Surprise Your Valentine with an Esotouric Bus Adventure edition
Gentle reader...
In the loving spirit of the season, we've created a special Valentine's Day offer for couples (or very good friends) who'd like to come adventuring with us.
Through February 14, you can purchase a Pair Pass, granting a couple two seats on two regularly scheduled tours for just $160, a savings of $72. Want to share one with your sweetie? Click here for more info, or to reserve.
If you're a fan of the televised paranormal, you may have seen Kim on this week's episode of Ghost Adventures, sharing fact-based Black Dahlia tales and schooling host Zak Bagans on the proper pronunciation of "Figueroa."
You never know who will get on our bus or what bits of lost Los Angeles lore they carry. For instance, last week, on the Eastside Babylon tour, passenger Jim Thompson graciously shared priceless childhood memories of dining in East L.A.'s giant tamale building when it was a Mexican restaurant in the 1940s.
We're back on the bus this weekend with a rare Sunday tour, the South Los Angeles Road Trip: Hot Rods, Adobes, Googie & Early Modernism. Join us, do, for a time travel trip through two centuries of Southland creativity! And yes, you can use your Valentine's Day discount pass on a tour that rolls prior to the holiday, including Raymond Chandler's L.A. on February 13.
RECENTLY TOURED
This week, we took an L.A. River walk with graffiti scholar Susan Phillips, in search of the 1914 hobo inscriptions featured in last week's newsletter. Tag along on our adventure here.
LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 4/17
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 Murder Will Out: The Secret World of Trace Evidence benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. For more info, click here.
RECOMMENDED READING
Get in the mood for a very special once-a-year bus adventure (5/21) by picking up guest host David Smay's acclaimed title in the 33 1/3 series of little books about great albums, Swordfishtrombones. Like the bus tour it inspired, David's book tells the story of a beautiful love affair, and how it radically transformed Tom Waits' personal life and music. Along the way, you'll get a peak at the last old school Hollywood motion picture studio, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope, and all the colorful characters who shaped a cool moment in popular culture.
COMING SOON
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.)
PASADENA CONFIDENTIAL - SAT. 4/9... The Crown City masquerades as a calm and refined retreat, where well-bred ladies glide around their perfect bungalows and everyone knows what fork to use first. But don't be fooled by appearances. Dip into the confidential files of old Pasadena and meet assassins and oddballs, kidnappers and slashers, black magicians and all manner of maniac in a delightful little tour you won't find recommended by the better class of people. (Buy tickets here.)
LAVA's FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 4/17... Murder Will Out: The Secret World of Trace Evidence, a four-hour presentation held at the teaching crime labs of Cal State Los Angeles. (For more info, click here.)
Additional upcoming tours: The Real Black Dahlia (4/16), Echo Park Book of the Dead (4/23), Charles Bukowski’s L.A. (4/30), Tom Waits' L.A. (5/21).
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
The UK Guardian takes note of Downtown LA's endangered burger shacks, among them a 1930s log cabin that cries out to be preserved.
The Bradbury Building is our favorite inanimate movie star.
Happy 100th birthday to the eternally lovely stripteuse Betty Rowland (who once took our Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice tour--much to Kim's grandfather's delight!)
The "other" Pershing park competition raises issues of preservation, funding and design quality
The real estate fraud that snatched Rudolph Schinder's South LA modernist church from its parishioners.
Will UNESCO turn its nose up at Hollyhock House if local developers overbuild?
California Department of Corrections: hard on people, harder on National Register landmarks.
A wonderful dream, rejected by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors in 1963. Behold the incredible proposal for a free citywide monorail system... if only....
Let's make it a programmatic 2016--get spinning, windmill!
Demolition by neglect, then actual demolition. The City of LA has been a lousy steward of Murphy Ranch.
For shame. Manhattan Beach just defanged its brand new historic preservation ordinance with an "opt-out" clause.
Video vault: Take a time travel trip to a Santa Monica supermarket, 1963.
Legendarily inaccessible Los Angeles subway terminal to become a shopping mall. See our photos here.
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yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric