Gentle reader,
Fridays are supposed to be the closest thing we get to a day off, before the weekend’s flurry of walking tour activity.
But early this morning, the National Register, Romanesque Revival Crouch Memorial Church of God in Christ (John C. Austin, 1905) at 1001 East 27th Street caught fire—again.
The old wooden church has been shuttered since October 2013, when a wall heater sparked a blaze that climbed up into the attic. Two firefighters trying to put out that fire were hurt when the roof collapsed, and another suffered an electrical shock.
The church is one of the key non-residential structures in the 27th Street Historic District—not just for its architecture, but as a community hub serving the changing demographics of its South Los Angeles neighborhood: temperance women at the turn of the 20th century, and the African American Holiness–Pentecostal congregation from 1950 on.
But L.A.’s demographics are always changing, and by the 2013 fire, many of the C.O.G.I.C. families no longer lived in the neighborhood. With the historic building unusable, services moved down to a borrowed pulpit in Willowbrook, half an hour south.
Despite Pastor Lawrence E. Magee’s stated intentions of restoring the historic church, a building permit issued in 2017 expired unused in 2020. And for 11 years, Crouch Memorial just sat there, occasionally accessed by vandals, animals and people seeking shelter, growing more blighted with each passing season.
We’ve been keeping an eye on the church on our visits further west on 27th Street to check on the historic cottages rendered uninhabitable after LAPD overstuffed its detonation truck with illegal fireworks. So when we heard about this morning’s fire, we went down to see if the building was a total loss.
Happily, it is not!
But while the south and west entry facades still retain their historic integrity, the back and east side of the structure are nearly destroyed, and the flames almost took out the historic contributors next door, an 1897 back house and a two-unit 1923 Spanish Colonial Revival bungalow court. The tenants lost two cars in the fire and were very scared.
Shout out to Lola, the protective little white pup who woke her family with time to get to safety, before the fire trucks arrived. She deserves a steak dinner.
We arrived on East 27th Street in the early afternoon, about eight hours after the fire was extinguished and it was all over the TV news. Nobody from the office of Councilmember Curren Price had bothered to come see if their constituents were okay, and when we called the City Hall office and the field office, the phone just rang and rang.
As for the online contact link, it’s dead.
Curren Price, of course, is distracted by his pending public corruption prosecution, but there’s no excuse for his staff being inaccessible on the last day before a holiday weekend.
So we stuck around and did what we could to help the residents navigate the costly, scary situation they woke up to, and gave Lola lots of scritches. Then we walked from the scorched alley around the front of the historic church to give you an idea of what remains, and how incredibly beautiful this neighborhood is.
While Crouch Memorial Church is still owned by its apparently inactive congregation, and they are responsible for maintaining the building, we believe this tragedy is also the city’s fault. For 11 years, this historic landmark has been vacant and blighted. The owners have failed to restore it, and have not kept it secure. And the city let it be that way.
Councilmember Curren Price has demonstrated his willingness to do an awful lot to help the big property developers who employ his wife and donate to his officeholder account, but not much for his constituents who have to live in the shadow of blighted buildings and don’t even get a courtesy visit after one burns down.
Fire is the eventual, predictable end for too many of L.A.’s vacant and derelict historic buildings, the culmination of a slow process of demolition by neglect. We believe that the city needs to be proactive with enforcement and offers of assistance when a property owner is unable or unwilling to maintain a landmark, and needs to do something to save important buildings before they’re too far gone. There are opportunities for grants and loans for National Register buildings, and property owners could get so much more help accessing them than they do now. Where are the Los Angeles Conservancy and the National Trust for Historic Preservation?
What now? It would be very easy to knock the church down and let a connected developer erect dense housing that looks like a file cabinet, but we hope that doesn’t happen. The building ought to be restored and reactivated to once again serve its community, and not get replaced with something that doesn’t reflect the history, style and personality of the National Register block.
This beautiful neighborhood is already home to great buildings and good people. Imagine how much would be possible if only Los Angeles had real progressive leadership that recognized the priceless value of historic buildings and used its vast resources to help preserve and reactivate them on East 27th Street and everywhere.
Maybe it sounds like a crazy dream, but that’s the crazy, dreamy city we want to live in.
And on Saturday, as we lead a group through Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights, founded in 1877 by civic leaders who had a vision for what Los Angeles could be, we’ll celebrate some of the crazy dreamers who lived and died in old Los Angeles, and the charming, quirky monuments that mark their eternal homes. Join us, do!
Finally, a special note for book lovers: the Westchester Rotary Club is holding its 70th annual fundraiser sale through Monday with new boxes arriving constantly. Yesterday, we found some very good books from the Immaculate Heart College library, which was a collection owned by late Mayor Richard Riordan—we also came away with Riordan’s law school yearbooks. We don’t know how much of his honor’s enormous home library will be sold in the Ralph’s parking lot next to LAX, but you might score some treasures if you go. And if you do, let us know what you get.
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
• Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sat. 5/25) • POP – Preserving Our Past Featuring the Dutch Chocolate Shop (Sat. 6/1) • Westlake Park (Sat. 6/8) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 6/29) • The Real Black Dahlia (Sat. 7/6) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 7/13) • Miracle Mile Marvels and Madness (Sun. 7/21) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop (Sat. 7/27 - sorry, sold out) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sun. 8/4) • West Adams Sugar Hill and Angelus Rosedale Cemetery (Sat. 8/10) • Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess (Sun. 8/25) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 8/31)
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