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36 Hours - New York Times Google Map

Weekend travelers take note - Google Maps and the New York Times have partnered to create the 36 Hours - City by City guide.

 

A compilation of the Times' popular Friday Escapes pieces, the guide offers a map of America with rolliver tags indicating its archive of destinations. Articles cover offerings in less-heralded cities for travelers and smaller getaways towns, framed from Friday happy hour Friday to a late Sunday brunch.

Whether Houston hip hop or Minneapolis theater, Carolina bluegrass or Lake Tahoe trekking, the guide contains surprises worth investigating before you depart.

Downtown LA's Comeback

  Rooftop blue 
  Originally uploaded by Divwerf.

Once an urban blight, Downtown LA is now red-hot. Home to top restaurants, hotels and art centers, it's become a Hollywood success story: as A-list neighborhood.

Jay Cooke covers Downtown LA's ascendent mix for the May 2006 Business Traveler Magazine.

He traverses mixed-use neighborhoods, canvassing Chinatown galleres, the American Apparel home factory, the LA basin's last winery and the Downtown Standard Hotel rooftop bar.

A travel writer and change journalist, Jay Cooke covers California and the West for VIA, the San Francisco Examiner and the San-Francisco Bay Guardian, among others. He profiled socially responsible businesses in San Francisco for Business Traveler in September 2004.

And They're Off at Hollywood Park

   
  Originally uploaded by ibison4.

ON A RECENT Friday night in Los Angeles, we followed our friend Mindi to the races. Someone she knew had bet big on Giacomo, California's 50-to-1 long shot who snatched the Kentucky Derby in May.

They were  celebrating at Hollywood Park racetrack's venerable (and pricey) Turf Club. Jesse and I tagged along and hung with the trackside minions.

In a city renowned for its barriers, the track proved a grand equalizer. In the cheap seats, we found a gathering as diverse and eccentric as LA itself: migrant workers, multiethnic families, slumming young hotties, crusty old dudes with mustard on their pants.

Mindy found Vince Vaughn. who's hot.

Full story: And They're Off!  in the San Francisco Bay-Guardian Being There section.