Gentle reader,
Early Saturday afternoon, we were wrapping up our last walking tour for a couple of weeks, the Westlake Park Time Travel Trip, when we got an emergency alert from a preservation pal.
Henry Lara, whose Angeleno Heart Instagram feed is a gorgeous blend of monochromatic street portraiture and short fiction, was a few miles south, looking with horror at an 1898 Victorian home that had been partially destroyed with a claw machine! Next to the house: a cool little corner cafe with an ancient backlit plastic Pepsi branded sign identifying it as Doss’s Corner.
We quickly did some digital reconnaissance on our way to the site: both cafe and house had been boarded up for years (Dov Charney had his eye on it in 2015), and the house had some minor fire damage. It was listed as a probate sale, and it changed hands for $700,000 on 2/28/2024.
A decade ago, the apparent new owner, Ronald Perlstein of Danco Housing, was reported to be collecting rents from vulnerable tenants in squalid, illegal conditions.
And despite Henry’s alarming photographs that looked as though a mechanical shark had taken a big bite out of the back of the house, there were no building or demolition permits pending on the property—much less any permits that have been approved.
Demolition of historic structures must be done safely, to ensure lead and asbestos are not spread throughout the community. And affordable housing units cannot be demolished without replacing them.
LADBS has been alerted about this illegal work, and there’s now an open investigation.
But inspectors can take months or years to review this kind of thing, and when we left the site there was a claw machine salivating to eat more of the Victorian duplex. The house is damaged, but it can be repaired. This needs to be stopped, and you can help.
Please take a moment to send an email, and also make a call, to Council District 9, expressing your concern. A short script is below, and you can fine tune it to reflect your own voice. The more people who email and call, the more likely it is that council staff will treat this urgently and act to get a stop work order posted.
Send your email to carlos.jauregui@lacity.org and xavier.clark@lacity.org and telephone 213-473-7009 and convey the same message.
Hello, I wish to express my concern about the unpermitted demolition happening to the RSO units at the Doss’s Corner property at 1057 E 23rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90011. Please work with LADBS to ensure this illegal work is stopped immediately, the housing units and historic cafe are protected and the site is secured. Thank you.
It shouldn’t be the responsibility of citizens to document, report and demand accountability when historic housing and commercial sites are threatened, but such is the state of things in Los Angeles. We truly believe that by holding our elected officials and city employees accountable and reminding them that we do expect them to do their jobs, that some of them will.
It’s particularly challenging when there’s a preservation crisis in a district where the councilmember has been accused of public corruption, as CD9’s Curren Price has been.
It’s infuriating to visit the CD9 website with its trolling front page photograph of the councilman and his alleged co-conspirator wife Del Richardson with their thumbs up in a parade, and to find that the contact link is malformed and the council deputy map is not accurate (Yenise Camacho still works for the city, but is no longer with CD9).
It would be easy to just get frustrated and turn away. But letting the whole office off the hook because the boss is a crook only hurts Angelenos.
There are people working for CD9 who work for you, and we’ve confirmed their contact info is correct. So call and email, don’t call them corrupt, instead treat them with respect and the expectation that they will do the right thing.
Let’s all help save Doss’s Corner, for the future, because it’s very cool.
Update 6/16/24: we checked the LADBS file and found that the second complaint about illegal demolition has been closed as a duplicate service request of the first complaint that was wrongly referred to vacant buildings. The illegal demolition is real, yet two inspectors have failed to do anything about it. This is rent controlled housing for Angelenos, and this is not okay.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles' past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city's soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. You can share this post to win subscriber perks. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking and bus tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
• Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 6/29) • The Real Black Dahlia (Sat. 7/6) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 7/13) • Miracle Mile Marvels and Madness (Sun. 7/21) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop (Sat. 7/27 - sorry, sold out) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sun. 8/4) • West Adams Sugar Hill and Angelus Rosedale Cemetery (Sat. 8/10) • Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess (Sun. 8/25) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 8/31)
Illegal Demolition Alert: Save Doss's Corner store and Victorian apartments in South LA