Gentle reader,
On Saturday we’re leading our Westlake Park Time Travel Trip all around the quirky, historic neighborhood centered on MacArthur Park.
For this edition of the tour, we’re switching up the route to visit the Silver Platter, one of L.A.’s oldest gay bars that’s currently threatened with demolition, and to the active demolition site that was the M. Flax Artists’ Materials Building (1925), lost to a suspicious fire. Plus a delightful array of offbeat early Angelenos and their memorable shenanigans.
We stopped by what’s left of M. Flax yesterday, and found Jaime Castro’s crew high in the air, about to remove one of the upstairs French windows as part of their salvage efforts, so we documented this sad moment for posterity. (Here’s earlier video of some brick removal, and a special 2-for-1 offer on Saturday’s tour. Bring a friend and have a ball.)
It’s hard to watch this destruction. But still, if a good building has to come down, we’re glad the useful parts are being saved rather than trucked to the dump. And it is interesting to get to see how a 1920s-era building was made, as M. Flax is carefully deconstructed from the inside out.
Even after the fire that conveniently gave the out-of-state owners the demolition they sought and terrorized the near neighbors, some cool artifacts survived intact, including a pair of mysterious unscorched painted ladies, who now serve as guardian angels over the workers as they pull down brick walls and kick out window frames.
The City of Angels really needs her angels to be alert and active, in this time of mass displacement, real estate speculation, vacant storefronts, suspicious fires, ambitious taggers, rampant metal theft and lousy leadership.
And so we’ve joined our friend Rev. Dylan Littlefield, the chaplain at the Hotel Cecil, to create the St. Vibiana Circle, dedicated to empowering Angelenos to help preserve and reactivate historic buildings, protect vulnerable tenants and spark creative advocacy relationships between people who care about Los Angeles and want to see it thrive.
We’d been kicking the need for this kind of wider-ranging organization around for a while, as our preservation advocacy kept colliding with tenants’ rights concerns.
Then our mutual friend Lupe Breard was very nearly evicted from the landmark Victorian house she has lived in all her life, in a Kafkaesque series of improper legal actions that ultimately were miraculously reversed—but not before she seriously considered jumping from the roof of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse.
It was terrible. And while Lupe’s fall from safe housing was broken with enormous effort by many concerned advocates, we know that most people in her situation would end up homeless and their pretty home demolished, despite the protections that are supposed to be there for seniors in rent controlled housing and for designated historic landmarks.
But in Los Angeles today, “supposed to be there” is kind of a dirty joke. Almost nothing works like it’s supposed to, and tenants and L.A. history take it on the chin.
Commercial real estate developers and their fans look at old buildings inhabited by poor, vulnerable tenants and see that vast profits can be made if those inconvenient structures and souls can only be cleared away, so that the “highest and best use” can be achieved for every square inch of land. With so much money to be made in Los Angeles, dirty tricks like “Lupe’s” eviction (based on statements about her sister’s conduct happening at a different address) are all too common, and rarely stopped.
As we went into high gear to help Lupe, and were in and out of court seeing first-hand how broken the eviction system is, we found ourselves thinking about L.A.’s own martyred saint, who was herself displaced from her 19th century landmark home on Main Street when the historic cathedral was slated for demolition, but who landed safely and whose old home was saved, too.
And thus the St. Vibiana Circle was born.
We intend to meet in-person one Tuesday a month in the plaza outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (555 W. Temple St. in Downtown Los Angeles), starting on June 11 at 1pm. The formal gathering will last less than an hour, and afterwards you can continue conversing with new friends, or go inside the Cathedral and visit St. Vibiana in her chapel, where she rests surrounded by stained glass and artifacts that made the move with her from the old Cathedral.
We hope you’ll join us to explore new paths for Angelenos coming together to save this beautiful city from all the ugly, greedy things that are chipping away at everything we love and value.
All are welcome in St. Vibiana Circle. People of all faiths or no faith are invited to join us in the fight for housing justice and preservation through adaptive reuse and other innovative programs.
Sign up for the newsletter for future announcements and have hope. Los Angeles is special, as are Angelenos. Let’s use all the powers of heaven and earth to take this city back from the greedy clowns who are stripping her for parts—and usually not even saving the beautiful bricks for making walls and pizza ovens!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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 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. You can share this post to win subscriber perks. 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.
UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
• Westlake Park (Sat. 6/8 - special offer for our readers) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 6/29) • The Real Black Dahlia (Sat. 7/6) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 7/13) • Miracle Mile Marvels and Madness (Sun. 7/21) • Know Your Downtown L.A.: Tunnels To Towers To The Dutch Chocolate Shop (Sat. 7/27 - sorry, sold out) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sun. 8/4) • West Adams Sugar Hill and Angelus Rosedale Cemetery (Sat. 8/10) • Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess (Sun. 8/25) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 8/31)
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