This Sunday, We Travel 200 Years In A Day

Gentle reader...

Sometimes, over delicious tacos while watching the world pass by, we idly wonder if we could do what we do any place but Los Angeles.

The answer is yes, because all places have stories worth telling, and you can always find a bus to rent. But we truly believe there is no part of the world more fascinating than Southern California, and nowhere we'd rather give our tours.

This Sunday, you can join us for a rarely scheduled excursion that illustrates the depth and richness of the region. On the South Los Angeles Road Trip, we'll visit Spanish land-grant ranchos and Googie-style coffee shops, modernist masterworks and relics of a pre-digital wayfinding system, while talking citrus, redwood, aerospace, hotrodding, advertising, pinstriping, pop music, concrete, steel, neon, stucco, politics, preservation, polution and the freeway system.

This is the only tour we've ever been flown to another country to present virtually, in the form of a lecture at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture. That was interesting, but you really need to see these extraordinary Southern California places for yourself. So why not get on the bus? We still have some space available on Sunday's South L.A. Road Trip. Join us, do!

SUPPORT OUR WORK

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RECENTLY TOURED

Our Raymond Chandler tour passengers were rewarded with an Angelyne sighting as we left Hollywood Boulevard. Let's preserve her sweet mystique.

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

Did you know that Cranky Preservationist Nathan Marsak is also the author of the first book about the neon signs of our fair city? While not widely distributed, you can order lovely Los Angeles Neon here.

COMING SOON

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 LAVA SUNDAY SALON & BROADWAY ON MY MIND WALKING TOUR - SUN. 8/27... Our free cultural lecture series recently relaunched on the basement level of Grand Central Market with a walk to follow. August's Salon: The Cranky Preservationist in search of Lost Art Deco. (Free, reservation required.)

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

The Cranky Preservationist returns with Episode 4: Heather Apartments Arson Fire Blues on Facebook and YouTube. Plus, he leads the just-announced August LAVA Sunday Salon (free with RSVP).

Tying the noose? Now you can put an Esotouric bus adventure for two on your VEBO wedding registry.

New Hollywood Community Plan proposal includes historic designation for Los Feliz' adorable garden court apartments.

A deep dive into mapping L.A.’s neighborhoods.

Beleaguered Malibu Lagoon restorer denies his team’s work is the cause of Adamson House lawn erosion.

In overdeveloped Hollywood, spot zoning foe Robert Silverstein is a force to be reckoned with.

Alhambra activists speak for the trees, and a Spanish Colonial chapel also threatened by development.

Tour guiding is tougher than it looks. Wishing fair winds to the L.A. Times’ reporters as they hop into the deep end.

Can this charming streamline moderne medical office be saved?

Of Angels Flight and surrounding blight. It would be sweet if Angels Knoll were opened up again, even though it’s not actually a park.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric