Spring Tours! Featuring Tom Waits' Gritty City and a Return to John Fante's Magical Bunker Hill

Gentle reader...

Last Saturday on The Real Black Dahlia tour, we debuted a new addition to the Esotouric family, a sleek modern tour coach that we'll be using on most of our upcoming excursions. The interior layout is more intimate, and the ride sure is smooth.

To go along with the new wheels, we've filled the calendar into May. We're especially excited about the return, after a six year hiatus, of the Downtown literary history tour John Fante: Dreams from Bunker Hill. Fante hailed from Colorado, but he crafted the most exquisite Los Angeles stories from his hardscrabble youth in the shadow of Central Library, and inspired a young Charles Bukowski to pick up a pen, in addition to tangling with Hitler in a most peculiar way. There will be some very special guests and seldom seen sites featured on this tour, so get on the bus!

A few seats have opened up on the Silent Echoes cinema locations tour debut weekend in early March. As of this writing, there is one seat available on Saturday's tour, three on Sunday.

If you dig 1970s music and film history and exploring the lost low rent districts of Downtown, Echo Park, Hollywood and West Hollywood, you'll want to snag a seat on author David Smay's once-a-year tour of Tom Waits' Los Angeles on May 11. From pastry tossing punks at Canter's to true love blooming in a coked out cinema wonderland to the Nickel in old Skid Row, it's a time travel trip we'd love to share with you.

Plus the crime bus rolls in Springtime with Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice, Pasadena Confidential, Blood & Dumplings (this once only happens once a year!) and The Real Black Dahlia.

Also new, click the Day of the Locust cover art below to visit our curated Amazon storefront of recommended Los Angeles-centric reads.

We're back on the bus on Saturday with the Weird West Adams crime bus tour, exploring strange lore with a side of social justice. Because the tour now starts in the Arts District, we're shaking up the featured stories, and reviving a favorite crime from the Black Dahlia era, a little horror we call The Print Shop of Death. Join us, do!

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Recommended Reading from the Esotouric Emporium of Los Angeles Lore
history, architecture, boosters, bubbles, citrus and noir
explore here

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

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 (3/2), Special Event: Silent Echoes (3/3), Special Event: Mansonland (3/9, waiting list), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (3/16), Pasadena Confidential (3/23), Special Event: Mansonland (3/30, waiting list), Special Event: The 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times (4/6), Blood & Dumplings (4/13), The Real Black Dahlia (4/20), Special Event: John Fante (4/27), Charles Bukowski (5/4) and Special Event: Tom Waits.

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

Richard Neutra's Hollywood Hills Chuey House somewhat safer after last minute landmark hearing halt, still not certain to be preserved in place.

First day of 2019 and another significant building has been lost
to fire. 1743 Hudson (1905), whose owner has marketed it as a teardown, was part of a tiny slice of Hollywood essentially unchanged for a century.

An important event, database and story: Vigil Pays Homage to Homeless Who Died on L.A. Streets.

On the Times Mirror Square landmarking fight: "Seems to me that GPA Consulting basically serves as a hired gun, dedicated to helping real estate investors push their projects forward."

Troubling media scoop: When the L.A. Times moved to El Segundo, its billionaire owner rented a tiny Downtown office, leaving reporter to beg LAPD for a desk, place to charge her phone.

Desperately needed historic preservation ordinance under consideration in Arcadia, where megamansions sprout up like mushrooms.

Another vacant rent stabilized apartment house has burned in East Hollywood. This one has serious literary cred: Jane Cooney Baker, Charles Bukowski's muse, lived and drank here.

One of our favorite Orange County landmarks, Polish diva Madame Modjeska's retreat Arden, is hosting more tours and performances, and needs some volunteers.

Start the year on a musically enlightened path: Pasadena's newly established Fusho Zen Institute, featured on a recent edition of our podcast are guest speakers at the historic Los Angeles Breakfast Club on January 16.

RIP Colonel Rob, who gave L.A.'s freaks a place to be themselves. Chief L.A. Cacophonist Al Ridenour captures the scary/sweet lost Los Feliz of his Mondo Video store.

Snapchat took over a huge swath of Venice, then split for more appropriate corporate office park space, leaving the neighborhood a ghost town and the wonders of the Venice Freak Show scattered to the winds.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric