Body parts and burning pallets... Is the past trying to tell us something?

Gentle reader,

Sometimes in Los Angeles, the past appears to rhyme with the present. We don’t know if it’s merely coincidence or if some celestial poet is crafting doggerel, but it sure feels like there is a larger, inexplicable pattern at play. And we pay attention.

Like last month. On November 8, a person scrounging in a San Fernando Valley dumpster tore open a plastic bag and found dismembered human remains, which he reported to police. This led to the arrest of a local man on multiple murder charges. Between those two events, on November 11, wooden pallets stacked beneath the 10 Freeway downtown caught fire, triggering a California state emergency order and bringing enormous resources to the repair effort.

Seemingly unrelated, a family tragedy (and policing failure) and an infrastructure crisis (and opportunity to reimagine CalTrans land for the public good).

But as the news stories broke and details were revealed, we looked at each other and asked “what was that all about?” Because these incidents rhymed—at least to us, they did.

Here’s how: one of the more disturbing tales we tell on true crime tours is about a 1979 dispute among Israeli cocaine dealers that ended with a young couple killed and dismembered, then disposed of in multiple locations, including a San Fernando Valley dumpster less than three miles from one seen above.

That historic crime, too, was quickly solved because a man digging in the garbage found something terrible and called it in. In each case, the wealthy killers were seemingly oblivious to the subculture of poor Angelenos who dumpster dive in order to survive, a blind spot they would have the opportunity to lament for a very long time.

We don’t know the name of the person who found the terrible package last month. But the 1979 dumpster diver was Daniel Van Meter. Though not poor, he had been scrounging for useful junk most of his life, and regularly visited this dumpster seeking food for the stray animals that lived on his property.

Van Meter was a folk artist, political crank and architect of sorts, and creator of an unlikely landmark called the Tower of Wooden Pallets (Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 184, declared in 1978—Cultural Heritage Commissioner Bob Winter later allowed he and his colleagues might have been drunk—demolished in 2006).

Had the Herald-Examiner photographer documenting the detectives at the scene panned out, they would have seen Van Meter’s controversial masterpiece, also located in the dead end cul de sac at 15357 Magnolia Boulevard.

After Van Meter’s death, his distant relatives petitioned the city to dissolve the historic protections on the Tower of Wooden Pallets. They wanted the land cleared so they could sell to a developer to build an apartment house. City inspectors said the landmark was a fire hazard, structurally unsound, eaten by termites and full of rats. And down it came, but not without a fight.

The unlikely synchronicity of trash diggers helping to catch murderers and towers of pallets dominating the news cycle was enough to remind us we’d been meaning to learn more about the Historic-Cultural Monument designation and the subsequent demolition of Daniel Van Meter’s tower.

And here’s where we ran up against a secondary rhyme scheme, or maybe a harmony line, to make it all more curious.

We constantly assist with independent historic preservation campaigns, but there are only a few times when we’ve gone into City Hall ourselves to champion a landmark designation.

The first time was when the writer Charles Bukowski’s East Hollywood bungalow court was threatened with demolition by real estate flippers. After digging for dirt online, their lawyer objected to the city honoring the property by claiming that Bukowski was a Nazi sympathizer, mainly due to some dumb stuff he once said when he was drunk. The Cultural Heritage Commission didn’t buy it. Nevertheless, Bukowski’s name was dragged through the international mud.

Looking into the Tower of Wooden Pallets’ history, we learned that Daniel Van Meter and his brother Baron had been sent to San Quentin in the 1940s, as a consequence of the group prosecution of The Friends of Progress, Angelenos accused of distributing German propaganda and convicted under the McCarthy-era Subversive Organizations Registration Act. Their supposed crime, sedition, is one that’s quite newsworthy for the first time in nearly a century.

The ACLU defended these creeps and in 2013 sponsored legislation that finally repealed the Act. The 1945 appeal, PEOPLE v. NOBLE et al., is a fascinating account of how Nazi sympathizers hung out and spread hate in the southland, while constantly surveilled by undercover operatives (here’s silent film footage of what looks like a Bund rally in Glendale’s Hindenburg Park).

From PEOPLE v. NOBLE we get hints about how trust fund kid Daniel Van Meter ended up living in a ramshackle old ranch house in the deep San Fernando Valley, piling up surplus pallets, feeding stray animals and digging in the trash.

Before the brothers were sent to prison, they lived with their widowed mother and her South American mining and poison gas millions in a fine home in the West Adams district, across from the William Andrews Clark Library. As far as we can tell, they never worked a day in their lives. The brothers enjoyed dressing up in Nazi uniforms, harassing the Clark’s gardener over lawn clippings, and socializing with others who shared their views at Clifton’s Cafeteria, the Aryan Bookstore and the Embassy Auditorium.

When they got out of the Big House, mama Esther Van Meter moved her wayward boys far from bad companions, to the semi-rural property on Magnolia, where Dan later built his tower and recorded one of the least compelling oral histories we’ve ever heard—the interviewers appear to have known nothing of his criminal past.

What does it mean, then, that Charles Bukowski grew up less than three miles from Daniel Van Meter and died on Van Meter’s 81st birthday? Maybe nothing.

But it’s interesting that both men were drifting, passive youths who had their paths shaped by older women. Bukowski spent years in the bars, learning humility and humanity in the company of Jane Cooney Baker, the tormented alcoholic who is so beautifully fictionalized as Wanda (Faye Dunaway) in Barfly.

Then after many years as a full time postal worker and part time writer, Bukowski dared to be entirely an artist and found success as the champion of L.A.’s lowlife outsiders. His work continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers, and fighting to save his rent controlled home from demolition (and later from illegal Airbnb use) showed us how local history, preservation activism, architecture and storytelling could come together into a guided tour business. Thanks, Hank!

And our friend Lauren Everett, who submitted the nomination for Bukowski Court, has done great work about the importance of affordable housing for healthy communities, and will soon publish a book on Santa Monica’s progressive tenant’s rights policies.

We’ve obtained and published the lengthy City Planning file on the landmarking of the Tower of Wooden Pallets and its destruction, including Daniel Van Meter’s claim that it was built atop a 19th century child’s grave (page 91) and the extraordinary detail (on page 97) that for many years Van Meter welcomed the children from the Hebrew school next door to explore his property. Rabbi Eidlitz said “there is a lot of love there.” Also, a real estate broker brings up the sedition, with press clippings (page 109).

Charles Bukowski was trouble when he was young, but he mellowed and grew. Insulated by his family’s wealth, Daniel Van Meter never had to grow up, and could still horrify a visitor with hateful rhetoric as an old man. What irony then that the murders the sieg heiling Van Meter helped to solve were, for two Jewish families, a chance to know the truth and to grieve their dead—a mitvah, in spite of himself.

And that’s a rhyme that’s worth repeating.

Saturday’s walking tour explores the rich legacy of creativity, collecting, preservation and wild parties along the Arroyo Seco, featuring stops at Lummis House, Heritage Square and two fascinating landmarks restored by preservation pals Paul Greenstein and Dydia DeLyser and a surprising neighborhood connection to the Bradbury Building. Join us, do!

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. 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.

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UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS

• Highland Park Arroyo Walking Tour (Sat. 12/9) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness Walking Tour (Sun. 12/17) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher Walking Tour (Tues. 12/26) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 Walking Tour (Sat. 1/20) • Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess Walking Tour (Sat. 1/27) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive Walking Tour (Sat. 2/3) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip Walking Tour (Sat. 2/10) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue Time Travel Trip Walking Tour (Sat. 2/17) • The Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 2/24) • Echo Park Book of the Dead Crime Bus Tour (Sat. 3/9) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop Walking Tour (Sat. 3/16) • The Run: Gay Downtown History Walking Tour (Sat. 3/23) • John Fante’s Downtown Los Angeles Birthday Walking Tour (Sat. 4/6)

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CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS

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