In Loving Memory of A Giant Chili Bowl, Sacrificed On The Altar of Civic Corruption
Gentle reader,
Greetings from your friendly historic Los Angeles sightseeing tour company, now offering digital programming until we can again organize groups to gather and explore the city we love.
Since last we wrote you about it, the wonderful giant Chili Bowl on Pico Boulevard has suffered a pointless and painful series of abuses, which we’ve been chronicling with the aid of its dedicated fans.
First, green demolition fencing went up, obscuring the view of the potential National Register landmark. So a worried fan flew a drone overhead, capturing grisly footage of workers scooping out the restaurant’s guts as if it was a Jack O’Lantern. A day later, another concerned citizen captured close up views of the historic structure being sliced into labeled sections, like an orange peeled by an ape.
But if there’s a plan to preserve and put these somewhat ravaged sections back together somewhere, sometime, neither the property owner nor councilman Mike Bonin is talking. Since February 16, we have sent eight emails to a previously active thread with Bonin’s planning staff, with no response.
Back when they were still talking to us, they said that the councilman had made a deal with the property owner—implying that in exchange for Mike Bonin not supporting landmarking last summer, the owner had agreed to move the building off site. Clearly, that didn’t happen. And it’s not at all what the councilman’s deputy said at the fatal landmarking hearing.
Despite the damage to the structure, we continue to advocate for a preservation solution, and to be dismayed by the power and influence that developers—and “developers,” for in this case there is no project proposed for the parcel—have over our almost comically corrupt and equally inept City Hall “leaders.”
With this building having been moved once before, and many folks interested in moving it again, we must sadly suspect that there is some malice at the core of how unpleasantly the Chili Bowl saga played out. And if there is malice in it, it reflects very poorly on the council office, the property owners and their legal team. It’s wrong to destroy something cool just because you can, and because you know it will cause pain.
Yes, it hurts to see the Chili Bowl chopped up, but it only makes us fight harder.
And every public preservation battle exposes weak spots in the forces that seek to destroy our shared history. The Chili Bowl campaign showed Angelenos that pro-development lobbyist group Abundant Housing LA will blatantly lie about a non-existent housing project to undermine the work of the nation’s largest member-based preservation non-profit, the Los Angeles Conservancy, and promote their growth-at-all-costs agenda. Their credibility is shot.
We hope people will remember the Chili Bowl, and tell their friends that this Abundant Housing gang acts in bad faith and is full of… beans!
But there was no time to mourn the Chili Bowl, because another remarkable and neglected mid-century California landmark needed our help.
Since our visit a month ago to Old Trapper’s Lodge on the campus of Pierce College, we’ve been studying the history of this widely misunderstood work and the enormous efforts by one of our preservation heroes, Seymour Rosen, to save it. Rosen’s documentation on the project has been scanned by SPACES Archives, and can be found here—it’s an impressive and illuminating file.
We hope you’ll visit our blog to learn more, become a Friend of "O.T" and join us in advocating for a solution that honors the accomplishments of sculptors John Ehn and Claude K. Bell and of preservationist Seymour Rosen, while keeping this folk art environment intact, accessible and in decent repair.
We've been working with historian Colleen Adair Fliedner and Supervisor Janice Hahn's office on options for preservation and interpretation of historic Rancho Los Amigos, the old County Poor Farm. So you can imagine our dismay when on February 23, we heard a helicopter reporter lament that the landmark property was burning down. So the next morning, we rushed to the campus to see if the historic buildings and sentinel trees on our preservation wish list had survived, and found... well, see for yourself.
For the story of this special place and our hopes for how it can again be of service to Angelenos in need, check out Colleen’s blog post and on-demand webinar. And stay tuned for much more Rancho Los Amigos news, as we’ve finally been able to walk the property and share our hopes and dreams with those in charge.
Finally, a reminder that early Sunday morning the time changes and we don't want you to be caught unawares. So remember to "spring forward" and reset your vintage neon clocks by adding one hour before bedtime. If you wake up early, you might head over to Breed Street in Boyle Heights for a community tree planting and giveaway in the shadow of the historic Jewish temple.
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. Or just share this link with other people who care.
yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
In the latest subscriber's edition of this newsletter—$10/month, cheap!—The Ghost of Harry Bergman's Roadside Museum on Highway 371: of provenance, weed murders, big lizards and the transformative effect of green glass shards lit by the sun.
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thanks for doing all this work and educating us