2017 Calendar Sneak Peak: Esotouric turns Ten with a 1974 SLA Shootout Tour

Gentle reader...

When we launched Esotouric in May 2007, it was with the idea that guided Los Angeles bus tours didn’t have to aim for the lowest common denominator. We believed there would be an audience for tours that challenged our passengers’ expectations, and our own, while telling the real story of this fascinating city and the wild characters who’ve called it home.

The path that began with the crime-a-day blog 1947project and widened as we took the show on the road has taken us to so many places we could never have predicted: opportunities to help save threatened landmarks, the discovery of Raymond Chandler’s suppressed comic operetta, documenting untouched time capsule interiors and many great friendships forged from a shared love of Los Angeles history.

Ten years and hundreds of Esotouric tours later, we’ll be celebrating this great shared adventure all through 2017 with a series of Tenth Anniversary special events: one-off bus tours, historical lectures, film screenings, publications and podcasts. Bookmark the calendar page to stay informed, or watch this newsletter for new listings. There are some wild things in the works!

The first Tenth Anniversary event to be announced is a guest-hosted tour about the radical Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a revolutionary group whose kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst came to a dark end during Two Days in South LA. Join Esotouric and author Brad Schreiber on February 11 for a time travel trip to 1974 on a very special one-off bus adventure.

Also new on the calendar are regularly scheduled bus adventures through February.

We're back on the bus this Saturday with Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, a noirish tour of the writer's 1920s Downtown haunts to mid-century Hollywood. 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

Islamic bungalow court apartments, an only-in-LA oddity, found in the Pico-Union district.

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 Richard Carradine, the founder of GHOULA (Ghost Hunters of Urban Los Angeles) is a companion book to their ongoing series of cocktail gatherings in reputedly ghost-ridden historic sites. Spirits With Spirits: A Guide to the Haunted Bars of Los Angeles (Volume 1) covers the waterfront with thirteen spooky watering holes, from Tom Bergin's to H.M.S. Bounty, Philippe's to Musso & Frank, Culver Hotel to the late, lamented Chasen's. Tis the season to soak up some uncanny lore with a side of local history.

COMING SOON

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 is now sold out, with a waiting list. (More info 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), Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles (1/14), The Birth of Noir (1/21), The Lowdown on Downtown (1/28), South L.A. Road Trip (2/5), Special Event: Two Days in South LA: The 1974 SLA Shootout (2/11), Boyle Heights & The San Gabriel Valley (2/18) and Weird West Adams (2/25).

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

Are you sitting down? These beloved LA landmarks might not make it through next year.

Alan Hess on The Soul of California podcast, in defense of William Pereira’s endangered architectural legacy.

Excuses, excuses as the public yawns over the project seeking to demolish William Pereira’s iconic LACMA campus.

A heartbreaking civic failure, as the Corralitas Red Car Property greenbelt faces dense development. The Supes tried; did City Council?

When the golden arches were removed to make way for outdoor grills, we knew it was a matter of time. RIP to the last Stanley Meston-designed Googie McDonald’s in Los Angeles (1957-2016). (Video link)

Graham C. Greene, who objected to our staging Raymond Chandler’s comic operetta, has died.

Sleuthing the obscure trainee WWI pilot and author whose name is all over Southern California.

One of Northeast L.A.’s most unique houses is facing demolition. Save the Lee Residence!

Frogtown at Risk: Anyone who remembers the deadly 1938 flood should be worried about plans to tear up the concrete in the L.A. River.

More people on the streets as HUD policy trickles down to L.A. shelters.

Retrolandia takes our Hollywood! tour, spies Angelyne from the bus window.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric