Join us at Grand Central Market for a 100-Layer Cake Celebrating 100 Years of Trade - it's free!

Gentle reader...

As we celebrate our 10th year as a tour company, we look back and marvel at all the nice people and cool adventures found along the road.

But imagine having 100 years of Los Angeles memories to draw on! Grand Central Market is about to reach that distinction, and on October 27, the city's historic bread basket is tooting its horn all day long, with music, mirth and free Angels Flight rides for the kids and kids at heart.

We're inviting folks to gather at 10:30am to watch the mayor cut a 100-layer centennial cake, slices of which will be free for all. We'd love to see you there to toast a Los Angeles landmark. Because you don't have to be 100 years old to have cake for breakfast... especially when the cake is on the house!

We're on the bus on Saturday with Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, a noir adventure featuring a Chandleresque gelato snack from Scoops. How can a frozen treat be Chandleresque? Get on the bus and see for yourself. Then next Saturday, we roll with the debut excursion of the Wilshire Boulevard Death Trip. Join us, do!

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RECENTLY TOURED

Radio royalty reduced to a ghost sign: C.P. MacGregor Electrical Transcriptions, on Western Avenue.

LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 11/5

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 November 5, 2017, join us for From the SLA to DNA, an afternoon of insights into historic investigations and new crime science. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. Sold out with waiting list. Click here for more info. Next forensic science seminar is Wrongful Convictions: Investigatory Case Studies from the California Innocence Project (March 4, 2018, info here).

RECOMMENDED READING

New from retro juggernaut and 35mm slide collector Charles Phoenix comes a technicolor celebration of all things old school Americana, featuring neon signage, oddball tourist traps, kustom kars and that patented Charles Phoenix high octane enthusiasm. Whip up a bowl of ambrosia and join him on a time travel trip to a lost world, found.

COMING SOON

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 10/21... 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.)

NEW TOUR! WILSHIRE BOULEVARD DEATH TRIP - SAT. 10/28... Wilshire Boulevard is an iconic Los Angeles thoroughfare—from its prehistoric origins as a path forged by extinct megafauna to the spectacular Art Deco monuments of the Miracle Mile. It’s also ground zero for some deeply strange, only-in-Los Angeles crimes and oddities that played out against the backdrop of the boulevard. The deceptively simple route contains a multitude of mysteries, from cruel plots, divine inspiration, historic preservation, love gone sour, lucky breaks and weird tales, Wilshire Boulevard Death Trip, a dark day’s out among the city’s most glittering architectural gems. (Buy tickets here.)

THE LAVA SUNDAY SALON & BROADWAY ON MY MIND WALKING TOUR - SUN. 10/29... Our free cultural lecture series recently relaunched on the basement level of Grand Central Market with a walk to follow. October's Salon: Mid-Century Art and Architecture of the Civic Center, with Clare Haggarty, the Deputy Director of Collections for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, art conservator Donna Williams and artist Joseph Young's daughters Leslie and Cecily. (Free, reservation required.)

WEIRD WEST ADAMS - SAT. 11/4... 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. 11/5... Professor Donald Johnson hosts "From the SLA to DNA," a program on vintage and cutting edge crime investigations. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. (Buy tickets here.)

EASTSIDE BABYLON - SAT. 11/11... 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 in the shadow of the world's biggest tamale. To Commerce, where one small neighborhood's myriad crimes will shock and surprise. To Montebello, scene of a horrifying case of child murder. That's Eastside Babylon, our most unhinged crime bus tour. (Buy tickets here.)

CHARLES BUKOWSKI'S L.A. - SAT. 11/18... 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. (Buy tickets here.)

Additional upcoming tours: Special Event: In Search of Imperial California / Richard’s Birthday Bus (11/25), Pasadena Confidential (12/2), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (12/9), The Real Black Dahlia (1/6), Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles (1/13), The Birth of Noir (1/20), The Lowdown on Downtown (1/27).

OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST

In Episode #122: Bunker Hill & The French Village: Two Lost Los Angeles Neighborhoods Taken By Eminent Domain, two stories of families torn from the places they loved, and the memories that survive. Plus another Pereira in Peril, Ports O' Call shopkeepers & more. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!

AND FINALLY, LINKS

There is only one Hollywood Reporter Building and YOU can help save it by signing the petition.

File under: Southern California is preservation country. The Getty’s Tim Whalen gets a plum appointment with the National Trust.

New from L.A. Weekly’s best L.A. history podcast: Bunker Hill & The French Village: Two Lost Neighborhoods Taken By Eminent Domain.

French Market Place developer drops demolition plans, proposes partial preservation of the Art Deco building in larger project.

Serious architectural and landscape guns brought in to redevelop William Pereira’s neglected Metropolitan Water District HQ, a prime focus of our Pereira in Peril campaign.

As David Geffen promises big bucks, an architecture critic wonders if LACMA can do something better with all that gelt.

With a strike of the pen, Governor Brown erases the dumb Assembly Bill that made it illegal to sell most autographed books in California.

One of L.A.’s coolest animated signs, the Jensen's Recreation Center bowler, is coming back to life, in its latest restoration by Paul Greenstein. Property owners: maintain these gems!

Thanks Eye On LA for including our "fascinating & freaky" tours among the best ways to celebrate Halloween in SoCal! We'll share the link when the show is live.

Congrats to the neighborhood preservationists who made a big win in the campaign to landmark 1936 streamline moderne apartments, once home of animation pioneer Rudolf Ising.

Some flashy new renderings for the expansion of the Boyle Heights Sears. Buying socks will never be the same.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric