The Wreckers Come For The Giant Chili Bowl, But They Can't Demolish L.A.'s Weird, Sweet, Creative Soul

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.

From this year forward, February 16 will be a grim anniversary for fans of offbeat Los Angeles architecture and restaurant history.

In spite of enormous good faith efforts by the Los Angeles Conservancy and our own scrappy Friends of the Chili Bowl crew to get the 1935 roadside diner moved to safety (if not landmarked), the property owner has a demolition permit and mysterious plans to do something destructive behind that privacy fence.

The Conservancy caught an ugly glimpse this morning, and our preservation pal Damian Sullivan witnessed the sign coming down in the afternoon.

So the question now is: how destructive? And how will anyone know, with the building hidden away and conflicting stories spewing from councilman Mike Bonin’s office and the owners? It’s going to fall on citizens to keep an eye on the big bowl and try hard to hold these slippery, entitled characters accountable. Mad? Yes, we are, thanks.

Last night, a fiery Richard addressed the West Los Angeles Sawtelle Neighborhood Council prior to its unanimous vote urging Mike Bonin to step in and finally do something to protect the Chili Bowl, and you can hear his few holds barred testimony in a video we’re calling Mike Bonin’s Hot Mess.

We find quite a contrast between the creative efforts of Art Whizin, the visionary restaurant operator and property developer who as a young English immigrant came up with the Chili Bowl concept, its eye-catching portable architecture, legendary chili recipe and wacky branding (“we cook our beans backwards—you only get the hiccups”), and how property based LLCs make their fortunes in Los Angeles today.

Where once you had to have good ideas, a quality product, excellent people and management skills, as well as a good name you stood proudly behind, now all one needs to do to profit is to register a shadowy corporate identity and $omehow convince a lame duck politician to slam the brakes on preservation efforts. And then if things goes as desired by almost no one, a little piece of Los Angeles history can be senselessly wrecked and a development site cleared.

It might be profitable for a few, but it leaves our city much the poorer.

As painful as it can be to take on these battles, you have our promise that we will continue adopting landmarks in peril and speaking up for cool, weird places that make up the Los Angeles story. It’s the giant Chili Bowls that really matter, and not backroom deals and dirty profits. In fifty years, nobody will remember any of these selfish, boring schemes. But Art Whizin will still be one cool cat worth talking about!

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.

But there’s more to life than giant threatened Chili Bowls, and in two short videos, we invite you to tag along on Kim’s recent birthday adventure, where she paid her respects to a most remarkable birdie named Blinky, and exposed the dark secret of the Old Trapper, whose folk art environment is threatened with eviction.

Hmm… sounds like we’ve got a lot of work to do. But we expect you know by now that we wouldn’t have it any other way.

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

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In the latest subscriber's edition of this newsletter—$10/month, cheap!—On Chicago Street in Boyle Heights, if you stand very still and wish very hard, it's still 1895—is a virtual tour of the time capsule wooden church where Occidental College was founded, featuring stained glass windows worth shouting about.

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