"Best True-Crime Tours" Says Los Angeles Magazine plus a "Barfly" crew reunion on Saturday's Bukowski bus
Gentle reader...
Every city gets the crimes it deserves, and there's just something special about Los Angeles, at least if you judge the city by the oddball quality of its murders.
Since 2005, with the original 1947project blog, we've made it our business to uncover the region's most fascinating crimes, and develop a different kind of regional history tour, built around these astonishing tales from the dark side. The victims, the perpetrators, investigators and journalists have become as familiar as old friends, and sometimes people who were touched by these decades-old crimes even come into our lives as new friends.
This week, this work received got a nice jolt of recognition, as Los Angeles Magazine named our true crime tours "Best of L.A." It's an honor just to be nominated, and a kick to be in such good company.
We're back on the bus on Saturday with the Charles Bukowski tour, a bookish love and historic preservation story told through visits to the time capsule locations that shaped this iconic L.A. writer. If you’ve been meaning to take this quarterly tour, this Saturday’s excursion offers a special treat: a mini reunion of several key Barfly crew members, Bob Ziembicki (Production Design) and Kevin Hughes (Property Master) and possibly also Éva Gárdos (Editor), who will share behind-the-scenes tales of the making of the greatest Bukowski adaptation in L.A.’s historic dive bars and SRO hotels. Plus, one lucky passenger will go home with a replica Barfly crew T-shirt. Join us, do!
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RECENTLY TOURED
If we lived in Oxnard, we'd drink just for the pleasure of patronizing this adorable liquor store.
LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 8/13
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 August 13, 2017, join us for Bombs & Decomp, an afternoon of insights into historic investigations and how a body changes after death. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. Click here for more info, or to reserve your seat.
RECOMMENDED READING
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
LOS ANGELES TIMES GLOBE LOBBY TOUR - FRI. 7/21... One of our special tenth anniversary happenings, this free lunchtime tour is currently full. (For more info, or to get on the waiting list, click here.)
CHARLES BUKOWSKI'S L.A. - SAT. 7/22... 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. Special this tour only: mini Barfly crew reunion. (Buy tickets here.)
RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 7/29... 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 LAVA SUNDAY SALON & BROADWAY ON MY MIND WALKING TOUR - SUN. 7/30... Our free cultural lecture series recently relaunched on the basement level of Grand Central Market with a walk to follow. July's Salon: old Bunker Hill and the Second Street Cable Car Rail Road. (Free, sold out with waiting list, reservation required.)
SOUTH LOS ANGELES ROAD TRIP: HOT RODS, ADOBES, GOOGIE & EARLY MODERNISM - SUN. 8/6... 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.)
WEIRD WEST ADAMS - SAT. 8/12... 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 criminal misbehavior, visit the shortest street in Los Angeles (15' long Powers Place, with its magnificent views of the mansions of Alvarado Terrace) and stroll the haunted paths of Rosedale Cemetery. 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.)
FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR AT CAL STATE LOS ANGELES - SUN. 8/13... Professor Donald Johnson hosts "Bombs & Decomp," featuring Mike Digby on historic bomb cases and Dr. Elizabeth Miller on decomposition of the human body. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. (For more info, or to reserve your seat, click here.)
BOYLE HEIGHTS & MONTEREY PARK: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF L.A.'S MELTING POTS - SAT. 8/26... 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 BIRTH OF NOIR: JAMES M. CAIN'S SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE - SAT. 9/9... This tour digs deep into the literature, film and real life vices that inform that most murderous genre, film noir, rolling through Hollywood, Glendale and old Skid Row, lost lion farms, murderous sopranos, fascist film censors, offbeat cemeteries -- all in a quest to reveal the delicious, and deeply influential, nightmares that are author Cain's gift to the world. (Buy tickets here.)
SPECIAL EVENT: THE 1910 BOMBING OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES WITH DETECTIVE MIKE DIGBY - Sat. 9/23... An all new bus adventure follows in the shadowy footstep of the labor activists who plotted the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times Building, part of a nationwide plot that played out some of its most dramatic scenes in the heart of historic Los Angeles. Included in the ticket price is a copy of guest host Mike Digby's new book on the Southland's most fascinating bombers. (Buy tickets here.)
Additional upcoming tours: Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (9/16), Hollywood! (9/30).
OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST
Back from hiatus! In Episode #119: Secrets of Llano del Rio and Utopian Los Angeles, we preview the June 17 Desert Visionaries tour with guest hosts Paul Greenstein & Karyl Newman, plus Lummis House, Lytton Savings and Sinatra Bungalow news. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!
AND FINALLY, LINKS
Will an illuminated Marciano Art Foundation sign be allowed on the Wilshire facade of Millard Sheets' Masonic Temple?
Remains of L.A. paints a pen portrait of Burbank’s delightful Pinocchio Restaurant.
New from the Library of Congress, the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive, an American treasure free of copyright restriction. (Here's an Egyptomaniac gem from San Diego.)
L.A. Weekly asked us to list 10 Iconic Los Angeles Buildings That Could Be Demolished at Any Moment.
Neighborhood Councils, created to keep the Valley from seceding from greater LA, show their flaws in times of stress.
Remembering Ray Phillips, who spent so many years saving LA landmarks, he wrote himself into preservation history.
L.A. Magazine takes a look at the Gage Mansion preservation problem, but fails to cover all the drama of our ongoing public access battle. Get the scoop on the South L.A. Road Trip, August 6.
Introducing The Cranky Preservationist, who loves Los Angeles and HATES what you’re doing to it! Episode 1: Bunker Hill Telephone Building Blues (YouTube, Facebook Video).
The Colorado Street Bridge, a suicide magnet, loses its lovely alcoves for public safety.
It is a dull little house, save that Ray and Cissy Chandler briefly called it home.
Community rallies to help widow, store cat after murder of proprietor of Magic Door, a great used bookstore in Pomona.
A big loss for Echo Park history and preservation. RIP Danny Muñoz, citizen archivist.
Video Vault: Preservationists dress sharp to show developers that Covina Bowl is too cool to lose.
Major renovation work at Thelma Todd's Beach Café, one of the loveliest crime scenes on Pacific Coast Highway.
yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric