A rare peek at the Natural History Museum car collection (full video for paid subscribers)

Gentle reader,

Greetings from your friendly historic Los Angeles sightseeing tour company, now gearing up for the return of our signature Esotouric bus adventure programming.

For the first citywide tour since February 2020, we’re going back to our roots for The Real Black Dahlia crime bus tour (established 2007), to sleuth out evidence in the 1947 kidnapping and murder of Beth Short. This tour spans Downtown Los Angeles, West Adams and the mid-city suburb Leimert Park.

When we realized our 2023 anniversary fell on a Saturday, we took it as a sign that it’s time to get back to what we’re best known for: bus tours.

A lot of couples slip off to be alone for their anniversaries, but we’re alone together all the time. It’s a treat to be able to express our love for one another and for Los Angeles history, while honoring the memory of Elizabeth Short, the victim in this unsolved murder mystery.

Her tragic experiences as a homeless woman living with untreated mental illness in postwar Los Angeles reveals so much about the city, then and now. She deserves to be remembered as more than just a crime victim, and it’s our privilege to be able to share the story of her life to a new generation of Angelenos and visiting true crime aficionados.

We hope you’ll join us and our crime buddy Joan Renner, either for this or another upcoming Esotouric bus adventure. Already scheduled are Echo Park Book of the Dead (Sat. 7/1), Raymond Chandler’s L.A. (Sat. 7/22) or Charles Bukowski’s L.A. (Sat. 8/12).

Moving forward, we plan to offer both bus and walking tours, with a wide range of tales revealing the secret heart of the city we love. This Saturday’s walk is in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Highland Park along the Arroyo Seco, from Lummis House to Heritage Square.

Now for our latest post that’s hidden from the rest of the internet, but available to our sustaining subscribers—thank you!—we’d like to share a sneak peek at the Natural History Museum's new Vernon Collection Center, the cavernous facility where the institution’s legendary, seldom seen collection of historic automobiles is stored. We had this opportunity thanks to our friend Stephen Gee, co-author of the new book Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900-1930.