This house has better luck, except for the window... Flickr photo via iamrob

When I first moved to Echo Park, I had just graduated from college and moved into the cheapest apartment I could find. At $550 per month and with a roommate I found on Craigslist, I learned (after moving in) that my very first, very cheap post-college apartment had a bit of a, well, cockroach issue. And then we found the hole the mice were coming through. And the street this first post-college apartment was on had a bit of a crime issue. Suffice to say it wasn’t the best living, and not all streets in Echo Park are like that, but it worked at the time.

(Note: My first day there, with my U-Haul parked out front, an LAPD car pulled up. One of the officers asked us, “Who’s moving in?” I replied in my usual bubbly tone, “Me!!” They shook their heads and continued on… a sign of what to expect perhaps?)

Whatever the cockroach issues or the crime issue, one of the things I could never solve, however, was the LA Times newspaper delivery. While I realized it could be due to my zip code or maybe just because my street was really that bad, that Sunday Times never arrived, and after a couple of months of calling I couldn’t get a straight answer from the LA Times.

One of my fave blog reads, Franklin Avenue, posted about this issue today and revealed that the LA Times is now allowing subscribers to “opt-in” on receiving the LA Times Magazine along with their Sunday paper. Apparently the Magazine was only available in certain zip codes, and, as the blog describes: “…but, ahem, apparently Franklin Avenue HQ isn’t in an upscale enough part of SoCal.” We feel ya!

So now those “undesirable zip codes,” as Franklin Avenue describes it, can no receive both the Sunday Times and the Magazine… That is, if you can get the Times to deliver in the first place.