Gentle reader,
You may have noticed, there’s been a bit of turnover among the legacy businesses of Los Angeles.
Between fires and a pandemic, economic pressures, civic mismanagement and the occasional good old-fashioned family feud, it ain’t easy to keep something venerable and precious tootling along and open for just anyone to walk inside.
We are so grateful to the dedicated stewards who do the tough work to keep the commercial and cultural spaces of old Los Angeles alive and relevant.
Ten years ago this month, we welcomed the release of the book-length edition of How to Find Old Los Angeles, our expanded take on Dick Blackburn’s previously published fold-out map, published by the good folks at Herb Lester in London.
It’s been a favorite souvenir for our tour guests ever since, and is now out of print.
The perfect bound green book had 153 locations (and an index!), but ten years on, the brand new pale pink fold-out version of the guide with art by Heather Cranston-Lesniewski has been distilled to highlight 45 essential spots that we recommend for tourists or locals seeking something a little magical.
And at most of them, you can get something nice to eat or to drink.
Want a copy for your very own?
Join us on a walking tour and we can bring a copy packed up special with your name on the wrapper. Or just order by mail. You can also find it where fine maps and guidebooks are sold, from Amazon or the bookstore supporting Bookshop site or direct from Herb Lester—where you can supplement your order with some cool postcards.
And if you’re truly hardcore and need a copy of the outdated, but still pretty swell, green book for your archival shelf, we have a couple left—not cheap!—representing a time capsule of the city that was.
We know Angelenos and visitors have many options when deciding where to spend their folding green, and we’re so glad when they choose to patronize historic spaces that carry the memories of where we came from and where we might go next.
It’s our honor to amplify these landmarks and to have the opportunity to write the scripts for elegant Herb Lester guides. (Also available: The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles.)
If you go out exploring with the new edition of HTFOLA by your side, we hope you’ll report back on your adventures, or tag us in a photo from the scene.
We’ve got no public tours scheduled this week, but will be back on Saturday, September 12 for Franklin Village Old Hollywood, an exploration of the sacred and profane in a fascinating district packed with highly charges landmarks and lost but friendly souls. Join us, do!
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.
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
• Franklin Village Old Hollywood (9/12) • Know Your Downtown Los Angeles (9/19) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (9/26) • Bunker Noir! True Crime on Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill with Nathan Marsak (10/3) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (10/10) • Highland Park Arroyo Time Travel Trip (10/17) • Film Noir / Real Noir (10/24) • Hallowe’en at Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (10/31) • The Real Black Dahlia (11/7) • Richard’s Birthday Weird West Adams Tour & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (11/14) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (11/21) • Hollywood Noir (11/28)
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS
One of the oldest gay bars in America faces eviction after City Planning rubber-stamped redevelopment without checking for accuracy. If the entitlements did in fact expire last week, can Westlake’s Silver Platter be saved?
The County Board of Supervisors treating signing up for public comment as a 21st century service industry experience is pretty refreshing. Memo to the City: it costs you nothing to be gracious. Try it for a change!
SHOCKING FILING: Emerson College’s brand new appeal alleges CIM Group secretly built an unpermitted 8th floor at their new 6007 Sunset project — ~63 apartments and ~19,000 sq ft never approved by the City Planning Commission.
In 2022, we mourned the demolition of the lovely La Vida Liquor Store at 6007 Sunset for a new development. Cynical as we are about Hollywood land use, we never predicted how far off the rails this project would go... as NOBODY at City Hall or OSHA pulled the brake.
What CIM actually built: 8 stories, 172 units — not the 7-story, 109-unit project the City Planning Commission approved. Planning quietly signed off on it anyway, as a “minor modification” with no public hearing required. (HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?)
Dedicated attorney Robert Silverstein spent 20+ years batting down CIM Group’s Hollywood shenanigans. He died in 2025. As City Hall lets developers do outrageous things like this, we have to ask: will ANYONE step up to protect Angelenos?
A City Planning Department that considers an entire unpermitted floor on a new Sunset Boulevard building to be a rounding error probably should not be the body deciding if a citizen appeal is valid. Where did CIM Group get this sense of entitlement?
Forget it, Emerson, it’s Chinatown. Four days after you appealed the unpermitted floor, City Planning quietly approved all 172 units through a separate case, followed two weeks later by another rewrite for the developer’s benefit — no CEQA, no public hearing, and the planners say it’s “not appealable.”
Jose Huizar was caught on an FBI wire telling a co-conspirator “we’ll fix it in PLUM.” Turns out the City can clean things up completely out of public view. Maybe we’re old-fashioned, but we think Angelenos should be part of planning in L.A. Next stop: a writ in Superior Court?
Good news first: the Burbank Tropicana Apartments showcard script is perfection. But local architect Joe B. Jordan AIA’s 1958 fantasy of a Samoan desert island hideaway no longer has a pool or anything green or alive within. Ouch!
The Cooper Donuts heirs drop a bombshell in lost Main Street cruller lore, rely on AI to craft an otherwise historically sloppy attack on the historian who most wants to help ‘em get this right: “Lydia” Marsak! Nathan’s pretty gracious, considering.
If boating really comes back to MacArthur Park Lake, so will young romance, and we’re all for it!
Vacant Downtown LA landmark watchers alert: the Chetrit Group appears to be collapsing, even as a tiny work crew is puttering around the once-555-unit RSO residential Hotel Clark. What’s next for it, and the Embassy/Trinity’s dorm rooms and grand theater?
When we were helping Bob Baker hang on to his puppet theater, we’d always check in on the 1890 folk Victorian at 372 Laveta Terrace and think about redwood boards arriving by train at the Cornfield or by sea in San Pedro, the hands that carved the frippery, how lonely it seems.
226 N. Catalina turned 105 with no cake or candles, just wind through the plywood boards and no sign of the 17-unit upzoned apartment house used to justify displacing three households. How much pretty, empty housing are Angelenos going to put up with?
97 years ago this week, the action in The Kept Girl mystery begins. Join Raymond Chandler in Art Deco Los Angeles, a wild town populated with demented oilmen, deadly angel worshippers, clean and dirty cops and one fearless stenographer.
It’s a Civic Center miracle: Joseph Young’s Topographical Map of Water Sources in the County of Los Angeles is flowing again! In 2017, Dion Neutra visited with the LAVA Sunday Salon. Here’s a You Can’t Eat the Sunshine podcast, too.
Preservation pal Nathan Marsak urges YOU to attend his extremely strange Art Deco Society of LA lecture on the history of Clifton’s Cafeteria in the never-opened simulacrum of a basement speakeasy. Clifford Clinton, teetotaler, may haunt this program.
Richard Barron, who was replaced on the CHC by Mayor Karen Bass immediately after the presentation on fencing MacArthur Park, tells LA Local: “RAP kind of just came in and said, ‘We’re gonna put up a fence and here’s what it looks like’—‘What? Come on.’”
As Unite Here Local 11 endorses Nithya Raman, she should be asked about that union’s role in making it unfeasible for a new operator to move into La Golondrina Café. The impact on the health of the historic monument is severe.
Did you know that LA’s first HPOZ is under attack by the Sacramento YIMBYs? Saturday, on the Angelino Heights tour, we shared tales of sane, citizen+City Hall-led LA84 urban planning, where LA28 is falling down and the AI monster that wants YOU to STFU.