2018 - The Year in Los Angeles Historic Preservation

Gentle reader...

Happy New Year! Every year around this time we compile a survey of the past twelve months in historic preservation happenings.

The 2018 survey is packed with significant gains and distressing losses, and a very long list of places that are still teetering on the brink, somewhere between hope and despair. If you're looking to get involved, read on. You'll also find shout outs to the citizen advocates who took it upon themselves to learn and tell the stories of endangered landmarks, and in many cases to save them from demolition.

As the new year dawns, we're grateful to so many of you who helped us fight for the preservation of the newly landmarked Times Mirror Square, and share our belief that local land use decisions shouldn't be made as favors to foreign investors. It's such an honor to be able to do the work we do, celebrating the city we love with such fine folks. Please don't be strangers in 2019!

We're back on the bus on Saturday with our traditional first tour of the year, The Real Black Dahlia. There is something very moving about exploring the places where Beth Short was in life and death in early January, when the light is the same as last touched her face. We're filling up, but there's still room for you to join us, do!

SUPPORT OUR WORK

If you enjoy all we do to celebrate and preserve Los Angeles history and would like to say thank you, please consider putting a little something into our digital tip jar. You can also click here before shopping on Amazon. Your contributions are never obligatory, but always appreciated.

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

Remember when cartoonist Ted Rall sued the Los Angeles Times, claiming then-publisher Austin Beutner defamed him as a favor to the LAPD? Rall was back in court recently, but you wouldn't know it from reading the Times, or any other newspaper.

Southern California doesn’t often get to recognize such ancient history. In July, 250 years after Portolá's march, the Orange County Historical Society pull out all the stops.

A wild tale of surfing the Baldwin Hills flood waters.

2018 was a tough year for New York neon.

January 1987: after four homeless Angelenos die on the street during a brutal cold spell, City Council chambers in City Hall are briefly opened as a winter shelter. RIP Tommy Allen, Ralph Frederick, James Miller & Valerie Moreno.

Nix on the think tank. Billionaire Berggruen now plans restaurant at historic MacArthur Park property. But will McManus & Morgan Paper (1923) and Aardvark Letterpress (1988) be able to remain?

We wonder how much Los Angeles has spent so far defending Jose Huizar from his latest lawsuit.

Lynell George remembers LAPL's visionary photo librarian Carolyn Kozo Cole, who curated the lost history of Los Angeles in personal photo albums.

Sorry, Frank Lloyd Wright. Because the US has withdrawn from UNESCO to make a political point, your Hollyhock House is unlikely to become a World Heritage Site anytime soon.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric