, a televangelist group who produced a weekly television program "Hour of Power", but they went bankrupt and the church fell into Catholic possession. 
#***
# East LA
#* East Los Angeles is almost a city in its own right, with 120,000 people. The region includes the cities and neighbourhoods of East Los Angeles, Monterey Park, Montebello, Maywood, Pico Rivera, Whittier, Norwalk, and Downey. East L.A. is dominated by Hispanics (except for white Downey and Chinese Monterey Park) – not only Mexicans but Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Peruvian, and other Latin American immigrants. Besides a large Japanese garden in one of the largest cemeteries in the world (Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier), there is not much here to attract tourists, and plenty of stories of crime (East L.A. was the stomping ground of Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker”) and drugs to drive them away. Whittier Blvd, in East L.A., is a renowned low-rider cruising strip, the heart of youth culture in another blighted region. 
#**
#Pasadena
##Pasadena is best known as the home of the Rose Bowl stadium and its attendant parade, but this small and relatively diverse (in both income and ethnicity) city possesses a lot to recommend it. In nearby San Marino, for instance, the Huntington Gallery, Library and Museum contains paintings by Gainsborough, a Gutenberg Bible. and an archival copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls, among myriad other treasures. The Norton Simon Museum, in west Pasadena, has tremendous collections of classical art and Buddhist sculpture. North of that museum, on Orange Grove Blvd are the sumptuous Gilded Age mansions of Millionaire’s Row. For gloomier celestials, Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge is known as “Suicide Bridge,” from which many of those millionaires jumped after the 1929 crash. Finally, east Pasadena is the home of the California Institute of Technology and its associated Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the former famous for its pranks to rival MIT. 
##*
#San Gabriel
##The San Gabriel Valley is the “other valley” in the L.A. basin, and has much the same demographic mix as its more famous cousin. Like the San Fernando Valley, it is made up of a number of little towns (now an intermingled suburban sprawl), although they escaped annexation by L.A. since they had the San Gabriel Mountains watershed as a source of fresh water. Pomona is the site of the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds (the fair, the world’s largest, is held in September). One of the great American racetracks, Santa Anita Park, is in Arcadia, north of Temple City. San Gabriel, the site of the first European settlement in the Basin, is west of Temple City on the border of Pasadena
##*
#Malibu
#*The popular image of Malibu is of a town of millionaire surfer idiots who live in houses destroyed every year by fires or mudslides, or both. They’re not all idiots. The region of Malibu includes the similar community of Pacific Palisades, and the vast (230 sq. mile) Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The mountains are covered with scrub forest and hold many Indian archaeological sites. Topanga Canyon, running north-south through the mountains, is a well-known “New Age” community with its share of hippies and ashrams. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu is built in a reconstructed Pompeiian villa, and until the opening of the Getty Museum in Brentwood held pride of place among L.A. art museums. Malibu is also home to Pepperdine University. 
#Ventura County
#*The most recent of L.A.’s “white flight” suburban sprawls, Ventura County holds the cities of Simi Valley, Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, and Ventura, among others. The rolling residential hills of Ventura County are more pleasant than Orange County’s built-up suburbia, and the population is a little more laid-back. The John Spoor Broome Library here is built on the site of what was once the largest mental institution in the world, the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. After a law requiring judicial review of all involuntarily committed patients caused the number of admissions to fall, it found its self too large to be cost effective and its few remaining patients were transferred elsewhere. 
#LAX
#*LAX is the Los Angeles International Airport, the third busiest in the world. LAX’s nine terminals host (among others) British Airways, Air France, Lufthansa, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, Japan Airlines and Mexicana, along with all major U.S. carriers. The five-story Tom Bradley International Terminal is the centre of this beehive of activity. This region is also home to the Los Angeles Air Force Base, confusingly, this doesn't belong to the US Airforce but to the new US Spaceforce, and is the headquarters of the United States Space Force's Space Systems Command (SSC) and the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC)
#Catalina
#*Santa Catalina Island is the largest of the Channel Islands, lying 30 miles south of Long Beach. Passenger ferries leave from Long Beach and San Pedro, and from Newport Beach in Orange County. There’s even a passenger helicopter service from the Queen Mary Seaport in Long Beach, although it isn’t cheap. Catalina itself is mostly a nature preserve, with 400 indigenous species (including 100 varieties of birds). The town of Avalon, on Catalina’s northeast shore, is a seaside resort town overlooked by the Wrigley Mansion. Until the 1940’s it had a legal casino, which is now a museum and hotel. Getting to Catalina takes around 90 minutes for the ferry to make the crossing from Catalina to either Long Beach or Orange County.
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