Gentle reader,
This Saturday’s tour, Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive, is very occasional and special, the rain will be letting up, and we’d love to see you there.
In the late 1960s, after the Community Redevelopment Agency bought up all the boarding houses, hotels, shops and taverns, displaced 9000 people and brought in the bulldozers, it seemed like the end for Bunker Hill, the Victorian neighborhood above Downtown.
But a funny thing happened, as the proposed redevelopment stalled and new ideas about adaptive reuse, historic preservation, environmentalism and tenants rights took root: people who never visited old Bunker Hill began to study, celebrate and explore it–virtually–through the thousands of photos, film clips, stories and paintings that survive.
Bunker Hill might be dead, but its ghosts are active and eager to meet you.
Join our special guest host, Bunker Hill historian Nathan Marsak, for an immersive time travel trip onto modern Bunker Hill, to explore the lost neighborhood and how it grew, with stops to memorialize iconic landmarks and fascinating personalities, and its double life as a favorite film noir location.
Then once you’ve fallen in love with the lively and lovely old neighborhood, we’ll break your heart with how local and Federal officials conspired to knock it all down, and the lessons this failed redevelopment scheme can teach Angelenos of today.
Plus, we’ll explore the new Bunker Hill’s best buildings and public spaces, an open-air Museum of Modernism, featuring remarkable examples of Late Moderne, New Formalist, Postmodernism and more, and revisit some notorious crime scenes from the past.
If that sounds like an unusually rich and layered walking tour, that’s because it is! Nathan Marsak is the author of three very different books about Bunker Hill–Bunker Hill Los Angeles, Bunker Noir! and Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill–and this tour includes elements of all of them. You’ll have a chance to buy copies and get them autographed after the tour.
Plus we’re joined by native son Gordon Pattison, who will be our guide hunting for the ghosts of the lost Victorian neighborhood hiding among the shining modern towers. Gordon is featured in the 2013 video at the top of the newsletter—a vignette produced for our third ever You Can’t Eat the Sunshine podcast episode—reuniting with one of the few relics of his family’s beloved landmark boarding house that survived an arson fire.
And we’ll get a chance to check out the new Los Angeles Public Library photo exhibit about master architect John Parkinson, with a walk through from Parkinson’s biographer and the show’s curator Stephen Gee. It’s a rousing day in old L.A., and we invite you to join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles' past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city's soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, 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. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (Sat. 3/15) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 3/22) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (Sun. 3/30) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (Sat. 4/5) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 4/12) • Elmer McCurdy’s Main Street Revival (4/15) • Leo Politi Loves Los Angeles (Sat. 4/19) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (Sat. 4/26) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Cases (5/3) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (5/10) • Highland Park Arroyo Time Travel Trip (5/17) • The Run: Gay Downtown History (5/24) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (5/31) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (6/7) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (6/14) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (6/22) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (6/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (7/12) • The Real Black Dahlia (7/19) • Broadway (7/26)
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