The Cultural Steward-ship Founders, and Bukowski at 99

Gentle reader...

We're experiencing an unprecedented stewardship crisis at Los Angeles non-profits and institutions, as seemingly solid commitments to preserve and program community treasures collapse under scrutiny. But at least in the cases of Gamble House and Arroyo del Rey, two architecturally distinguished houses working to disentangle themselves from USC, the landmarks themselves appear to be safe, with their public programs intact.

Less certain is the status of the Egyptian Theatre, as its troubled non-profit owner The American Cinematheque quietly shops the landmark to streaming giant Netflix, while refusing to meet with the dues paying members and community to explain the situation. When we went to City Hall last week to present our petition and ask the City Attorney for an opinion on the legality of a property the city "sold" for $1 being bought by a corporation, we discovered that the person brokering the sale has an interesting history. Richard also reunited with his beloved high school film teacher Jim Hosney for a Spectrum News 1 feature about what would be lost if the Egyptian Theatre is allowed to pass into private ownership. Please spread the word to anyone who cares about repertory film in Hollywood.

Charles Bukowski's 99th birthday week saw a flurry of stories about the writer, whose insights into the struggles of ordinary life in Los Angeles remain relevant 25 years after his death. San Pedro politicians and boosters have a perhaps overly ambitious idea to memorialize him in larger-than-lifesize bronze in time for his centennial, though as Richard observed on KCRW's Greater L.A., it would be hard to improve upon girlfriend Linda King's lovingly crafted bust. And in his debut KPCC Take Two Throwback Thursday local history feature on Terminal Annex Post Office (at timestamp 34:34 in the show), Richard describes the abiding impact of Bukowski's years in the postal sorting trenches. Can't get enough of the self-styled Dirty Old Man of L.A. Letters? We'll tour his beloved haunts on 10/19.

The grassroots campaign to preserve and reactivate Alpine Village got a powerful ally, as L.A. County's Historical Landmarks and Records Commission asked for a report on the German shopping district's historic significance. We're very pleased that the County has finally adopted a landmarking ordinance, which we've advocated for out of concern for otherwise unprotected gems like the world's biggest Tamale. Alpine Village is a great opportunity for the County to show how it can work with the community and developers to find preservation solutions for places that matter, while raising consciousness about historic preservation. Sign and share and see you at (or before) Oktoberfest!

Our true crime tours are now listed through November. Won't you join us on the dark side of Los Angeles for... Weird West Adams (11/2), Wilshire Boulevard Death Trip (11/16) and Pasadena Confidential (11/23)? Because every neighborhood gets the crimes it deserves!

Saturday's tour explores the landmarks and cultural history of two Eastside neighborhoods with surprising similarities. We're taking a time travel trip through Boyle Heights & Monterey Park. Join us, do!

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COMING SOON

BOYLE HEIGHTS & MONTEREY PARK: THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF L.A.'S MELTING POTS - SAT. 8/24... 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, El Encanto, Divine's Furniture and Wing Hop Fung. (Buy tickets here.)

MANSONLAND - SAT. 8/31... A journey through the 1960s counterculture, organized crime and Hollywood hustlers, with author Brad Schreiber illuminating the mysteries and connections informing the crimes of Charles Manson's family. (Sold out with waiting list, more info here.)

SAVING LOS ANGELES LANDMARKS - SAT. 9/7... A new tour, a little different every time, celebrates the passionate citizen preservationists who adopt a threatened building or artifact and bend heaven and earth to bring its story into the light. From the progressive bank as arts center Lytton Savings to L.A. Riots memorial light sculpture Vermonica, William Pereira's woefully remuddled MWD to mysteries revealed by Chinatown's vanishing Joan of Arc sculpture, it's a wild day out in the preservation trenches, telling offbeat Los Angeles stories that will have you rooting for these cool landmarks, and the preservationists who love them. (Buy tickets here.)

LOS ANGELES BOOK LAND, 1939: CHANDLER, FANTE, HUXLEY, ISHERWOOD, WEST - SAT. 9/14... There must have been something special in the air that year, as the great Los Angeles novels tumbled onto the library shelves like sweet summer peaches. Join us on a new excursion through Downtown and Hollywood, celebrating the literary and cultural history of an incredible literary year, with visits to time capsule places that figure in the lives of the authors and in their books. From the new Union Station to a scandal-wracked City Hall, from forgotten speakeasies of old Skid Row to fantastical castles in the sky, from star-studded opening nights to mornings after in the gutter, to Larry Edmunds, the last great Hollywood bookstore standing, we’ll go out in search of the ghosts of that magical year. (Buy tickets here.)

HOTEL HORRORS & MAIN STREET VICE - SAT. 9/21... Through the 1940s, downtown was the true city center, a lively, densely populated, exciting and sometimes dangerous place. But while many of the historic buildings remain, their human context has been lost. This downtown double feature tour is meant to bring alive the old ghosts and memories that cling to the streets and structures of the historic core, and is especially recommended for downtown residents curious about their neighborhood's neglected history. (Buy tickets here.)

EASTSIDE BABYLON - SAT. 9/28... 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.)

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES - SAT. 10/5... 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 visit to Larry Edmunds Bookshop, the last survivor of a once-great Hollywood literary district. (Buy tickets here.)

FORENSIC SCIENCE SEMINAR - SUN. 10/13... 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 Lazarus Files is a cold case with a chilling twist: the killer was an LAPD detective! Your ticket benefits graduate level Criminalistics research. (More info here.) Additional upcoming tours: Echo Park Book of the Dead (10/12), Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles (10/19), The Real Black Dahlia (10/26), Weird West Adams (11/2), Wilshire Boulevard Death Trip (11/16) and Pasadena Confidential (11/23).

Saving Los Angeles Landmarks Tour - 9/7
$64.00

Los Angeles Book Land, 1939: Chandler, Fante, Huxley, Isherwood, West - 9/14
$64.00

Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice - 9/21
$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 The Big Sleep, John Fante's Ask the Dust, Aldous Huxley's After Many A Summer and the wonderfully unhinged The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West.

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

Sam Hall Kaplan pulled our sleeve to the independent report on the City of Malibu's botched response to the Woolsey Fire.

A judge rejected the amorphous EIR for the Capitol Records parking lot project. To quote winning attorney Robert Silverstein: “The FBI should continue to investigate city officials. Clearly, LA City Hall won't police itself.”

"Former L.A. planning director faces $281,000 ethics fine, the largest of its kind." How about a lifetime lobbying ban, and consequences for all his recent employees who took the meetings?

Support swells for preservation in place of the beloved Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign. You can't make them like this anymore!

New on Frenchtown Confidential: How Bernard Street Got Its Name. Learn more about early French citizens on our new Saving L.A. Landmarks tour.

Cheers to kayak tour guide Steven Appleton, who purchased a slice of the L.A. River so he can have a seat at the table for the frogs and the herons. With so many monied interests staking their claim, Appleton's "worthless" land is more precious than gold.

Last call for La Abeja, closing out fifty years of Fonseco family hospitality on the south side of Highland Park.

More institutional drama at Wilshire and Fairfax: Academy Museum director out. It’s been nothing but trouble ever since LACMA unloaded the May Company building at a price so low, the Academy couldn’t say no. L.A. historians could have told you: beware the Hollywood Museum Curse.

Diana Lundin has a different kind of Los Angeles pet photography business: Dog Noir, mini mysteries starring your hard-boiled pooch and this gorgeous, rotten city.

Farewell to Altadena eccentric Zeke the Sheik, whose humus helped nourish our garden and thousands around the southland. Hear his story on episode #51 of our podcast, Cosmic Consciousness & Compost.

LAPD investigating 12 unsolved murders with possible Manson family ties, among them, the overkill slayings of Doreen Gaul and Jim Sharp, whose mysterious last movements are explored on our Weird West Adams tour (11/2).

Video vault: A sneak peek of some of the sites that flesh out the lost world of psychedelic Los Angeles, as featured on our new Mansonland tour.

Curious about all the thought that went into making the revived Formosa Cafe look so effortlessly timeless, while addressing concerns about cultural appropriation? Elina Shatkin's got the skinny.

An update on Russellville, KY's ruined National Register town square, which we visited on in 2017. The lovely buildings we admired were demolished for "boutique hotels," which appear to be imaginary.

A cool new use for William Pereira's landmarked CBS Television City: a food and streetwear festival on the mid-century studio lot. Meanwhile, LACMA remains intent on demolishing its iconic Pereira campus.

File under: frustrating! SurveyLA data is supposed to be fully integrated into the Los Angeles Historic Resources Inventory, yet the Mendel and Mabel Meyer Courtyard Apartments is not listed as a protected city landmark, which it's been since late 2015.

An unexpected return for Broguiere's Sanitary Dairy, which closed in a huff last month, leaving employees in the lurch.

Get the nasty taste of the Manson Family's converted school bus of death out of your mind with The Hog Farm Movie, featuring much groovier conveyances, and Pigasus.

We're in love with the Kewpies and Vampires at a 1921 Los Angeles kiddie costume party, featured in W.E.B. Du Bois' groundbreaking's periodical The Brownies' Book.

After bizarre threats by the property owner’s attorney to fight designation all the way to the Supreme Court, architect John Parkinson's home Woodacres is now a protected Santa Monica landmark.

Because preservationists fought to protect the Covina Bowl until the right developer came along, Powers, Daly, and DeRosa's daffy masterpiece will mostly be sticking around. We’ll visit early next year on our revamped Route 66 tour.

The Italian American Museum of LA has digitized its photo collection. Unfortunately, the images are low resolution with huge watermarks. Still, there's interesting stuff, including this great shot of our friend and collaborator Jean Bruce Poole.

Herman Miller Showroom (1949) by Charles and Ray Eames threatened by grossly out of scale Beverly-Robertson project. But the neighbors are fighting back.

yrs,
Kim and Richard
Esotouric