1930s Los Angeles Comes To Life in a Newly Discovered Photo Archive
Gentle reader...
Every so often, a new collection of vintage documentary material appears that completely transforms our understanding of Los Angeles. One such collection is the Anton Wagner archive, several hundred Depression-era photographs just digitized by the California Historical Society.
While researching his doctoral thesis, the German student traveled widely across the Southland, visiting shiny new developments and funky ethnic enclaves, river bottoms and farms, carnival sideshows and the urban core, taking pictures everywhere he went. (Was he really a student, or some kind of spy? We do wonder!) But what matters is the photos, which are packed with surprises—Kim is particularly giddy about the reptile show on Main Street—and great fun to explore.
We've taken a deep dive into Wagner's images, and come up with some of our favorite discoveries. Won't you drop by the Esotouric blog and take a time travel trip?
Now online, video from some recent walking tours you might have missed: the LACMA preservation tour with Alan Hess and Lost Tunnels of Downtown, a tour of a hilly neighborhood since made flat.
We're back on the bus this Saturday with Echo Park Book of the Dead, featuring strange crimes and beautiful buildings in the streetcar suburbs of old Los Angeles. Join us, do!
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RECENTLY TOURED
The greatest surviving Pereira vista at LACMA, seen on Thursday's walking tour. It still smells like the sixties, too.
LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 12/11 & 1/22
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. On December 11, 2016 join us for The Spider-Man Bandit & The Artificial Human Head: Breakthroughs in Crime Scene Investigation. Track a fearless cat burglar/killer through the decades, as his 1970s-era crimes are exposed when the cold case unit tests old DNA. Then learn about new research in blunt force injury, with a chance to perform a hands-on assault on a head built for breaking. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. For more info, click here. Then on January 22, 2017, arson detective Ed Nordskog shares his most fascinating recent case, The Hollywood Fire Devil. Click here to reserve.
RECOMMENDED READING
New from chef and food tour guide George Geary is an historical survey of our city's iconic (mostly) lost restaurants, from cover star The Brown Derby to C.C. Brown's ice cream parlor, Van de Kamp's Dutch bakery to the Cocoanut Grove, Googie-style Tiny Naylor's to California Cuisine birthplace Ma Maison, and many more. Packed with colorful tales, vintage menu art and select recipes, L.A.'s Legendary Restaurants is a celebration of the innovative culinary culture that fueled a century of creative Angelenos.
COMING SOON
ECHO PARK BOOK OF THE DEAD - SAT. 10/15... New on our calendar, a crime bus tour meant to honor the lost souls who wander the hills and byways of the "streetcar suburbs" that hug Sunset Boulevard. See seemingly ordinary houses, streets and commercial buildings revealed as the scenes of chilling crimes and mysteries, populated by some of the most fascinating people you'd never want to meet. Featuring the Hillside Strangler, the Bat Man's Love Nest and a visit to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's exquisite Parsonage, now a museum. (Buy tickets here).
RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 10/22... 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.)
THE REAL BLACK DAHLIA - SAT. 10/29... 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.)
LAVA SUNDAY SALON / WALKING TOUR - SUN. 10/30... Our free (with RSVP) cultural lecture series recently relaunched on the basement level of Grand Central Market. For the October Sunday Salon, it's a talk and a walking tour combined, as architect and historian Alan Hess & our Richard Schave shine a light on the closest Pereira in Peril structure, the architect's 1973 corporate headquarters for Times Mirror Square.
WEIRD WEST ADAMS - SAT. 11/5... On this guided tour through the Beverly Hills of the early 20th Century, Crime Bus passengers thrill as Jazz Age bootleggers run amok, marvel at the Krazy Kafitz family's litany of murder-suicides, attempted husband slayings, Byzantine estate battles and mad bombings, visit the shortest street in Los Angeles (15' long Powers Place, with its magnificent views of the mansions of Alvarado Terrace), discover which fabulous mansion was once transformed into a functioning whiskey factory using every room in the house, and stroll the haunted paths of Rosedale Cemetery, site of notable burials (May K. Rindge, the mother of Malibu) and odd graveside crimes. Featured players include the most famous dwarf in Hollywood, mass suicide ringleader Reverend Jim Jones, wacky millionaires who can't control their automobiles, human mole bank robbers, comically inept fumigators, kids trapped in tar pits, and dozens of other unusual and fascinating denizens of early Los Angeles. (Buy tickets here.)
EASTSIDE BABYLON - SAT. 11/12... 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.)
Additional upcoming tours: Charles Bukowski's L.A. (11/19), Special Event: Richard's Birthday Bus Tour of Long Beach & the South Bay (11/26), Pasadena Confirdential (12/3), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (12/10), The Real Black Dahlia (1/7) and Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles (1/14).
OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST
Episode #115, Hollywood Book Culture & Downtown’s Chimney Swifts, we talk about the golden age of bookshops with film historian Bob Birchard, then visit the Ornithology section of the Natural History Museum for an insider's look at Vaux' swifts, tiny travelers who nest in landmarks. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!
AND FINALLY, LINKS
The last LA link to James Dean’s last ride, demolished. Vaya con Dios, Casa de Petrol.
A little dose of public shame, and the Chinese Theater forecourt is beautifully uncluttered once again.
Can the Southwest Museum be saved?
Bernard Maybeck’s marvelous Earle C. Anthony house might be open to the public yet.
The inaccessible historic Downtown LA landmark interiors we’ve scanned with Craig Sauer are now Virtual Reality environments. Pop a VR headset on & tour Angels Flight Railway, the Barclay Hotel, JK’s Tunnel & the Dutch Chocolate Shop.
As demolition permits pile up, the journal of the AIA asks: Which William Pereira buildings are worth preserving?
Richard muses on the irony of the new Clifton’s Cafeteria, a boozy spin on a teetotaler’s L.A. vision.
Los Angeles transit history lives in the middle of nowhere.
yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric