Ray Bradbury home's demise has LA re-examining its history

It was the house where Ray Bradbury wrote "Something Wicked This Way Comes," and when the bulldozer came to knock it down literary scholars and preservationists were aghast.

The bright yellow home with the big bay windows where the author lived and worked for 54 years wasn't the first Los Angeles landmark to be flattened of course. The statuesque Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, is now the site of a public-school complex.

Still, in a city where not much seems to last very long, the Bradbury home's destruction came as a surprise in part because the guy who knocked it down was one of the city's most prominent architects and Los Angeles is in the midst of what officials call the most far-reaching study of historical structures undertaken by any city.