Trouble at LACMA, Lights Out for Vermonica & Some Very Sweet Formosa Cafe Updates
Gentle reader...
Welcome to Summertime in Los Angeles, where so many interesting cultural preservation problems are heating up. So slap on some virtual sunscreen and let's take a tour. Don't be blue: it's not all doom and gloom!
Somehow, what started as a campaign to raise consciousness about William Pereira's endangered Southern California buildings has turned into a broader call for LACMA's non-profit managers and the L.A. County Supervisors to hold their horses before destroying LACMA... not just the architecturally distinctive 1965 Pereira campus, but the institution itself.
We were frankly shocked to discover how many prominent art world professionals emailed the Supervisors begging them to vote no on LACMA's redevelopment plan. Where were these voices in the years leading up to the vote, why haven't they been talking to reporters, and why would LACMA shut them out of the conversation about the future of our greatest public museum?
It's quite a mystery, and in Los Angeles, mysteries usually lead to huge piles of money and the powerful people who shovel those piles around.
Somebody has to stand up and demand an explanation, and apparently that's us. Word slipped over the transom about a weekend gathering we convened of concerned citizens seeking ways to stop the loss of LACMA before it's too late, and the Times reported that a LACMA opposition group vows to keep fighting the museum’s Zumthor plan.
We're not entirely opposed to new building on the LACMA campus, and we don't speak for an organized group, but we share the growing critical and public concern that Peter Zumthor's proposed building is significantly smaller than what will be lost, and won't contain the functional and public spaces that are needed by a museum of LACMA's caliber.
No curatorial offices, no docent library, no conservation labs, no art storage, an auditorium half the size of the Bing, diminished exhibition spaces. And of greatest concern, the new, single-level building seeks to bridge Wilshire and land on the surface parking lot on Spaulding, a subway adjacent site valued at $50 Million that was purchased explicitly to be developed with a tower generating revenue for the debt-ridden museum. Surely there are other options that won't squander such a valuable piece of property and might allow for some housing to go there.
If you agree there are too many questions that haven't been answered, and no need to rush to swing the wrecking ball, please sign the LACMA Lovers League petition and we'll keep you in the loop.
Now let's leave the Miracle Mile and swing out to East Hollywood, where a great piece of public art is in trouble. In November 2017, the original vintage L.A. streetlight sculpture Vermonica (15 years older than Chris Burden's Urban Light) was unceremoniously destroyed, then rebuilt in modified form in front of the Bureau of Street Lighting offices. We worked with artist Sheila Klein to set up city meetings, where it was promised that her work would be restored, and the fake removed. But nothing actually happened, and the city stopped communicating. Recently, government transparency blogger Adrian Riskin obtained some red hot emails that reveal serious shenanigans surrounding the destruction of Vermonica. We're still eager to see this beautiful work restored, and hope you'll help amplify Sheila Klein's very reasonable demands.
But in the midst of preservation heartbreak, hope dawns on old Route 66.
The Formosa Cafe, its magnificent red and black interior wrecked by insensitive former tenants splashing gallons of beige paint, has been exquisitely restored by the good folks at 1933 Group. We got a preview of the new and improved Formosa and boy howdy, that's the way to take care of a roadside landmark. 1933 Group spent $2.4 Million, some of it in preservation grants, and engaged a slew of talented artists, builders and historians to bring the lost landmark back better than it used to be. In the process, they're giving Los Angeles a master class lesson in cultural stewardship that we hope will be contagious. Opening night is tomorrow, Friday, June 28. Be there and be delighted!
And whatever our differences when it comes to land use decisions, we're grateful to LACMA for hosting the Preserving the City of the Future symposium last Friday and Saturday, bringing a terrific group of scholars, preservationists, architects, activists and planners together to talk about emerging issues the museum can help bring into the mainstream. We hope this will be the start of many such conversations, and you'll see some photos from the program here.
And of course, if preservation is on your mind, you'll want to join us at the debut Esotouric Preservation Salon at Lummis House, for an evening of good company and inspiring stories at the historic birthplace of the Southern California preservation movement.
Finally, in black and white and red all over news, the Los Angeles Times has made a wise decision to give Nita Lelyveld her own City Beat column, and you won't want to miss her love letter to L.A.'s vanishing weirdo subcultures, featuring our beloved Showmen's Rest memorial service at Evergreen Cemetery. Want to see that amazing place? Join us this Saturday for the Eastside Babylon true crime tour!
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COMING SOON
EASTSIDE BABYLON - SAT. 6/29... Go East, young ghoul, to Boyle Heights, where the Night Stalker was captured and to Evergreen, L.A.'s oldest cemetery where we'll share newly unearthed tales of secret burials. 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 true crime tour. (Buy tickets here. Tour repeats 9/28.)
PASADENA CONFIDENTIAL - SAT. 7/13... The Crown City masquerades as a calm and refined retreat, where well-bred ladies glide around their perfect bungalows and everyone knows what fork to use first. But don't be fooled by appearances. Dip into the confidential files of old Pasadena and meet assassins and oddballs, kidnappers and slashers, black magicians and all manner of maniac in a delightful little tour you won't find recommended by the better class of people. (Buy tickets here.)
FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 7/14... 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. The Serial Killer Summer Session is an inquiry into the impact of the Night Stalker murders on Southern California. Your ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. (Sold out with waiting list. More info here.)
WILSHIRE BOULEVARD DEATH TRIP - SAT. 7/20... 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 horrors and mysteries. Join us for a dark day out among the city’s most glittering architectural gems. (Buy tickets here here.)
THE REAL BLACK DAHLIA - SAT. 7/27... 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. (Sold out with waiting list. More info here.)
THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNTOWN - SAT. 8/3... 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.)
CURSE OF THE SHE-DEVIL: A TRUE STORY OF REVENGE, BETRAYAL, BOMBS AND REAL ESTATE IN 1919 LOS ANGELES - SAT. 8/10... In this sequel to his popular tour about the 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times, arson and bomb detective Mike Digby takes us on a scrupulously researched journey through early Los Angeles, exposing a brazen conspiracy to kill, maim or terrorize anyone who stood in the way of a beautiful young woman inheriting the fortune of her estranged husband. While following the forensic leads of the unfolding case on a route rich in time capsule crime scenes, Mike will compare and contrast the historical investigation to the modern crime analysis methods he has used in his law enforcement career. And every passenger gets a copy of Mike's new book about the case. (Special event, buy tickets here.)
THE BIRTH OF NOIR: JAMES M. CAIN'S SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA NIGHTMARE - SAT. 8/17... 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.)
Additional upcoming tours: Boyle Heights & Monterey Park (8/24), Mansonland (8/31), Saving Los Angeles Landmarks (9/7), Los Angeles Book Land, 1939: Chandler, Fante, Huxley, Isherwood, West (9/14), Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (9/21) and Eastside Babylon (9/28).
Eastside Babylon – Saturday, June 29
$64.00
The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain's Southern California Nightmare---August 17th
$64.00
Wilshire Boulevard Death Trip Tour - Saturday, July 20th
$64.00
Pasadena Confidential Saturday July 13
$64.00
RECOMMENDED READING
You don't have to read every book by the authors featured on our newest literary tour Los Angeles Book Land, 1939, but the experience will be richer if you crack a spine or two before you board. Choose from Raymond Chandler's debut mystery The Big Sleep, John Fante's Bunker Hill love letter Ask the Dust, Aldous Huxley's questing After Many A Summer Dies The Swan and the wonderfully unhinged The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. And Christopher Isherwood came to Los Angeles after completing Goodbye To Berlin, trading an iconic old world city for one very new and very different from all he knew.
OUR HISTORIC L.A. PODCAST
Episode #132 is Illuminating Los Angeles: Elmore Leonard & The Triforium. Meet Gregg Sutter, who is hosting a new 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
The pathetic tale of a Downtown L.A. ego trip that petered out when the ego got bored. (But at least Tom Gilmore didn't wreck the Farmer’s & Merchant’s Bank.)
Dig the nearly finished and eerily lifelike bust of Raymond Chandler, bound for the bronze foundry and a secret location to be announced.
Seems like everybody who gets close to Huguette Clarke’s ill-gotten riches turns into Scrooge McDuck. Don't hold your breath for a visit to her Santa Barbara estate.
An end to our long collaboration with Scoops, as Tai Kim shutters his original East Hollywood gelato shop. On 6/15, we enjoyed noir-inspired flavors honoring Raymond Chandler one last time.
Erosion threatens the shoreline, lagoon and tiled loveliness of Malibu's Adamson House. The grand old palm has fallen!
Santa Monica's backroom deal with an impatient developer means to see Millard Sheets' iconic beach scene mosaic, you'll need to drive to the OC.
In a city where too many landmarks are lost to greedy developers and the politicians who enable them, it's heartening to see Bob Baker's magical marionettes blooming in their new home.
The best thing in the Burt Reynolds estate auction at Julien's was this bust sculpted from pipe cleaners.
Drama in Santa Monica as the landmark nomination for John Parkinson's estate triggers threats to fight the concept of historic designation to the Supreme Court. (In the end, protection prevailed.)
RIP Old Fort MacArthur Days, mysteriously restricted to just 20th century U.S. wartime reenactors. Viking, Civil War, Californio and other characters will be up in Bakersfield instead. Big loss for San Pedro.
A bit of a mixed message from the new tenants at CBS Television City, but someone seems to have clued them in that the iconic eye logo is a protected feature of the landmarked Pereira building.
It was a in City Hall, with Miracle Mile Neighbors vs. Las Vegas Speculators, fighting bare-knuckled for the soul of Tom Bergin's.
Even as LACMA contemplates taking a wrecking ball to its 1965 William Pereira campus, LAX is shopping his firm’s iconic Theme Building to potential developers as the centerpiece of a new hotel complex.
Cracks found on L.A. Times building ahead of controversial development. Back home in Canada, marine district rezoned for developer Onni Group as officials lament their “history of broken promises... a travesty.”
We love Marvin Gaye, but it's a shame Isidore Dockweiler should lose his post office. Weirdly, the 2017 bill Karen Bass sponsored was not for the branch by USC, but for Rimpau Station, in the West Adams neighborhood where Gaye lived and died.
Branching out from their ongoing (but threatened) Egyptian Theatre programming to present Music Box Cinema elsewhere, The Retroformat Coalition was granted nonprofit status to further appreciation for the Silent Film Era.
La Puente lacks vision, and now the city lacks its landmark Star Theatre by S. Charles Lee, which could have been restored as the centerpiece of a new development.
By the Mayan Theatre, where Onni Group plans to build a 60-story tower, we speak for the gorgeous, endangered street trees.
The grim tale of the 2008 Universal vault fire, and how easily hustled journalists failed Los Angeles, and the world.
A perfect rose to honor a century of scholarship, horticulture and art.
What happened to the exciting redesign of Pershing Square? A refusal by Jose Huizar to consider public sentiment that John Parkinson's 1910 park was better than anything in his competition, among other transgressions. Restore!
yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric