It’s Up To Angelenos To Save Los Angeles: Here’s How webinar announced
Gentle reader,
Greetings from your friendly historic Los Angeles sightseeing tour company, now offering digital programming until we can again organize groups to gather and explore the city we love.
Just posted on our calendar is the first live webinar of the year, a round table featuring many of our preservation pals that we’re calling It’s Up To Angelenos To Save Los Angeles: Here’s How.
Our guests for the Sunday, January 23 afternoon program are some of the Southland’s most passionate, informed and dedicated citizen-activists and historians, who look at old buildings and see a fresh canvas where Angelenos can live, work, create, feast and connect. From San Pedro to Hollywood, Watts to Downtown L.A., Boyle Heights to Pico-Union, The Fairfax District to Los Feliz, you’ll learn about fascinating landmarks that are taking on a new life, and some of the threats and challenges their champions are fending off in an effort to preserve the places that matter most to Angelenos.
City Hall has completely failed to deal with land use problems big and small, from metal thieves snatching bronze lamps off the historic Glendale Hyperion bridge to a tenant illegally gutting the landmark Pig ’N Whistle restaurant, to a housing crisis exacerbated by real estate investment trusts that evict renters and take rent stabilized units off the market in return for illegal Airbnb listings and vast swaths of blighted, boarded up buildings. If Los Angeles is going to be saved, it will be done building by building at a neighborhood level, by Angelenos who care and know how to get things done. In such a challenging time for the city, the stories of people who are stepping up to save the places they love are what we all need to hear. Tune in to find out what’s happening, how you can get involved, and how to launch this kind of campaign in your own community.
Our special guests are:
RITA COFIELD (Friends at Mafundi). Rita will share the story of the Mafundi Center, a modernist, city-owned Watts cultural hub that was threatened with demolition for redevelopment until the community came together with a successful landmarking nomination. Now a protected Historic-Cultural Monument, Mafundi Center is drawing on its rich history and looking to the future, with plans to restore the building and fill it with cultural programming. In the meantime, the Watts Happening Coffee House serves the best breakfast around.
EDWARD LANDLER (film maker, “I Build The Tower”). For four decades, Ed has been deeply involved in the interpretation and preservation of Simon Rodia’s world renowned folk art environment, the Watts Towers and the wider Watts community. Now, he’s sounding the alarm about an enormous, fast-tracked mixed-use development project by Thomas Safran & Associates and the Housing Corporation of America that would straddle the rail tracks near the 103rd Street/Watts Towers A Line Metro station. The proposed new buildings are completely out of scale with the historic neighborhood, and would split Watts in two while destroying the Watts Towers viewshed, an important criterion for the site to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status. Even worse, the proposed mega-development would break a decades-old promise that open green space will connect the train station and the Watts Towers in a linear park and community space called the Cultural Crescent.
EMMA RAULT (Friends of Walker’s Cafe). When Emma moved to San Pedro from Downtown L.A., she quickly found a favorite local joint on the bluffs at Point Fermin, the time capsule diner Walker’s Cafe. But shortly after, Walker’s closed with no notice. Concerned that it might be sold for redevelopment or sit vacant for years, Emma gave herself a crash course in Los Angeles preservation law, then researched and wrote a historic landmark nomination for this very special place. From its neon and incandescent sign to the hand painted menu, vintage knickknacks and “Chinatown” cameo, Walker’s has a story worth telling, about San Pedro, legacy businesses, and what it means to be part of a community.
MIKI JACKSON (AIDS Healthcare Foundation / Healthy Housing Foundation). Miki is a lifelong activist whose current focus is on the intersection of affordable housing and historic preservation. She’ll talk about HHF’s strategy of buying up vacant Skid Row residency hotels like the King Edward, Baltimore and Barclay and fixing them up for low-income tenants at a fraction of the cost of new affordable housing construction. In addition to welcoming residents to call these buildings home, HHF is submitting landmarking nominations and restoring and documenting significant historic features.
JAMES DASTOLI (@WindowsReplaced on Twitter). James is an Angeleno with a finely tuned eye for architectural integrity. When he noticed that buildings he admired in Los Feliz were changing for the worse, he started documenting the difference between original wooden windows and the cheap, ugly vinyl windows that often replaced them, and highlighting the aesthetic and environmental benefits of restoring rather than replacing historic home and apartment windows. James will share what he’s learned, and the informative video short he produced to encourage landlords and homeowners to give their old windows a second chance.
STEVEN LUFTMAN (Art Deco Society of Los Angeles). Preservationist and community activist Steve will talk about his successful campaign to designate the derelict Fairfax Theatre as a protected national and local monument, how Historic Preservation Overlay Zones can preserve affordable housing and good buildings, and the redevelopment threats facing the Carthay Circle community.
NATHAN MARSAK (R.I.P Los Angeles / The Cranky Preservationist). Half architectural historian, half performance artist, Nathan wields his acid wit to shine a light on the lies of the urban density movement, contrasting dense, green, attractive historic structures with the upzoned file cabinets for humans that too often replace them. He’ll highlight some of his favorite neighborhoods and the multi-family housing threatened by the wrecking ball, and remind us that while we can’t go back in time and save Bunker Hill, it’s not too late for Pico-Union.
DAVID SILVAS (Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council). Realtor and preservation advocate David will talk about his work to foster community around historic buildings in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, where his family has deep ties, including campaigns to celebrate the neighborhood mom and pop corner stores, legacy businesses, and the Brooklyn Avenue Commercial District. As President of the Planning and Land Use Committee for the Neighborhood Council, David believes that tools like the Boyle Heights Community Plan, if properly implemented, can help protect this dense, historic neighborhood from gentrification and displacement.
GORDON PATTISON (On Bunker Hill). Gordon is a native son of the lost Victorian residential neighborhood of Bunker Hill, where his family’s historic homes were seized under eminent domain, landmarked and moved to Heritage Square, then tragically destroyed in a fire set by vandals. He speaks eloquently about the lasting impacts of poor planning on his family and the wider Los Angeles community, and advocates for the preservation of our precious historic buildings and neighborhoods.
This webinar is an illustrated lecture packed with rare photos that will bring the history and future of many precious Los Angeles landmarks to life, while inspiring you to look around your own community for ways you can help to keep old places around with fresh new uses.
We hope you can join us for this special webinar program, which you can watch live or catch later on-demand. We’re grateful to count all the participants among our preservation pals, and always feel encouraged, energized and hopeful when we hear what they’re doing to make this city better. We just know you’ll love them, too!
yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric