Last Call for Discounted Gift Certificates into the Secret Heart of L.A.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE L.A. HISTORY ELVES!
Gentle reader...
We've got some cool changes in store for 2019, with a more intimate tour bus layout, new guest hosted excursions, occasional Sunday tours (and forensic science seminars), and some very special off-the-bus programs that we can't wait to share with you. Also coming soon is our 7th annual year-end historic preservation survey of the big wins, crushing losses and bittersweet maybes that teeter on the brink and keep us up nights. So stay tuned!
If you're having a hard time holiday shopping for that certain someone with a passion for Los Angeles crime, history, architecture or literature, there's still time to pick up some discounted gift certificates. Save $20 or more per ticket when you purchase 3+ by Monday night, and we will email the certificates to you for printing or forwarding the the lucky recipient.
We're off the bus for the rest of 2018, returning on January 5 with our traditional first tour of the year, The Real Black Dahlia. Come walk in the footsteps of the doomed and fascinating Beth Short, as we sleuth her last weeks and the post-war city that sealed her fate. Join us, do!
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LAVA'S FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 1/27
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 January 27, join us for an inquiry into Arson and After, from cold case clearance to the impact on an arsonist's family. Your $36.50 ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research.
COMING SOON
THE REAL BLACK DAHLIA - SAT. 1/5... Join us on this iconic, unsolved Los Angeles murder mystery tour, from the throbbing boulevards of a postwar Downtown to the quiet suburban avenue where horror came calling. After multiple revisions, this is less a true crime tour than a social history of 1940s Hollywood female culture, mass media and madness, and we welcome you to join us for the ride. This tour usually sells out, so don't wait to reserve. (Buy tickets here.)
WEIRD WEST ADAMS - SAT. 1/12... 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 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 other unusual and fascinating denizens of early Los Angeles. (Buy tickets here.)
ECHO PARK BOOK OF THE DEAD - SAT. 1/19... On a crime bus tour honoring the lost souls who wander the hills and byways of the "streetcar suburbs" that hug Sunset Boulevard, see seemingly ordinary houses revealed as the scenes of chilling crimes and mysteries, populated by some of the most fascinating people you'd never want to meet. Featuring the Hillside Strangler, the Bat Man's Love Nest and a visit to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's exquisite Parsonage, now a museum. (Buy tickets here.)
RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 2/2... 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.)
BOYLE HEIGHTS & MONTEREY PARK: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF L.A.'S MELTING POTS - SAT. 2/16... 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, El Encanto, Divine's Furniture and Wing Hop Fung. (Buy tickets here.)
THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNTOWN - SAT. 2/23... 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. (Buy tickets here.)
Additional upcoming tours: Special Event: Silent Echoes Film Locations Tour (3/2, waiting list), Special Event: Silent Echoes Film Locations Tour (3/3), Special Event: Mansonland (3/9, waiting list), Special Event: Mansonland (3/30, waiting list) and Special Event: The 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times (4/6).
OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST
Episode #132 is Illuminating Los Angeles: Elmore Leonard & The Triforium. Meet Gregg Sutter, who is hosting a new bus tour about the screenwriter he aided for 33 colorful years, then get the skinny on reactivating Joseph Young's 1975 musical phantasmagoria. Click here to tune in. New: find stories on the map!
AND FINALLY, LINKS
Landmark Lytton Savings, threatened with demolition by one of Jose Huizar's trademark sketchy land use rulings, is available for relocation. Idea: how about "Sleazy Huizy" pays the moving costs from his discretionary fund? Better idea: revisit all Huizar’s votes.
Our preservation pals Kate Eggert and Krisy Gosney's newest National Register nomination, Mirlo Gate Lodge Tower, might just be your new tiny home.
Tejon Ranch made conservancy concessions long ago to stifle criticism of its development plans. Citizen environmentalists aren't welcome if they speak up.
Why is this piece on Krishna Venta’s Box Canyon cult so accurate? Because Detective Mike Digby, host of our L.A. Times Bombing tour, is the primary source.
Unlike Times Mirror Square, CBS Television City, newly landmarked, is one Pereira that's not in Peril. New owners will maintain the historic features of this groundbreaking modernist production factory—and perhaps use it for its original purpose.
When they write the history of the sale of the historic Los Angeles Times buildings and the possible demolition of William Pereira's 1973 corporate HQ, they'll have to consider Michael Ferro's fundamental misunderstanding of Los Angeles, and his racism.
Two long derelict Downtown landmarks, Trinity Auditorium and Hotel Clark, might finally be reactivated.
Don't show this newly revealed ghost sign to old school Echo Park folks. It's more sad than cool.
A look back at 2018’s highs and lows of landscape architecture, including Brookfield's stealthy destruction of Lawrence Halprin's only atrium, Wells Fargo Court on Bunker Hill. The Cranky Preservationist too is irked.
SF Planning Commission show their teeth: Ross Johnston, who illegally demolished Richard Neutra's Largent House, denied retroactive demo permit, told to rebuild the lost landmark exactly as it was. The preservationists win, kinda.
Government transparency blogger scoops mainstream press with a bombshell email suggesting coordinated, illegal pre-vote collusion by Los Angeles City Council staff.
Thom Mayne, who we'll never forgive for demolishing Ray Bradbury's house, proposes "I'm crushing your head" building to replace The Viper Room, Terner's and Sun Bee Liquor, Aahs! and the whole 8800 block of the Sunset Strip.
It could just be incompetence, but it's awfully convenient. City staff slowed Councilman David Ryu's "Starbucks Stakeholder" neighborhood council reforms, helping pro-development forces game the system through another election cycle.
Sneak a peek at the revived Formosa Cafe, a gem of old Hollywood that was nearly wrecked by nitwits.
We drew on USC's Pereira papers for our L.A. Times landmarking nomination. Now that the finding aid is complete, it will be easier for folks to study this important architect's Imperial California vision.
A look under the hood of the wonderful vintage Los Angeles print media archive site Adsausage.
Packed with charm, history and built-ins galore, the Tokio Florist mansion sits on half an acre of prime Silver Lake commercial real estate. Can it be saved?
The best thing to come out of our broken city government is going away. Get to know Target Husk before it's too late.
As conservator Donna Williams painstakingly restores Joe Pellkofer's astonishing miniature Hollywood streetscape, the real thing is under attack from hyper-gentrification.
We never had the nerve to visit this particular Downtown L.A. landmark & now it might be too late: Yelper Jason P. reports that KLYT, Skid Row's last gay bath house, has turned out the lights for good. 101 years ago it was a deluxe ladies Turkish bath house.
yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric