Gentle reader,
On this wet and blustery Christmas Eve, we’re wishing you a warm and sweet holiday season, surrounded by those you love and those you tolerate (because even difficult people deserve a little grace, and you can afford to be gracious).
We’re all in it together, and in a region that’s taken it on the chin from fire and ICE, it’s never been more essential that we look after each other, love one another and stand up for what it means to be an Angeleno: a citizen of a culturally diverse, creative, tolerant place that has always welcomed the outsider, the visionary, the refugee, the lonely and the lost.
In this City of the Angels on the edge of the western dream, we’re all of us capable of finding the voice within that is great, and letting that voice rise as one.
The message is clear: we want and need you here and cannot wait to see what you’ll do.
This is why we fight so hard to challenge the real estate and tech industry propaganda that fuels the low-information, largely online “Yimby” movement, with its coordinated attacks on anyone who pushes back against the narrative that cities can build themselves out of the housing use crisis by eliminating zoning and local control, destroying existing housing for dense new towers and removing protections for cultural landmarks.
We’ve watched our hometown, the city we love, become unaffordable and blighted—not due to a lack of modest, decent, affordable multi-family housing, but because that housing is getting snapped up by speculators, the longtime tenants pushed out (sometimes by murderous violence), units held empty, whole buildings burned out after they’re left open to squatters and vandals.
Every one of those units could be a home to people who belong here, and we hate that it’s now so hard to survive in a city long known as a cheap place to reinvent yourself.
It doesn’t have to be this way and very soon, in collaboration with some dedicated preservation pals, we’ll be introducing tools to help Angelenos fight back against the blighted fire traps in their neighborhoods and hopefully return them to their proper use as housing for Angelenos.
Because the best present we can think of is giving each one of you a sense of power and purpose, so you can help to shape the city into something better, something more welcoming and beautiful and accessible to newcomers, than it is today.
We’re not giving up on Los Angeles and we hope you aren’t, either!
If you still need a hostess gift or something for your sweetheart’s stocking, how about a digital/printable gift certificate for a walking tour into the secret heart of Los Angeles? They’re on sale through Christmas, five for the price of four, and if you want to keep the free one for yourself, that’s just fine.
And if you’re curious about the latest Black Dahlia killer theory—which like others before it seeks to conflate that unsolved 1940s L.A. case with the unsolved 1960s Zodiac murders in the Bay Area—you might like to join us on Saturday’s Human Sacrifice, our last public tour of the year.
We won’t delve into these new allegations against the war-damaged Marvin Margolis (an intriguing character who features on our new Hollywood Noir tour), since they are being slow dripped via podcast episodes, but will seek to understand the real person at the heart of the case, the depressed and vulnerable Beth Short, a homeless drifter who just needed a safe place to sleep.
The tour is about housing insecurity, public policy, corruption and true crime in Downtown Los Angeles, from the Hotel Cecil (where Rev. Dylan Littlefield is changing lives on the historic Alcoholics Anonymous mezzanine) to the alleys on the edge of Skid Row to high rise party pads where crypto casinos are no place to suffer a medical crisis. It’s a web of stories spanning the 1940s-2010s that will break your heart and open your mind to all the city can be, and we’d love to see you there.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
Are you on social media? We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Substack Notes, TikTok, Nextdoor and Reddit sharing preservation news as it happens. New: some of these newsletters are on Medium, too.
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
• Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Cases (12/27) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (1/24) • Alvarado Terrace & South Bonnie Brae Tract (1/31) • Hollywood Noir (2/7) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (2/14) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (2/21) • Weird West Adams & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (2/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (3/7) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (3/21) • Christine Sterling & Leo Politi: Angels of Los Angeles (4/4) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (4/11) • Early Hollywood’s Silent Comedy Legends (4/18) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (4/25)
