Gentle reader,
Good grief! In this mixed-up, shook-up town, even a redevelopment project long promised to preserve a century old building alongside a brand new tower is not necessarily an historic preservation success story.
Consider the Arts District project called the Rendon Hotel. We started getting messages from concerned locals weeks ago.
Why, they all wanted to know, was there a blue demolition application posted up on the shuttered Licha’s Santa Fe Grill bar at 7th & Santa Fe?
Wasn’t the Rendon Hotel above the bar slated to be restored as part of an adaptive reuse and new tower project, designed by preservation architects Omgivning and owned by local artists and gallery owners Ralph Ziman and Maria Greenshields-Ziman?
Yes, according to many sources, it was!
But something had quietly changed with the project in 2025, as documented on the City Planning portal where an additional applicant’s name appeared, and by the presence of the demolition notice.
So after planning deputies at Council District 14 were unable to explain the situation to our satisfaction, we asked preservation pal and retired engineer Mike Callahan to take a look under the hood to see if he could figure out what was going on.
His latest newsletter post for The Dusty Archive, From Adaptive Reuse to Demolition: It’s Just a Minor Mod in the Eyes of City Planning, is a must read for Angelenos seeking to understand the incredible power of unelected city staffers to shape Los Angeles development outside of public review.
Because as Mike writes, it appears that city planners took it upon themselves to decide that years of public meetings, the support of an impressive litany of local citizens and community groups and formal City Council votes don’t matter if a developer and their land use consultants return, asking to hit the reset button.
And for unknown reasons, the expanded Rendon Hotel team has done just that.
The new project, weirdly described as a “minor modification” by the City Planning Department, seeks demolition of the 44 room, 1914 residency hotel except for the basement, creation of 20% less commercial space than previously approved with significant environmental impact due to dust and truck traffic.
Instead of a quirky blend of historic low-rise Beaux Arts brick shadowed by a modern glass and steel tower, the new scheme is for a bland box on a podium.
We wonder what the community members and organizations who generously gave their support to the original project think about how it’s changed.
Maybe they don’t even know! Unlike the first time around, there have been no public hearings, no gushing blog posts, no presentations before the neighborhood council, just a nearly invisible procedural update that could mean the end for a local landmark.
So if you live in the Arts District or are friendly with people and groups that care about the neighborhood and this building, please share Mike’s post with them.
And if you share our concern that unelected administrators are making such radical changes without public review, and disagree that the new Rendon Hotel plans are a “minor modification,” tell Mayor Karen Bass and CD14 councilmember Ysabel Jurado not to allow demolition of the historic building at 2053–2059 East 7th Street.
If the project has changed that much, the developer can and should go back to the community and elected officials and make their case.
You can tell the real decision makers what you think, via an email sent to: mayor.scheduling@lacity.org and Councilmember.Jurado@lacity.org.
We think the Rendon Hotel project that was approved in 2022 is pretty cool, and worth completing, in the creative, funky spirit of the Arts District as it used to be. Let’s hope it’s not too late for that to still happen.
If you’d like to learn more about the Arts District, we’ve got several You Can’t Eat the Sunshine podcast episodes from 2013 that you might enjoy:
• Episode #18: Peeling Back The Layers of The Arts District • Episode #23: Growing a neighborhood: The educated user’s guide to The Arts District • Episode #42: The Arts District, Then & Now
Saturday’s tour is Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles, a ramble around the Art Deco towers and Beaux Arts hotel lobbies that feature in the master detective novelist’s life as an oil company executive and in his fiction, to sleuth out the real life crimes and characters who inspired his work. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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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
• Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (2/21) • Weird West Adams & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (2/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (3/7) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (3/14) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (3/21) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Bradbury Building, Basements of Yore & the Dutch Chocolate Shop (3/28) • 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) • Highland Park Arroyo (5/2) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (5/7) • The Run: Gay Downtown History (5/23) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (5/30) • The Real Black Dahlia (6/6) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (6/13) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sunday, 6/21) • Westlake Park (6/27)
CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS
Before the Pacific Dining Car was condemned, when there was still hope that the scorched, “protected” landmark might be reborn, the Los Angeles Times asked us to meet to talk about why it matters. And we walked in the open door and shot this last goodbye.
Preservation pal msrandomnotes1 sounds the alarm about serious tagging on the mostly empty E. Clem Wilson Building (Meyer & Holler, 1929) at Wilshire and La Brea. The owner who opposed landmarking efforts needs to secure the tower, clean it up!
After months of rumors, it’s been announced that Homeboy Industries will convert Monastery of the Angels in Hollywood into treatment facility. As part of the Friends of the Angels team who stood fast against earlier plans to sell the property to a developer to be demolished, we are very pleased that it will be preserved and put to good work.
File under: dirty tricks in the improbable true crime theory realm. Steve Hodel claims Alex Baber sought access to his Black Dahlia / Zodiac Killer research files, then used the material to develop a podcast with Michael Connelly. We think Hodel is full of it, but if true, this is not cool.
The Lucas Museum website has been updated to highlight this charming Pico Rivera tortilla cooking class scene from Leo Politi’s Three Stalks of Corn (1976), just a taste of the treasures in the artist’s family’s collection.
Matt Lingo and Gregg Garvey shot a lo-fi music video in the Gower Gulch mini-mall, not knowing the owners planned to trash the beloved medicine show wagon soon after. We love this last look back at a quirky, cool relic—and the song’s good, too.
This is intriguing: business management firm Grant Tani Barash & Altman seeks a conditional use permit for a restaurant/bar/bookstore (!!) in Cameron Silver’s shuttered Art Deco Decades vintage shop. Is culture coming back to the Melrose District?
Self-storage developer La Tierra Consulting uses Papa Cristo’s logo in renderings presented to the Neighborhood Council, but has not actually asked Chrys Chrys if he wants to reopen his displaced family business. Neighbors say they want housing. Sigh... We miss it so.
Indicted councilmember Curren Price’s handpicked successor Jose Ugarte is settling with the Ethics Commission at tomorrow’s hearing for failure to disclose income on form 700s. Interesting to see a Mitch O’Farrell PAC on the client list in light of the sketchy PLUM vote not to landmark the Selma Las Palmas Apartments.
There’s a cool new neighborhood history mural from @tapia.323 going up at Daly and Broadway in Lincoln Heights, featuring low riders, Honest Abe and a snappy crocodilian representing the Lincoln Park Alligator Farm!
Three iconic L.A. fashion businesses—Broadway and Albion Knitting Mills and Broadway Cheerleading Sales—and their historic HQ at 2152 Sacramento have just been listed. If they don’t sell as a package, where will American teams buy cheer uniforms and varsity jackets?
Save the date, and speak out on February 24 at City Council’s PLUM Committee (in person at City Hall, or by email—scroll down to the bottom of this post for instructions), when the billionaire Munger family seek to demolish the landmarked Barry Building with (they say) no plans to develop the prominent Brentwood parcel. If approved, this would set a dangerous precedent, and community activists Angelenos For Historic Preservation are fighting back.
Our dear friend John Bengtson, the silent cinema sleuth who discovered early film locations hiding in plain sight, and used his imagination to travel through time and reveal how silent directors made magic, is with the angels now. We remain in awe of his incredible work, and how he kept his spirits up and kept creating, even while his body was growing weaker from ALS. We’ll treasure the memory of the tours we gave together, and pray that before much longer his greatest Hollywood discovery, Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd Alley, is once again accessible with the illegal private gates removed and the alley declared an official city landmark in his honor. You can visit John’s world on YouTube, and we’ll be sharing some of his Westlake research on the Early Hollywood’s Silent Comedy Legends walk on April 18. RIP to one of life’s true gentlemen.
