What have they done to the Bradbury Building?
Gentle reader...
California's greatest Victorian office building is a local and National Register landmark, and protected from insensitive alteration, so we were shocked one evening this week to glance up at the Bradbury Building and find looking less than lovely.
It seems that the Bradbury's facade has recently been fitted with LED lights, in a scheme partly paid for by a 2014 city grant made through Coucilmember José Huizar's Bringing Back Broadway initiative. A press release that March announced an award of "$166,304 to illuminate the entire top floor’s decorative panels and roof eaves."
Well, that's certainly what lighting designer Tom Ruzika did. Sadly, with no articulation of windows, lower floors or the iconic arched entryways, the effect of these ultra-bright, yellow racing stripes is garish and odd.
Facade illumination is an art form that can create zones of visual excitement that encourage after hours public activity. When done well, it can let us see a familiar building in a new way, and become itself a destination.
Urban theorists talk about something called "affective ownership." That's the emotional connection that people form with their local landmarks, a sense that while the property may be privately or civically owned, it also belongs to the citizens who love it and expect it to be maintained. When sudden, unwelcome change comes to a place rich in affective ownership, the response can be extreme and end badly.
As two of the affective owners of the Bradbury Building, we're dismayed that the costly facade illumination scheme detracts from the beauty of the landmark. But happily, no permanent harm has been done, and things can always be improved.
We hope that, as the building's renovations are completed and new tenants move in, lights from occupied windows will create their own changing patterns of life. More facade illumination can be added to articulate the arches and lower decorative elements. And the existing LEDs can probably be adjusted so that they aren't quite so jarringly bright and, oh please, quite so yellow.
But the sudden, unlovely changes to the Bradbury Building remind us just how opaque the Bringing Back Broadway initiative has been as it makes big aesthetic decisions about the future of our National Register Historic Theater District. It's this lack of public feedback that inspired our free Broadway on My Mind walking tour series, an evolving architectural and social history of the fragile coral reef that is this living landmark.
The Bringing Back Broadway initiative has recently completed its ten-year term. But Broadway will keep changing, through civic and private forces. With so many passionate citizens who love the street, its buildings and its people, future projects would do well to tap into this deep pool of goodwill. So why not let the people who love Los Angeles have a say when making changes? Affective owners have so much to offer, and we'd rather help make a positive change than to complain about a bad one after the fact.
We're back on the bus on Saturday with Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, a hard-boiled journey through oil boom Downtown and Golden Age Hollywood, in the footsteps of our greatest detective novelist. And new tours have been posted into October. Join us, do!
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RECENTLY TOURED
Completely obsessed with this exotic motel in Costa Mesa.
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
Every city has developers looking to bulldoze landmarks or evict longtime tenants for a quick buck, but New York's policy-driven preservation crisis has unfolded at warp speed. Since 2007, Jeremiah Moss has blogged the city's hypergentrification, watching through his fingers as historic family businesses are forced out for one more drugstore, bank or corporate coffee shop. His new book, also called Vanishing New York, paints a heart-rending portrait of systemic loss thru case studies of a decade's skirmishes in the preservation wars. It's tough reading, but necessary, especially in cities that still have a soul to save.
COMING SOON
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.)
HOTEL HORRORS & MAIN STREET VICE - SAT. 9/16... Through the 1940s, downtown was the true city center, a lively, densely populated, exciting and sometimes dangerous place. But while many of the historic buildings remain, their human context has been lost. This downtown double feature tour is meant to bring alive the old ghosts and memories that cling to the streets and structures of the historic core, and is especially recommended for downtown residents curious about their neighborhood's neglected history. (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: Hollywood! (9/30), The Real Black Dahlia (10/7), Echo Park Book of the Dead (10/14), Raymond Chandler’s L.A. (10/21)
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
A drive-thru coffee shop is moving into that derelict streamline moderne gas station on Beverly.
Time capsule alert: vintage hand-painted prohibition sign discovered under 1920s LA garage roof.
Video vault: The Cranky Preservationist, who loves Los Angeles and HATES what you’re doing to it, is back with ARCO Towers Screwy Skybridge Blues and Hotel Clark Air Vent Blues.
If Adamson House slides into the ocean, it will be the fault of the idiots who “restored” Malibu Lagoon.
Scoop! On the occasion of his 129th birthday, newly digitized war records reveal Raymond Chandler as a survivor of the Spanish Flu.
Holland had her Tulipomania, but California was truly Eucalypt-demented.
It's a banner week for scholars of the JFK assassination, as a new trove of evidence is released by the Feds.
A lost 1972 billboard found as Bullwinkle J. Moose lets it all hang out on the Sunset Strip.
Last week's free tour of the historic Globe Lobby of the L.A. Times with Darrell Kunitomi was great fun.
Bye bye, Ciro's, never to be forgotten. We named Esotouric over a bowl of their incomparable guacamole.
On August 4, from our Desert Visionaries tour co-host Karyl Newman: a nighttime sound bath & Llano Colony history walk.
A big question mark hovers over the Westlake Theatre, once a key piece of neighborhood retail with swap meet vendors.
yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric