New date added for Know Your Downtown Los Angeles featuring the Dutch Chocolate Shop
plus the disturbing loss of the oldest building at the Hollywood Center Motel
Gentle reader,
Happy New Year, if you can call it that. The approaching anniversaries of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena conflagrations weigh heavy, as does yesterday’s entrapment fire followed by the LAFD heavy equipment unit’s demolitions at the Hollywood Center Motel.
Much more on this situation will follow in a dedicated newsletter. But in case you missed it, we went live on Instagram around noon to document the terrible scene on the Sunset Boulevard side, then with a full walk through of the property as the fire department completed their mop up.
Later this week, the Cultural Heritage Commissioners have plans to tour in order to assess the potential landmark—and now the 1905 house El Nido is gone, lost to a predictable, and we believe preventable, not to mention extremely convenient, demolition by neglect.
But when the commissioners get there, they will see that a great deal of the potential landmark compound is still here, and still merits landmark designation. We hope you’ll tune in to Hollywood Heritage’s free streaming webinar The Hollywood Center Motel: A Case for Preservation on Wednesday at 7pm to learn why this place matters and what the future might hold.
But we’re writing in haste to let you know that we’ve just added a new date (Saturday, 1/17) for the very popular Know Your Downtown Los Angeles tour, featuring early hotel service tunnels, the Bradbury Building and the Arts & Crafts tiled landmark Dutch Chocolate Shop.
We expect the tour to sell out quickly, so if you’d like to join us, click here. Can’t make this date? We’ve got a streaming webinar about the Dutch Chocolate Shop and its long and fascinating history.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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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, 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. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Know Your Downtown LA: Bradbury Building, Basements of Yore and the Dutch Chocolate Shop (1/17) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (1/24) • Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Tract (1/31) • Hollywood Noir (2/7) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (2/14) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (2/21) • Weird West Adams & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (2/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (3/7) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (3/21) • Christine Sterling & Leo Politi: Angels of Los Angeles (4/4) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (4/11) • Early Hollywood’s Silent Comedy Legends (4/18) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (4/25)