On Raymond Chandler's birthday, you can't kiss your sweetheart on Angels Flight Railway, but you can do this...
Gentle reader...
It's been just over year since we petitioned Mayor Garcetti to step in and cut the red tape that has been holding the historic Angels Flight Railway stuck in mid-air, forbidden to legally operate. But more than 2200 signatures, and a report from Metro later, the landmark funicular still isn't running up and down Bunker Hill.
Los Angeles Magazine took note of the lingering issue, and the frustrating fact that Angels Flight can be used as a backdrop for romantic film kisses, but not for real life ones. We're putting getting a kiss on Angels Flight Railway at the top of our 2017 Los Angeles wish list, and believe the Mayor is the man to make that happen. We encourage anyone who is similarly minded to sign and share the petition widely, and be a polite pest towards the Mayor should you see him around or on social media.
But while this charming gem of old Los Angeles remains just out of reach, there are so many wonderful time capsules to explore, and we'd love to take you with us, whether that's on the bus or in the privacy of your own head. This Saturday happens to be the 128th birthday of the great Raymond Chandler, and we'll be celebrating all week long, from July 23-29, with these special offers:
Take $12.80* off on tickets on the Raymond Chandler's L.A. tour on 7/30 with the discount code redwind
Take $12.80* off on tickets on the Birth of Noir tour on 9/10 with the discount code haytruck
The Kindle edition of Kim's acclaimed 1920s mystery novel The Kept Girl, starring the young Chandler on the trail of a murderous cult of angel worshippers, is on sale starting at 99ยข. Use the discount code gimlet for $5 off the paperback edition.
If you've been following our campaign to help protect William Pereira's Metropolitan Water District headquarters from demolition, here's happy news: this morning, the Cultural Heritage Commission decided to consider the property for landmarking. It's not saved for certain, but it's saved for now. We hope you'll join us at City Hall for the next hearing, date to be announced.
We're on the bus this Saturday with Charles Bukowski's L.A. touring Downtown, East Hollywood and Crown Hill locations where a busted up postal worker found the voice within himself that was great. Next weekend, it's the Raymond Chandler tour, and a free LAVA Sunday Salon and historic Hill Street walking tour. Join us, do!
* Restrictions: These discount codes expire at midnight, 7/29. Limit four tickets per purchaser, but you may share the codes with friends. This discount can only be used on the tours listed above; if you need to reschedule, you may apply what you paid towards a full-priced ticket on a later regularly scheduled tour date. Discount cannot be combined with any other offer. Questions? tours@esotouric.com
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RECENTLY TOURED
While recording our Pereira in Peril podcast, we revisited his Los Angeles Times corporate HQ and were horrified to see the condition of the 1973 dedication stone. Top photo is just seven months old.
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
Our Kim Cooper's debut mystery novel, and the first title from the Esotouric Ink imprint, is set in jazz age Los Angeles, where the young Raymond Chandler is tasked with investigating the shenanigans of a strange cult that's abandoned the mansions of Bunker Hill for the wilds of Simi Valley, where they take "the cure" too far. For Raymond Chandler's birthday week (July 23-29) the e-book and paperback are both on sale. Learn more here.
COMING SOON
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 #113, Pereira in Peril, a special mid-month edition focusing on two mid-century landmarks by iconic Los Angeles architect William L. Pereria that currently face the wrecking ball. Guests Alan Hess and Leo Wolinsky provide the historic and architectural skinny. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!
AND FINALLY, LINKS
When did Angelenos last ascend through Hope? Our dear librarians have the answer.
A warning to the credulous: days ahead of its National Register honor, sneaky developer proposes fake "preservation" of a cinema and LGBT landmark. (If moved and rebuilt, it can't be on the National Register.)
In Boyle Heights, an influx of high-end galleries makes low-income residents extremely anxious. Some are fighting.
Temple City's mystery child (her story is one we share on the Blood & Dumplings crime bus tour).
On our crime bus: the Lady Novelist meets the Black Dahlia, finds it a refreshingly respectful ride.
Greedy developer Brookfield wanted to gobble up every historic building, so the Whittier Conservancy suedโฆ and won! (See rare views of the endangered structures here.)
Come explore another 3D LA landmark with Craig Sauer: here's cafeteria man Henry Boos' West Adams mansion with a delightful allegorical Einar Petersen mural in the parlor.
Ten little years and... Clifton's Pacific Seas was the craziest thing ever to happen to Olive Street. (Fun fact: the 1929 version was a Boos Brothers cafeteria. Today? A parking lot)
Los Angeles feeds its history into a wood chipper. Wither Walt Disney's first southland home?
L.A.'s City Council is eager to accept pro-development neighborhood council recommendations. But this week, one said "enough."
The New Yorker presents a little Bunker Hill time travel trip, which we take in real life on the Lowdown on Downtown tour.
yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric