Looking For Free Videos of Historic Los Angeles Talks & Tours...?

Gentle reader...

It probably isn't news to you that we post videos of historic Los Angeles talks and walking tours and preservation news on our YouTube channel. When something new is posted, we share the link here.

Some of our more popular videos include rare 1916 silent film footage of the original Pershing Square, an on-location talk about Ernest Batchelder's magical Dutch Chocolate Shoppe, memories of downtown novelist John Fante, the power-washing of Angels Flight Railway after taggers defaced the landmark and Gordon Pattison's moving tales of life on old Bunker Hill.

But popular is a relative term, and today, we're asking you to please visit YouTube and subscribe to our channel by clicking the little red button on the right. And then maybe tell a friend.

We need your help. Responding to complaints about exploitative content by folks whose shenanigans get millions of views, the YouTube Partner Program has decided to penalize niche creators like us. 1000 subscribers is a high bar for a channel that assumes our viewers are smart, engaged citizens with an attention span longer than it takes to watch somebody chomp down on a laundry pod. But if you sign up, we just might make it. And if we make it, you can look forward to a lot of cool stuff in the queue, so stay tuned!

New in videos, The Cranky Preservationist, who loves Los Angeles and HATES what you’re doing to it, returns with his 15th featurette, Not Vermonica Blues. You can find it on Facebook or on YouTube, where, well, you know what to do.

There's a new episode of our deep L.A. history podcast You Can’t Eat the Sunshine, featuring author Brad Schreiber on his upcoming 1974 SLA Shootout bus tour and Arcadia’s most inventive vintage holiday decorators, plus Vermonica, Lawrence Halprin, Pershing Square & a year’s worth of preservation heartaches and hurrahs.

We're back on the bus on Saturday with a rarely offered bus adventure, The Birth of Noir. Come discover how deeply James M. Cain's pulp fiction resonates in the time capsule places he wrote about, in their film adaptations and on our visits. Join us, do!

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RECENTLY TOURED

Tag along on our bus adventures on Instagram. Here are scenes from the Raymond Chandler tour.

LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 3/4

Four times a year, we gather in the teaching crime labs of Cal State L.A. to explore the history and future of American forensic science. On March 4, 2018, join us for Wrongful Convictions: Investigatory Case Studies from the California Innocence Project. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research.

COMING SOON

THE BIRTH OF NOIR: JAMES M. CAIN'S SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE - SAT. 1/20... 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.)

THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNTOWN - SAT. 1/27... This is not a tour about beautiful buildings--although beautiful buildings will be all around you. This is not a tour about brilliant architects--although we will gaze upon their works and marvel. The Lowdown on Downtown is a tour about urban redevelopment, public policy, protest, power and the police. It is a revealing history of how the New Downtown became an "overnight sensation" after decades of quiet work behind the scenes by public agencies and private developers. Come discover the real Los Angeles, the city even natives don't know. Features a visit to the Dutch Chocolate Shop, a tiled wonderland not open to the public. (Sorry, sold out with waiting list. Tour repeats 4/14.)

THE LAVA SUNDAY SALON & BROADWAY ON MY MIND WALKING TOUR - SUN. 1/28... Our free cultural lecture and walking tour series returns to the basement level of Grand Central Market. Join architectural historian Nathan Marsak on a time travel trip through the aesthetics of Bunker Hill's Victorian architecture, viewed through the filter of the atomic age. Free, reservation required. (To RSVP, click here.)

TWO DAYS IN SOUTH LA: THE 1974 SLA SHOOTOUT - SAT. 2/10... When we gave this tour last year, it quickly sold out, so it's back by popular demand. Join author Brad Schreiber (Revolution's End) to discover how the radical Symbionese Liberation Army's political kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst came to a fiery end. New on this tour: get investigators' insights from retired LASD bomb and arson detective Michael Digby, who shares his deep knowledge of the SLA, much of it unpublished. Sorry, no discounts accepted on this Special Event tour. (Learn more and buy your tickets here.)

WEIRD WEST ADAMS - SAT. 2/17... 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.)

BOYLE HEIGHTS & MONTEREY PARK: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF L.A.'S MELTING POTS - SAT. 2/24... 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.)

Additional upcoming tours: Echo Park Book of the Dead (3/3), Eastside Babylon (3/10), Special Event: Desert Visionaries 2 - Llano del Rio, St. Andrew's Monastery, Angeles Crest Creamery & Aldous Huxley's Pearblossom Ranch (3/17), Pasadena Confidential (3/24), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (3/31), The Real Black Dahlia (4/7), The Lowdown on Downtown (4/14).

OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST

In Episode #124: author Brad Schreiber talks about his book Revolution's End and the upcoming Esotouric bus tour inspired by his true crime research. Plus, Arcadia's Linda Jensen & Adam Wadlow on heir award-winning holiday display of vintage, illuminated Blow-Mold plastic figures. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!

AND FINALLY, LINKS

It's sad how the city has treated Ports O' Call tenants.

File under: urban legends that are real. We need to talk about the Greenock Catman.

In re-restoration news, Denny’s plans to fix the Van De Kamp’s windmill blades that collapsed onto the restaurant roof.

Sign the Save 7500 Sunset petition to help preserve two threatened blocks of Hollywood small businesses, including the gorgeous Parisian Florist storefront.

A cool tool for mapping historic spaces reveals an 1856 tunnel in psychedelic 3-D.

San Francisco's ghastly historic preservation crisis, and the city agencies that enable it.

Our civic disgrace: L.A. issued a demo permit in two days, then Lawrence Halprin’s taxpayer-funded Crocker Court was destroyed with no public notice.

Thursday: Please attend the Cultural Heritage Commission hearing and show your support for landmarking the Musician's Union.

Also on Thursday … From the WWI historian who brought us the restoration of Victory Memorial Grove, rededication of a newly restored West Adams monument.

Exciting news about the gift of a 1920s Myron Hunt-designed Tudor Revival manor in San Marino.

Cinefamily will need to change a lot more than its name to satisfy its unhappy members, staff and volunteers.

The Cravens Estate is a favorite stop on our Pasadena Confidential tour. We hope new owner Michael Feinstein enjoys many happy, scandal-free years there.

Renderings released for proposed redevelopment of William Pereira’s Metropolitan Water District HQ: much demolition, but also partial restoration of the low-rise building at the heart of the complex.

Is Tronc's ownership of the Los Angeles Times some kind of elaborate fraternity prank?

On The Road with William and Grace McCarthy, a newly digitized archive of early 20th century Los Angeles photos, and beyond.

Bittersweet love for the soon-to-close Twohey's, as Remains of L.A., makes a first, and probably last, visit.

It tickles us enormously that the roots of Downey's tiki emporium are deep in Boyle Heights, and entwined with a terrible crime that blew the whistle on the corrupt LAPD. Sunshine and Noir!

Church of the Angels is one of the loveliest buildings in Northeast Los Angeles, but some creep tried to burn it down.

Living memory is not quite long enough to wrap our brains around the risks of living in the foothills. John McPhee's 1988 New Yorker feature should be required reading for all coastal Californians.

Tom Bergin’s on the ropes, again. Fears of redevelopment run high.

The Bank of Italy was shuttered for decades, so when Kim set part of her mystery novel The Kept Girl inside, she had to imagine everything. Next week, Raymond Chandler's old office building reopens, and it looks incredible!

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric