Pereira in peril (again). Why does this iconic Los Angeles architect get no respect?

Gentle reader...

Another week, another historic preservation crisis, and with it, an opportunity to expand our knowledge of mid-century civic modernism. Won't you climb aboard for the retro-futuristic ride?

In 1963, William L. Pereira designed a stunning headquarters for the Metropolitan Water District on a circular hilltop site overlooking Sunset Boulevard and Downtown Los Angeles. Ten years later, he completed the west side of the campus with a complementary tower.

From the long tiled patio on the south side of the original building, there is a perfect sight line to A.C. Martin's Department of Water and Power headquarters, completed 1965.

Both buildings celebrated the life-giving, metropolis-fueling water that William Mulholland's aqueduct brought to Los Angeles, with vast, illuminated pools and whimsical fountains. But while the DWP's building is a city landmark, beautifully maintained and protected from alteration, the MWD sold its home in the 1990s, and the next owner let things go to pot.

The 1973 office tower, long a vandalized shell, has been adaptively restored as The Elysian apartments, developed by Linear City. But the 1963 low-rise campus buildings, recently purchased by Palisades Capital Partners from the bankrupt church owner, are in imminent danger, with a demolition notice posted on the fence.

William Pereira is an iconic Southern California architect—his projects include LACMA, CBS Television City, LAX, JPL and the Disneyland Hotel—but his work is being lost at a frightening pace. So on Sunday, architect and architectural historian Alan Hess met us at the endangered Metropolitan Water District Headquarters to talk about why it's so important that the buildings be landmarked and preserved. And as Alan points out, preservation makes good financial sense, too.

Please watch and share the video we made together (YouTube link, Facebook link) and stay tuned to this newsletter for more news about how you can help save William L. Pereria's Metropolitan Water District headquarters.

We're on the bus this Saturday with a sold out Real Black Dahlia tour. Next week, it's the Charles Bukowski tour of Downtown, East Hollywood and Crown Hill locations where a busted up postal worker found the voice within himself that was great. Join us, do!

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RECENTLY TOURED

We're crying neon tears. Tragically, Culver City's whimsical, wonderful Half Moon Motel neon sign has been scrapped by the nincompoop owners.

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 the last program, Rituals: Sacred and Profane, here.

RECOMMENDED READING

Learn more about the hugely influential Southern California architect whose work is too often lost to redevelopment in the only monograph on William L. Pereira's work, illustrated with stunning Julius Shulman photographs (like the MWD HQ detail above). From the soaring brutalism of UCSD's Geisel Library to the elegant working spaces of CBS Television City, LACMA to LAX, Pereira imagined buildings to reflect our regional myths and a lifestyle still very much worth living.

COMING SOON

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 is now sold out with a waiting list, and repeats Hallowe'en weekend. (More info 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).

LAVA SUNDAY SALON / WALKING TOUR - SUN. 7/31... Our free cultural lecture series recently relaunched on the basement level of Grand Central Market. For the July Sunday Salon, bandleader and musicologist Skip Heller presents a musical history tour of Southern California, followed by a mini set from his Hollywood Blues Destroyers combo. After the Salon, a free Broadway on My Mind walking tour explores Hill Street. Due to limited space, reservations are required for both of these free events.

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).

BOYLE HEIGHTS & THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF L.A.'S MELTING POTS - SAT. 8/13... 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).

THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNTOWN - SAT. 8/20... This is not a tour about beautiful buildings--although beautiful buildings will be all around you. This is not a tour about brilliant architects--although we will gaze upon their works and marvel. The Lowdown on Downtown is a tour about urban redevelopment, public policy, protest, power and the police. It is 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. Come discover the real Los Angeles, the city even natives don't know. Features a visit to the Dutch Chocolate Shop, a tiled wonderland not open to the public. (Buy tickets here).

Additional upcoming tours: 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

Episode #112, Elysian Park Activists: Preserving Sacred Ground features Michael Weinstein of AIDS Healthcare Foundation talking about the Chris Brownlie AIDS Hospice at Barlow Sanitarium, and Sallie Neubauer, past president of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!

AND FINALLY, LINKS

A rare chance to visit the goldmine of 100-year-old hobo graffiti along the L.A. River with the scholar who maps it.

Video vault: LAVA's June walking tour reveals Hill Street lore, from John Fante to Pershing Square.

On the Walk of Fame, the clitter clatter of John Rechy's City of Night.

Not landmarked, the Los Angeles Times compound sits square in a developer's crosshairs.

The Peabody-Werden House makes a move.

Cheers to AIDS Healthcare Foundation, seeking to landmark the Hollywood Palladium. (PDF link)

See Angels Flight Railway and Pershing Square from the highest building in Los Angeles in these neat photos by Gerry Hall.

"Where are all the people?" is the burning question on beautiful, broken Broadway. (And a Las Vegas food critic says the emperor is naked.)

More small business fallout on the Boyle Heights side of the new Sixth Street Bridge, aka the Gentrification Highway.

At home with Bungalow Bob and the happy spirit of Ernest Batchelder.

Hot Dogs of old Los Angeles, yay and nay.

Weird when the first we hear of a giant Los Angeles development is when someone sues to stop it.

An artistic conversation with Dean Cornwell's lovely, yet highly charged, Central Library murals.

Take a whirl beneath the streets of Long Beach in the old Jergins Tunnel to the Pike.

Tracking The Factory/Studio One's road toward National Register status. We say designate!

Bravo Whittier Conservancy! Judge voids city sale of endangered Nelles site to Brookfield.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric