Back to the Crime Lab edition
Gentle reader...
This Sunday finds us back in the teaching crime labs of Cal State Los Angeles, co-hosting true crime presentations by a pair of fascinating LASD investigators, Ed Nordskog (arson expert) and Mike Digby (bombings). We're privileged to be able to support the cutting edge research of Professor Donald Johnson's Criminalistics graduate students through this LAVA series, and would love to see you there.
Here's something very special for everyone who believes, like we do, that it's possible to restore John Parkinson's beautiful 1910 design for Pershing Square: a portion of the park has now been digitally recreated by the architect's great-great grandson, 3D designer R. Arlen Parkinson DeCambre. Like John Parkinson did a century ago, Arlen has donated his time to give Los Angeles something beautiful to aspire to. Click to see this lost landscape on video or follow the link under the vide to explore the 3D rendering at your own pace. Like what you see? Sign the petition to Restore Pershing Square!
We're back on the bus on Saturday with Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles, a tour about finding the voice within yourself that is great. Buk's journey to literary lion is set against a landscape of hard drinking, traumatic romance and the very special agony of life as a postal worker, and some wonderful time capsule locations. So join us, do!
LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 1/17
Four times a year, we gather in the teaching crime labs of Cal State Los Angeles under the direction of Professor Donald Johnson to explore the history and future of American forensic science. Your $36.50 ticket to Detective's Casebook: L.A. Bombing & The Making of A Serial Killer benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. For more info, click here.
RECOMMENDED READING
Sister of the Road, which purports to be the autobiography of a female hobo active during the Great Depression, is a fraud--but a fascinating one. The "Boxcar Bertha" character is an amalgamation of numerous real women, filtered through the eyes of Ben L. Reitman, hobo physician, revolutionary, lover of Emma Goldman. From Southern homeless camps to urban houses of ill fame, from the lively lecture halls of Hobohemia to the deadly rail yards of Downtown L.A., Bertha/Ben takes us on a tour of a lost America that seems increasingly familiar. A lively and important document, also adapted for film by a young Martin Scorcese.
COMING SOON
CHARLES BUKOWSKI'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 1/16... Come explore Charles Bukowski's lost Los Angeles and the fascinating contradictions that make this great local writer such a hoot to explore. Haunts of a Dirty Old Man is a raucous day out celebrating liquor, ladies, pimps and poets. The tour includes a visit to Buk's DeLongpre bungalow, where you'll see the Cultural-Historic Monument sign that we helped to get approved, and a mid-tour provisions stop at Pink Elephant Liquor. (Buy tickets here. Tour repeats 4/30.)
LAVA's FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 1/17... Detective's Casebook: L.A. Bombing & The Making of a Serial Killer, a four-hour presentation held at the teaching crime labs of Cal State Los Angeles. (For more info, click here.)
THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNTOWN - SAT. 1/23... A revealing history of how the New Downtown became an "overnight sensation" after decades of quiet work behind the scenes by public agencies and private developers. (Sold out, this tour repeats in summer.)
EASTSIDE BABYLON - SAT. 1/30... Go East, young ghoul, to Boyle Heights, where the Night Stalker was captured and to Evergreen, L.A.'s oldest cemetery. To East L.A., where a deranged radio shop employee made mince meat of his boss and bride--and you can get your hair done in a building shaped like a giant tamale. To Commerce, where one small neighborhood's myriad crimes will shock and surprise. To Montebello, for scrumptious milk and cookies at Broguiere's Farm Fresh Dairy washed down with a horrifying case of child murder. That's Eastside Babylon, our most unhinged crime bus tour. (Buy tickets here.)
SOUTH LOS ANGELES ROAD TRIP: HOT RODS, ADOBES, GOOGIE & EARLY MODERNISM - SUN. 2/7... This rare Sunday tour in our California Culture series rolls through Vernon, Bell Gardens, Santa Fe Springs and Downey, and the past two centuries, exploring some of L.A.'s most seldom-seen and compelling structures. Turning the West Side-centric notion of an L.A. architecture tour on its head, the bus goes into areas not traditionally associated with the important, beautiful or significant, raising issues of preservation, adaptive reuse, hot rod kar kulture and the evolution of the city. (Buy tickets here.)
RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 2/13... Follow in the young writer's footsteps near his downtown oil company offices to sites from The Lady in the Lake and The Little Sister, meet several real inspirations for the Philip Marlowe character and get the skinny on Chandler's secret comic operetta that we discovered in the Library of Congress nearly a century after it was written. Plus a stop at Scoops for noirish gelato creations and a visit to Larry Edmunds Bookshop. (Buy tickets here.)
WEIRD WEST ADAMS - SAT. 2/20... Thrill as Jazz Age bootleggers run amok, marvel at the Krazy Kafitz family's litany of headline-making misdeeds, see L.A.'s shortest street and its neighboring mansions, stroll the haunted paths of Rosedale Cemetery, stop at Marvin Gaye's murder house and learn how miffed locals fought racist housing laws to the highest court. (Buy tickets here.)
BOYLE HEIGHTS & THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF L.A.'S MELTING POTS - SAT. 2/27... Come on a century's social history tour through the transformation of neighborhoods, punctuated with immersive stops to sample the varied cultures that make our changing city so beguiling. Voter registration, citizenship classes, Chicano Moratorium, walkouts, blow-outs, anti-Semitism, adult education, racial covenants, boycotts, The City Beautiful, Exclusion Acts and Immigration Acts, property values, xenophobia, and delicious dumplings--all are themes which will be addressed on this lively excursion. This whirlwind social history tour will include: The Vladeck Center, Hollenbeck Park, Evergreen Cemetery, The Venice Room, El Encanto & Cascades Park, Divine's Furniture and Wing Hop Fung. (Buy tickets here.)
WILD WILD WESTSIDE - SAT. 3/12... Think there's no weird history on the Westside? Come thrill to tales of teenaged terrors, tortured tots, wicked wives, evil spirits, cults, creeps and assorted maniacs, like Weird Ward, boy husband of the nefarious cult leader who compelled her followers to carry her dead victims all across 1920s L.A., and the peculiar Helen Love, murderess who nearly escaped justice when she willed herself into a coma. Plus a true-life Hansel and Gretel story, the grand hotel that was a flop house for the Synanon Cult and a ghastly killing beneath the pier. It's a tour so wild, we had to say it twice. (Buy tickets here.)
THE BIRTH OF NOIR: JAMES M. CAIN'S SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE - SAT. 3/19... This tour digs deep into the literature, film and real life vices that inform that most murderous genre, film noir, rolling through Hollywood, Glendale and old Skid Row, lost lion farms, murderous sopranos, fascist film censors, offbeat cemeteries -- all in a quest to reveal the delicious, and deeply influential, nightmares that are author Cain's gift to the world. (Buy tickets here.)
HOTEL HORRORS & MAIN STREET VICE - SAT. 3/29... Through the 1940s, downtown was the true city center, a lively, densely populated, exciting and sometimes dangerous place. But while many of the historic buildings remain, their human context has been lost. This downtown double feature tour is meant to bring alive the old ghosts and memories that cling to the streets and structures of the historic core, and is especially recommended for downtown residents curious about their neighborhood's neglected history. (Buy tickets here.)
HOLLYWOOD! - SAT. 4/2... This new tour reveals the unwritten history of the sleepy suburb that birthed the American dream factory, a neighborhood packed with fascinating lore and architectural marvels. You won’t see the stars’ homes or hear about their latest real estate deals, but we’ll show you where some colorful characters breathed their last, got into trouble that defined the rest of their lives and came up with ideas that the world is still talking about. So for unforgettable stories you won’t hear on anyone else’s Hollywood tour, climb aboard and tour Cross Roads of the World (Robert V. Derrah, 1936) and much more. (Buy tickets here.)
Additional upcoming tours: Pasadena Confidential (4/9), The Real Black Dahlia (4/16), Echo Park Book of the Dead (4/23), Charles Bukowski’s L.A. (4/30).
OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST
In the latest edition of You Can't Eat the Sunshine, we get the inside scoop on Barlow Sanitarium's legendary gift shop from 99 year-old Margaret Freed, shopkeeper. Plus, a visit with performance artist Elisha Shapiro maestro of Downtown L.A.'s 1984 Nihilist Olympics. Click here to tune in.
AND FINALLY, LINKS
In case you missed it in the holiday frenzy, here's our 2015 historic preservation survey.
Death of a gadfly.
A powerful set of Skid Row photos from the 1980s.
Troubling documents obtained by a Hollywood BID critic reveal surveillance, retaliatory landlord and LAPD allegations.
D.J. Waldie asks if Pershing Square Renew is asking too much of Pershing Square. And Frances Anderton of KCRW's DNA amplifies L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's query: is the competition to redesign Pershing Square real?
The beach boy who loved bunnies.
What happened on Stagg Street?
The long shadow of Joe Friday.
Let's save a science fiction landmark!
Oscar Night yard sale: our pals at Dearly Departed Tours are selling rare, weird stuff so they can buy and exhibit Jayne Mansfield's death car.
Something stinks in Boyle Heights.
File under: who knew? Forgotten Victorian house discovered in giant Long Beach coffee pot.
SUPPORT OUR WORK
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yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric