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When it comes to L.A., I'm a smug native. I'm used to rejecting that urge to act like a tourist in my own city because I've already seen everything worth seeing.
Been there, done that.
But that was before I ran into West Gale, who vividly remembered asking for a picture of Billie Holiday from the famed singer herself at the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue. Ditto for Alejandro Garza who said he actually knew Simon Rodia, the creator of the Watts Towers.
And the smiling lady taking a walk on South Norton Street in Leimert Park knew why I kept staring at a certain pink stucco house in the 3800 block. I was trying to visualize the exact spot in a vacant field-long since filled up by houses-where the body of Elizabeth Short was discovered in 1947.
"That house wasn't built yet, but that's the place where they found the Black Dahlia lady," she says. "Cut in half she was."
Never in my own city have I muttered "I didn't know that" so many times.
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I went on a three-hour car tour of South-Central because a newly formed nonprofit coalition of community activists and groups has proposed some tours...