Owens was once a vast lake, but in 1913, an aquaduct was constructed to feed its waters into the growing City of Los Angeles. As the lake dried up, towns like Keeler, which attracted revenue from both its mines and its lakeside location, transformed into hot, marshy patches of land. And Keeler didn't just lose tourist revenue from the disappearance of the lake. Once Owens vanished, Keeler was plagued by pervasive dust storms, including old mining chemicals kicked up from the now dry lake bed.

A lawsuit forced the Los Angeles Water Department to build pools in an attempt to restore Keeler's ecosystem, and continued mining encouraged some residents to stay through the 1960s and 1970s, but continued dust storms and lung cancer deaths eventually pushed even the hardiest souls out of town. Today, Keeler ranks as the second dustiest place on Earth, after Kazakhstan's Aral Sea, and only a ghost town remains.

Strange Geographies: the Little Town That Los Angeles Killed [Mental Floss]

New York

Los Angeles

Chicago

Washington, DC

San Francisco

Tokyo

London

Paris

Additional Reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz.

My biggest beef with these shirts (aside from the giant crane in lieu of one of Tokyo's already gigantic movie monsters), is that more cities need to be represented. Where is the San Juan Chupacabra? The Vancouver Sasquatch? I'd even settle for a Montauk Monster.

T-shirts are available for $17 from Stussy.

[via Hide Your Arms]

Kidney writes:

My current home is near the top of Mt Washington, and several times a week I jog down this same street to catch the Metro Rail at the bottom of the hill. As I hike back up, panting, I sometimes imagine I'm being passed by one of the iron cars of the Los Angeles and Mount Washington Railway. Inside, the passengers in their colorless hats and collars sit on wooden benches gazing out at the passing front yards. And as they go by, I realize not one of them can see me.

So cool. Reminds me of the post we did a while back on the alternate history of public transportation projects that almost happened.

Ghosts of Mnt. Washington [via Dinosaurs and Robots]

As you can see above, the city of Los Angeles would look a lot less ugly and disheartening if you could just wipe this traffic jam (photographed by The Infamous Gdub) out of existence and bring the city's formerly glorious cable car system back to life. If you ever want to see the LA cable car system of yore, it makes many exciting appearances in Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last!.

Right now, the city of Baltimore is considering upgrading its mass transit to include aerial gondolas, a system of elevated trams on cables with a tiny carbon footprint. They would initially service mostly the convention center and waterfront areas, but could branch out all over the city. Apparently gondola-makers have recently seen a spike in requests for mass transit systems, and even New York City is considering an aerial gondola to take commuters from Manhattan to Governor's Island and on to Brooklyn. Here is what the proposed gondolas might look like on a typical Baltimore city street (original photo from Zaloudek.net).

Seattle has a long and tragic history with monorails, once believed to be the public transit of the future. Just recently, the city voted to expand its tiny, largely-decorative monorail system, built for the World's Fair back in the 1960s. But urban planners have been trying to make Seattle a monorail city since 1910, when a Seattle monorail was first proposed (and shelved). We have yet to see whether the city will act on this latest vote for the monorail, but this is what you might see in downtown Seattle (original photo by GiSuser) if the system started ferrying commuters.

Although Melbourne has one of the most extensive electronic tram systems in the world, it might have been much bigger if early-twentieth century plans to expand it hadn't been derailed. If you look at images of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, you'll see a peaceful city full of trams and horses, but no traffic jams. Here's what Melbourne might look like today if the automobile had never taken over, and the city had become a haven for trams.

If you've ever visited San Francisco, you know that the downtown area is dominated by a wide street called Market (original photo by Hyku). What you probably don't know is that Market is actually a gushing river that early city planners decided to bury underground just to make everything nicer for carriages — and, later, cars. If we'd built San Francisco to cooperate with the region's actual geography, downtown San Francisco might have a system of canals like the ones in Venice (original photo by Minnaert). People could boat to work instead of burning gas in their cars.

Photoshoppage on all images by Stephanie Fox.

When Blade Runner came out in 1982, Cinefex devoted an entire issue to the movie, complete with scads of Syd Mead's concept art. They later became collector's editions, and were hard to track down. If you were lucky enough to find one, it would usually set you back a hundred bucks. However, Titan Books put out a special edition hardcover edition a few years ago, and you can pick one up for about sixteen bucks. It may not come with an accompanying floppy record full of jazz riffs or even Vangelis tunes, but it does featuring some truly amazing concept design from one of the masters.

Author Dave Eggers of McSweeneys and A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius started 826 Valencia in San Francisco as a tutoring and writing center for students, and they now have locations in New York, Los Angeles, Michigan, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle, with more coming soon. Many of the locations feature themed stores that generate both traffic and money for the non-profit centers: San Francisco has a pirate store, New York has a superhero goods company, Seattle has a space travel supply company, and now Los Angeles has a time travel mart.

You can hit this link for an exhaustive rundown of all the products they sell. We particularly like the Evil Robot Memory Eraser and the Drinkable Languages.

Time Travel Mart [826 LA] (Thanks Alan!)

There's a lot more to see — just click on an image to get to the full gallery.

While the gallery was packed tighter than Emma Frost's pants, next door at Golden Apple artists were signing pieces and doing original sketches for fans, with all proceeds going to The Hero Initiative, a non-profit organization that helps comic book artists and writers in hard times. Stan Lee came in, flashed his grin around the gallery, flitted over to the comic book shop to sign some items for the charity, and then vanished into the night.

We spoke briefly to artist Sarah Coleman who painted a huge Scarlet Witch piece for the show. Admittedly not a "comic book person" to begin with, Coleman struck out on her own and did a lot of research on Marvel characters before settling on Wanda Maximoff and her magical powers. Although she was quick to point out to us that Wanda's powers "were initially math-based, giving her the ability to affect probability." Rewrites over the past few years have changed her ability from "hex magic" to "chaos magic," and she's now one of the most powerful mutants in the Marvel universe.

So, you do learn something new every day, true believer. We feel like we should have known this and retreated into the night ourselves, but not before shouting "Excelsior!" at several random passers by.

Here is Davis' list of ways LA is destroyed in literature, with number of occurrences, for your contemplation:

Nukes, 49
Earthquakes, 28
Hordes (invasion), 10
Monsters, 10
Pollution, 7
Gangs/terrorism, 6
Floods, 6
Plagues, 6
Comets/tsunami, 5
Cults, 3
Volcanoes, 2
Firestorms, 2
Drought, 1
Blizzard, 1
Devil, 1
Freeway, 1
Riot, 1
Fog, 1
Slide, 1
Bermuda grass, 1
Global warming, 1
Sandstorm, 1
"Everything," 1

Needless to say, Davis moved out of LA to Hawaii several years ago.

We say he's been hard at work, because this film premiered at Cannes amidst some pretty dismal reviews. In fact, some of the reviews were so bad that they make the two word review Spinal Tap got for Shark Sandwich look eloquent in comparison.

He's added over 100 visual effects shots to a film that "wasn't ready" for Cannes in an effort to clarify the story. Does that mean that George Lucas was saying that the Star Wars flicks weren't ready when he put them out with all new effects?

We'll let you know if it worked when we're sitting front and center for its November 14th premiere. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plus Sarah Michelle Gellar plus Seann William "Stifler" Scott plus 100 new visual effects shots = we have to see what comes out of this mix. That's not even mentioning the musical number from Justin Timberlake.

Southland has new shots [Sci-Fi Wire]