Curren Price's City Hall Corruption meets Raymond Chandler at the Crossroads of the World

Gentle reader,

Often when we go digging into the past in Los Angeles, we find echoes and answers for what the hell is going on with the city today. Clio, the muse of history, has a sense of humor, and she seems to enjoy leaving clues tying time, space and trauma together to perplex modern seekers.

Each time this happens, it’s like an electrical shock. Zap!

So we can pick up the Monday Los Angeles Times and read in Barrington Plaza tenant Robert Lawrence’s op-ed about how he and 576 neighbors got eviction papers “on May 8, the same date in 1959 that Los Angeles officials used eminent domain and other political machinations to bulldoze Chavez Ravine and destroy the homes of that vibrant, historic Mexican American community… If the Barrington evictions go through, they’ll join Chavez Ravine as among the largest evictions in the city’s history.” Zap!

Or a forgotten ADOHR MILK FARMS neon sign that was obscured under a false roof for decades can be uncovered during construction for a new Howlin’ Ray’s Nashville hot chicken shop in Pasadena, only to be saved and repurposed on site with the HR now standing for Howlin’ Ray’s. Zap!

There are such little synchronicities we encounter all the time, usually so subtle that they’d only mean something to obsessed L.A. history geeks. But there’s nothing subtle about what’s happening around Crossroads of the World—a streamline moderne fantasy architecture landmark we’ll be visiting on Saturday’s Raymond Chandler bus tour.

Curren Price is the fourth Los Angeles councilmember to be indicted on corruption charges as part of the sweeping DOJ investigation that first snared our historic preservation nemesis Jose Huizar in November 2018.

As we wrote in last month’s newsletter, the charges against Price involve failure to recuse himself when land use votes came up for demolitions of large, historic apartment houses where his bigamous “wife” Del Richardson’s relocation specialist company was being paid to make the inconvenient rent controlled tenants go away.

These projects are all over the map, but two of particular interest to us are in central Hollywood. The charming, candy colored garden court Yucca-Argyle Apartments are where citizen activist John Walsh fought for decades to protect Los Angeles taxpayers and his fellow tenants, before dying at home while under the threat of eviction.

Del Richardson is the tenant displacement agent at Yucca-Argyle who used the cover of the pandemic shutdown to sneak the long stalled project through.

A mile away, as Del Richardson prepared more cash for keys move out offers, Clio giggled.

On Las Palmas between Sunset and Selma, a whole block of gorgeous French Regency garden court apartments are threatened with demolition for a massive $1 billion project that borrows the name of the National Register landmark across the street: Crossroads (of the World) Hollywood.

The new project seeks to displace the tenants and destroy the historic apartments, eliminate Las Palmas Avenue entirely, and turn this low-rise portion of Sunset Boulevard into a hotel tower district. A writ of mandate and later a successful Tenant’s Union lawsuit were filed on behalf of the community, even as developer Harridge scored new funding and the city rubber stamped their plans.

According to tenant advocate Susan Hunter, at the present “The tenants [about a dozen families remaining in 83 RSO units] are organized and hopeful as they have a very strong case regarding the baseless evictions filed against them. They have repeatedly tried to get Harridge to engage in real negotiations for a meaningful right of return. Unfortunately the developer has decided to try and play games that will ultimately cost them more than if they had just negotiated a real deal in the first place.”

While the apartments are still standing—and should be housing an additional 70 families!—Harridge is busy preparing the rest of the parcel for some unspecified future construction start. Recently, they tried to demolish the coffee shop on the corner without permits, exposing the nearby tenants to airborne contaminants, noise and anxiety. The city cited them. Will they try to demolish an inhabited building next?

Well, that’s all a rotten story, but where’s the Zap!?

Well, dig this: about a century ago, the Crossroads of the World property was home to a bungalow court housing complex with tenants enjoying shared lawns and gardens. At the Sunset Boulevard entry to the parcel, a newer commercial structure had been erected, and here the supposedly reformed vice king Charles “The Gray Wolf” Crawford dealt in insurance and real estate.

Until May 20, 1931, when a business meeting went very bad indeed, and Crawford and muckraking journalist Herbert Spencer were both shot dead—allegedly by Dave Clark from the District Attorney’s office.

The crime was an odd one, the players shadowy, and nobody could be quite sure if the men in that office were good or bad guys. Everybody in Los Angeles had an opinion about the case, arguing their favorite theories on who shot first and why.

One of those intrigued Angelenos was a failed oil company executive trying to reinvent himself as a writer of pulp fiction. Raymond Chandler took the slippery chess pieces of the real Clark-Crawford-Spencer case and laid them out on a fresh, clean board, sliding them around until he found a motivation that resonated as, if not true, real enough to share.

Four years after the bloodshed, Chandler published “Spanish Blood,” his first mature piece of detective fiction, in Black Mask Magazine—the big time for pulp scribes. There was no Philip Marlowe yet, just detective lieutenant Sam Delaguerra, an LAPD outsider distinguished by his moral code and his ethnicity. Delaguerra solved the mystery by injecting romantic love and murderous jealousy into what appeared to be a racketeer’s tango.

In Chandler’s version, The Gray Wolf was killed by the woman he loved, and used his last breath to frame another for the crime—incidentally cleaning up the city, at least for a little while.

Charlie Crawford’s widow couldn’t stand the sight of the place. She tore down the insurance office and the little bungalow dwellings, erecting the pre-Disneyesque outdoor shopping center Crossroads of the World as a posthumous tribute to the man who never made good on his promise to take her on a trip around the world.

It opened a year after “Spanish Blood” appeared. By then, Raymond Chandler was well on his way to becoming the master of noir Los Angeles detective fiction, the first writer to recognize that the most interesting thing about the city was all the terrible ways a person could die here, and how little it mattered, and yet how beautiful and moving the details could be.

Nothing has really changed in Los Angeles since then. Different waves of mobsters take advantage in different ways, different newspapers look the other way, different crooks seek office and rob us all blind. Kim wrote about the current crop for a New York Times advertorial piece not long ago.

So when we saw this awful note from crooked Curren Price’s “wife” in the window of the apartments across from Crossroads, the multi-family units erected after the bloody bungalows were torn down by a heartbroken lady, all the layers of noir fact and fiction folded neatly together across the generations. Zap!

Tomorrow, after four years, we’re resuming operations for our Raymond Chandler bus tour. Crossroads of the World is on our route, along with many other spots where the writer lived, loved and drew inspiration from the real life crimes and characters of Jazz Age Los Angeles.

And there’s another Zap! best shared in person: Michael Connelly became a writer because he loved Raymond Chandler, and his character Harry Bosch is a modern gloss on Chandler’s Marlowe. Because Bosch is alive now, his investigations touch on crooked landlords who evict vulnerable tenants and create blighted blocks where Angelenos are imperiled.

We’ve added one such location to the tour, one that’s in the heart of Chandler’s old neighborhood, where the layers of noir then and noir now fold together to remind us: Los Angeles is a hell of a town, but she’s full of great stories and worth fighting for.

So join us, do!

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric

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UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS

Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles Bus Tour (Sat. 7/22) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue Walk (Sat. 8/5) • Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles Bus Tour (Sat. 8/12) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 8/26) • Pasadena Confidential Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 9/9) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood Walking Tour (Sat. 9/16) • University Park Walking Tour (Sat. 9/23) • Weird West Adams Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 9/30) • Eastside Babylon Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 10/14) • The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare Bus Tour (Sat. 10/21) • The Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 10/28) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 Walking Tour (Sun. 10/29)