Category: Culver City

Once reluctant to acknowledge the problem, Culver City is getting proactive By Gary Walker For some people, seeing is believing. After a Jan. 18 homeless count in Culver City, many volunteers came away with a new perspective: There actually are people in Culver City who have no place to live. “It’s an eye-opening experience for first-timers,” said Dr. Ira Diamond, who led the homeless count and chairs the city’s Committee on Homelessness. While public parks in the “Heart of Screenland” are not magnets for homeless encampments and the city’s well-kept, tree-lined streets do not harbor caravans of vehicle dwellers,...

A homemaker’s unlikely friendship with a homeless man inspires hope for a better tomorrow By Stephanie Case Under the freeway overpass where the 90 crosses the 405, Nathalie Boutin and Akinwale Adubi struck up an unlikely friendship. Boutin, a French-born homemaker and mother of two, was driving a shortcut down Culver City’s industrial Selmaraine Drive when she spotted Adubi riding a bright green bicycle. Tied to his handlebars were a dozen trash bags, each stuffed with bottles and cans that had once been strewn across the sidewalk. Each day, Adubi pedals through the neighborhood, collecting recyclables to make a...

Experts display treasures from MGM’s Costume Collection Costumes can be like time capsules, especially if they reside in MGM’s Costume Collection. Behind the buttons and zippers there could be a wardrobe tag signed off with a scene number, a production number or an actor’s name. There even could be a famous star’s sweat embedded in the seams, explains Culver City Historical Society Costume Chair and Knott’s Berry Farm prop master Denice Renteria. “They were worn, they were worked in and then hung up,” she says. So any residue left behind …“it’s in there,” says Renteria. Making conserving such costumes...

Grassroots organizer Daniel Lee draws inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement to empower others By Regan Kibbee Driven by a passion for social justice and helping others, filmmaker and grassroots organizer Daniel Lee is passing lessons from his childhood on to today’s youth. A volunteer mentor at El Rincon Elementary School who developed a Civil Rights curriculum for the Culver City Teen Center, Lee credits his grandmother — who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in the Montgomery bus boycott — as an inspiration. When Lee was growing up in the South, she used to bring him along on...