Thirteen hours was all it took to save a 120-year-old house in Boyle Heights

Gentle reader...

Meet the old Peabody place, a rare remnant of Victorian Los Angeles that has managed to fend off the slobbery ministrations of our great nemesis: The Stucco Man.

For more than 120 years, she has stood firm at First and Soto Streets, while Los Angeles grew from a sleepy village to the magnificent mess we know and (mostly) love.

Now honestly, we don't know a whole lot about her. Archival newspaper clippings reveal that this was a house of joys in 1899 when Miss Isabella Nelson wed Claude Faithful within, and of sorrows in 1904 when Miss Anna Peabody accidentally gassed herself, and very nearly her invalid newspaperman brother Josiah. It was built as a duplex, and when Miss Peabody passed the upper section was being used commercially as a store room by her neighbor, Charles King, a printer in George Steckel's Spring Street photographic studio.

No, we don't know very much about her, just that she's very beautiful and that our fates are now entwined. For tomorrow morning in Boyle Heights, this fine old house will be loaded onto a truck for a trip across First Street. It's the happy conclusion of a lightning fast historic preservation campaign that we launched last September 27, which saw results on September 28. Read all about it and drop by for the move!

We're off the bus this holiday weekend, but back on July 9 with a Pasadena Confidential crime bus tour, packed to bursting with demented millionaires, sex magicians and rocket scientists, and the capers they got up to. Join us, do!

SUPPORT OUR WORK

If you enjoy all we do to celebrate and preserve Los Angeles history and would like to say thank you, please consider putting a little something into our digital tip jar. You can also click here before shopping on Amazon. Your contributions are never obligatory, but always appreciated.

RECENTLY TOURED

Today on Route 66, a landmark Arcadia sign spun into motion for the first time in decades. We were there to celebrate the restoration.

LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 11/6

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. Save the date of November 6, 2016 for our next program, with details to be announced very soon. See photos and video from last Sunday's Rituals: Sacred and Profane program here.

RECOMMENDED READING

This is the updated edition of architectural historian Alan Hess' classic guide to those distinctly Californian dining palaces, the 1950s-era atomic drive-in coffee shops. As Arcadia's last surviving Van de Kamp's Holland Dutch Bakery's windmill begins her first 24 hours of restored rotation, why not celebrate the style with this insightful, illustrated guide to the revolutionary forms that followed pop culture function?

COMING SOON

PASADENA CONFIDENTIAL - SAT. 7/9... 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 confidentialfiles 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.)

THE REAL BLACK DAHLIA - SAT. 7/16... Join us on this iconic, unsolved Los Angeles murder mystery tour, from the throbbing boulevards of a postwar Downtown to the quiet suburban avenue where horror came calling. After multiple revisions, this is less a true crime tour than a social history of 1940s Hollywood female culture, mass media and madness, and we welcome you to join us for the ride. This tour always sells out, so don't wait to reserve. (Buy tickets here).

CHARLES BUKOWSKI'S L.A. - SAT. 7/23... 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. New: souvenir Bukowski's L.A. booklet available. (Buy tickets here).

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 7/30... 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).

SOUTH LOS ANGELES ROAD TRIP: HOT RODS, ADOBES, GOOGIE & EARLY MODERNISM - SUN. 8/7... 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).

Additional upcoming tours: Boyle Heights & the San Gabriel Valley(8/13), The Lowdown on Downtown (8/20), The Birth of Noir (9/10), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (9/17), Blood & Dumplings (9/24), Hollywood! (10/1), Wild Wild Westside (10/8), Echo Park Book of the Dead (10/15), Raymond Chandler's L.A. (10/22), The Real Black Dahlia (10/29).

OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST

In episode #111, our focus is the artist Wallace Berman, the center of a vibrant scene in mid-century Los Angeles. Hollywood gallerist Michael Kohn walks us through the new retrospective (up through June 25) and the artist's son Tosh shares insights into his father's craft and character. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!

AND FINALLY, LINKS

Downey lost Taco Bell #1 but might get an old yellow LARY line L.A. streetcar.

In search of small town America's stories and built environment, before they're gone.

Under all that beige stucco, a bit of 90-year-old roadside California history. Can it survive the property bubble?

Farewell, Dr. Nadeau. You may have left Los Angeles, but she forgives the slight.

Video vault: Nathan Marsak's LAVA Sunday Salon talk "Bunker Hill and the Demolition Mythos" and the Broadway on My Mind Hill Street walking tour that followed it.

Last week, we lamented the preservation crisis facing the Los Angeles Times compound. But meanwhile, on the newspaper side…

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric