Gentle reader,
We’ve lost some great Los Angeles landmarks to the landfills, and it doesn’t have to be this way. More progressive, green and thoughtful policies from City Hall could help preserve the places that matter, while creating opportunities for the city to grow and change and investors to succeed.
Instead, 200 North Spring defers to those who have power, money and influence, and their pathological yen for demolition permits. The only way these unimaginative characters know how to make money for their investors is by destruction / construction—for glitzy new apartment towers with all mod cons, no greenery or ground floor retail and unaffordable rents.
The Los Angeles that serves their interests isn’t serving the rest of us. When we think about the iconic local writers and musicians and painters and architects whose stories we share with an international audience on our tours, we muse on how Los Angeles was such a generous place, with a pleasant climate and low rents and opportunities to work just enough to stick around and find the voice within that is great.
Could a Charles Bukowski ever bloom again in the city as it is now? We’ll be talking about that question on our new walk of Hank’s Westlake on May 11.
Featured in today’s video post is the long vacant, rent controlled corner duplex that is the jewel of the upper end of the Beverlywood residential district, built by J.J. Rees in 1937, and apparently days away from demolition.
We’ve long admired this handsome building, but it really came on our radar in 2021, when neighbors kicked up a stink over some shocking improprieties by the City Planning Department. Our pandemic pledge to read every document produced by a city agency concerned with land use helped us to see many crises brewing. (See our scoops on La Golondrina, Skid Row Housing Trust, the Hotel Cecil, etc.)
Here, the Planning Commission had just done something unusual, something that rarely happens in neighborhoods where poor people live: it denied a huge proposed project on the site. Beverlywood rejoiced: City Hall had listened to them. But when the project went back to Planning, that department falsely claimed it had been accepted and it commenced approvals!
The council file for this matter is packed with disturbing communications from confused and angry neighbors, one of whom filed an appeal—which of course, the city, complicit in violating its own rules and standards—which are the law—rejected.
And then in January 2022, the vacant duplex was unexpectedly put up for rent. At the time we wondered if the FBI was asking questions about the improprieties. But it’s since become clear that the DOJ isn’t actually interested in cleaning up the real estate corruption that’s wrecking Los Angeles, only in prosecuting one slim slice of that rotten cake. And while a For Rent sign went up and an online ad was published, nobody moved in. Two years later, the bulldozers are salivating to destroy something beautiful and rare.
Read these two emails (1, 2) by appellant Alison Block, laying out the many serious issues with the proposed project, then imagine this happening next door to you, in the community you love, to the prettiest building on the block. Think about the endless hours Alison and her neighbors spent, to educate themselves on the planning permitting process, the various hearings and decision makers, how close mass transit needs to be for a building to qualify for TOC upzoning, attending and transcribing and annotating public hearings, yelling with frustration, not giving up.
Imagine doing all that, documenting the many errors and outright falsehoods in the city’s work, filing a timely appeal… and then the arrogant, hostile, scofflaw city just goes ahead and holds fresh hearings and didn’t even send out a proper legal notice.
And the Beverly Drive neighbors learned the hard way what Angelenos in less privileged communities like Echo Park found out long ago: when big real estate wants to tear something down, the fix is already in.
And over the hill in Studio City, the Weddington Golf & Tennis neighbors are learning the same ugly lesson. They too are fighting back, through three separate lawsuits, including one directed at the Harvard-Westlake alumnae on the Planning Commission, Caroline Choe and Samantha Millman, for failing to recuse themselves when it came time to vote on their school demolishing much of a “protected” city landmark that the community was desperate to protect. (How is it ethical for there to even be two graduates of one elite San Fernando Valley private school—the school Eric Garcetti also attended—on the commission that makes planning decisions for this huge, diverse city?)
We’re grateful to our preservation pals all across Los Angeles, and honored to help amplify their work. When a citizen makes the effort to advocate for places that matter, whether it’s through attending public hearings, submitting landmark nominations, appealing or suing, surviving slumlord arson attempts, or just expressing their love in word or deed or cool Instagram photos, it matters.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, and we wish it wasn’t. Because the city puts its thumb on the scale for dirty projects, good buildings are lost, tenants displaced, small business strangled, communities harmed and people suffer.
All of this strife and negativity could be avoided if only our city followed its own rules, behaved ethically and developed new policies meant to nurture and support the community and not just those who seek to profit from us.
Back to Beverlywood, and what’s happening behind the green demolition fence. Soon, because the fix was in since they were purchased six years ago in order to keep them empty until the city approved the demolition permits, the beautiful J.J. Rees apartments will be nothing but plaster dust and broken glass, smashed wrought iron, crushed concrete and toppled trees—all of it trucked off to the landfill as if it was garbage, which it ain’t.
Our preservation pal Alison won’t be there to see it wrecked. She’s left Los Angeles, after fighting as hard and long as she was able, like so many good people who have seen their neighborhoods and livelihoods decimated by the bad policies of Eric Garcetti’s Planning Department—an agency that has only gotten more brazen since Karen Bass took office and changed nothing.
That’s the unspoken secondary tragedy of L.A.’s preservation crisis: we’re losing Angelenos, too. And just like lovely prewar apartment buildings, once these precious and unique members of our community are gone, we won’t ever see their like again.
There’s no shame in leaving. It’s asking a lot of any citizen to fight a machine that is just meant to be managing the built environment, keeping the sewers flowing and the sidewalks flat and garbage off the streets, but manages to do so much less and so much more, in all the wrong ways.
But some of us are born to fight, and it feels pretty sweet to be in the army of righteous Angelenos, hitting back and sometimes scoring knockout blows.
We’ll leave you with the just-published cover story in San Pedro’s free weekly Random Lengths News. Not satisfied with landmarking Walker's Cafe—and working to refute the owner seeking to divide the community to build a huge triplex that will kill off the cafe—Emma Rault now advocates for policies to preserve legacy businesses all over L.A.
Everything she writes makes such good sense. If the city is willing to grow up and turn away from the corruption that is destroying it from within, it can, too.
We’re so excited about Saturday’s walk, a once-a-year celebration of the life and work of Bunker Hill novelist John Fante, with our very special guests the writer’s children Vickie and Jim, and neighborhood native son Gordon Pattison. The Million Dollar Theater marquee was just updated this afternoon to honor Fante on what would be his 115th birthday weekend, and there’s a slice of yummy strawberry cake with your name on it. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
Psst… If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. You can share this post to win subscriber perks. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking and bus tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
• John Fante’s Downtown Los Angeles Birthday (Sat. 4/6) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown (Sat. 4/13) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Cases (Sat. 4/20) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (Sat. 4/27) • Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Tract (Sat. 5/4) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (Sat. 5/11) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice (Sat. 5/18) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sat. 5/25) • POP – Preserving Our Past (Sat. 6/1) • Westlake Park (Sat. 6/8) • Highland Park Arroyo (Sat. 6/15) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 6/29) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 7/13) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop (7/27)
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS
Update on landmark status for Marilyn Monroe's house at 12305 West 5th Helena Drive: the owners rev up the anti-landmark PR engine with a negative TV news spot, followed by an aggressive letter to the City Attorney threatening legal action if the house isn't physically moved out of Brentwood.
When L.A. was locked down, the Getty's release of Ed Ruscha's Sunset streetscapes gave us wings. Brian Goldstein’s Sunset Over Sunset immersive map tells underground LA stories through their lens: sex work, Thai Town, transit.
More trouble around Mayor Bass' harebrained ED 1 upzoning scheme: developers Shawn Ebrahimian and Sean Tabibian let an aggressive peeping tom squat in the storybook house at 507 N. Larchmont Blvd. they're eager to demolish, refuse to secure the site.
SFGate has been telling some quirky L.A. stories lately, including this Gower Gulch history lesson, featuring architect Lester Paley's son Aaron. This cool spot in Hollywood's demo-for-tower district is ripe for a landmark nomination.
Andrew Nette tipped us off to Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride (1974), a stark mob procedural with astonishing location shots in the lost Victorian Skid Row sanitized by the CRA's ugly SRO hotel scheme. Watch it here.
RIP to Alhambra's Curtis Street oak, an ancient witness to Southern California's transformations, brought down by February’s storms.
Shout out to Mr. Homegrown, another citizen court reporter who like us felt compelled to attend Ray Chan's public corruption trial, since the newspapers failed to provide daily updates.
RIP 200 North Dillon Street. Unoccupied 1912 Craftsman burned 8/14/1022. Video here. Demolished at taxpayer expense. VACANCY TAX NOW!
YES! A landmark nomination has been submitted for the rent controlled Theosophical residential compound above the shuttered, suppressed Monastery of the Angels. Krotona Court & Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross needs some love, and is a landmark is all but name. You can read it here. We’re glad to see the LA Conservancy step up to nominate historic RSO housing. The tenants are struggling.
Beneath the Hall of Records, a hidden world of concrete, cardboard boxes, golf carts and mystery puddles. How far do the tunnels go?
Months before Gil Cedillo left office, an application to name part of Westlake in CD1 "Guatemalan Square" raised questions, as organizers didn't live there. Now nonprofits oppose the "poorly thought out" plan and the map borders, and the city says “yeah, this is not happening.” Wonder what this was all about?
Demolition is coming for the beautiful 1937 J.J. Rees Apartments in Beverlywood, and it's everything wrong with L.A. City Hall