Gentle reader,

It’s been a strange couple of years for us. Oh, for you, too?

Mid-February 2020 found us in a suite in Downtown L.A.’s Barclay Hotel, filming interviews for a Netflix documentary about Elisa Lam’s strange death in the Hotel Cecil water tank. We had a full calendar of weekend bus tours and forensic science seminars scheduled through the summer, including an all-day outing to share our Riverside discoveries.

But as we left the apartment in the STOA building on Main Street, rented by the Netflix production company for day use, we encountered a strange figure in the hallway: a woman traveler, pulling her wheeled suitcase and wearing a surgical mask. A portent.

We knew that Covid-19 was something to watch and that people were getting scared. That Saturday’s tour was of Boyle Heights & Monterey Park, and when we stopped in to remind them we’d be coming for a tea tasting, our friends at Wing Hop Fung were effusively grateful that we still planned to bring a group to an Asian owned business.

A month later, after much research, worry and discussion, on March 11, 2020—eight days before Los Angeles and California shut down—we made the hard decision to cancel everything. And later, to go online with L.A. history webinars, which helped keep us from going nuts in isolation. Well, completely nuts, at least.

Winter 2019 seems a lifetime ago, but the virus named for that season is still with us and nothing to sneeze at. Yet we desperately miss exploring the city with folks who share our passion for cool buildings and weird history. Can we do this in a safe, fun way that respects different levels of risk tolerance? We believe we can.

So today we are thrilled to announce the first four dates in an all-new series of Esotouric cultural history walking tours, spanning the city from Boyle Heights to the Miracle Mile, Downtown to West Adams, with more to come. Click the links below for tour descriptions and community safety mask policies, and to reserve your spot.

• Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Boyle Heights, Saturday, June 25)

• Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (Downtown L.A., Saturday, July 9)

• La Brea Tar Pits Time Travel Trip (Miracle Mile, Sunday, July 17)

• All Around the Auto Club (West Adams, Saturday, July 23)

We hope one day soon we can again invite you to “get on the bus” and cover a broad swath of the southland on a four-hour tour like The Real Black Dahlia or Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles. Not yet.

But William Blake taught us that you can see an entire world in a grain of sand. There is so much rich and layered Los Angeles lore to uncover and cool things to see when you travel on foot, and we’re digging up some great stories to share on these walks.

So starting on June 25, you’ll find us once again exploring the secret heart of the city we love, with so much more to come. 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 on demand, and a souvenir shop you can browse in. Or just share this link with other people who care.

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