Gentle reader,
Every morning, we wake up and check the LAFD’s alerts page to see which vacant, derelict property caught fire overnight.
This morning, we didn’t have to click, because our preservation pal The Right Reverend Dylan Littlefield, CRH—no longer just plain Reverend Dylan since his elevation this week to Bishop—saw the horrifying footage on the Citizen app of the Fairfax District’s recently shuttered (but still selling wholesale breads) legacy business Diamond Bakery, ablaze.
And on social media (Twitter, Instagram) Annalisa Mastroianni Johnson stepped out of her soon to open Annie's Soul Delicious restaurant to narrate the firefight with a frustrated and all too familiar lament over the abject failure of her councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky and LADBS to respond to repeated calls to do something about a predictable fire hazard.
If the city did something about derelict, vacant buildings, we’d see fewer of these awful fires. According to the Citizen thread, this one involved multiple RVs parked in the narrow commercial alley and sent a child to the hospital with burns.
When we visited Diamond Bakery and the husk of the National Register Fairfax Theatre in late August to shoot the video at the top of this post, there were no RVs in the alley. Since then, Mayor Karen Bass and City Council have been directing significant resources to tow and crush RVs in which Angelenos are living on public streets. The County is moving RVs along, too.
Within the city, RV dwellers are strongly encouraged to give up their mobile shelter and move into motels, which adds to the percentage of people temporarily “housed” under mismanaged city programs like Inside Safe and diverts a fortune to scofflaw residential hotel owners, convicted racketeers and politically connected nonprofits.
Those housing numbers need to improve quick, because Federal District Judge David O. Carter has lost patience with L.A.’s broken programs for housing the homeless and has issued a ruling that puts an end to decades of corrupt mismanagement at the VA. He is presently auditing programs and could impose the same type of enforcement in Los Angeles.
This all means that people living in operational RVs are more likely to move from place to place, and cluster in large groups where they aren’t currently being hassled. It’s whack a mole, with vulnerable human beings the moles and city officials wielding the mallets.
It’s getting colder now, and it’s hard to stay warm in a tin box. Families who could be living with dignity in one of the estimated 111,000+ vacant apartment units (per 2017 Census data, and certainly an undercount) in Los Angeles are themselves at risk of accidental and arson fire, and so are the housed people and businesses around them.
This is all the city’s fault, and until we get some common sense policies in place that penalize property owners who hoard empty buildings in various stages of dereliction, we are all going to continue suffering and losing places that matter.
Will anyone on City Council have the courage to revive the expired “Empty Homes Penalty” motion and force the corporate real estate trusts that are using Los Angeles to park money and offset their taxes to free all this unused space that is so desperately needed? Call or email your councilmember and let them know you’re watching and you want change now.
As for the video at the top of this post, tune in to the end to see something very special that the wrecking crew missed.
Shout out to preservation pal Steven Luftman and his Art Deco Society of Los Angeles colleagues for their wonderful efforts to tell the story of the Fairfax Theatre and preserve it, a big raspberry to property owner Alex Gorby for creating blight and destroying something that mattered, and please show some love to Annie's Soul Delicious as they work hard to open something fresh and exciting on a stretch of the Fairfax that desperately needs this kind of creative entrepreneurship.
Our tours this weekend are a Downtown L.A. double feature, both packed with offbeat lore and unexpected connections. On Saturday, we’re taking advantage of the planned evening street closure for the city’s free cultural festival Broadway Night Lights to explore the length of the National Register Historic Theatre District with the Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess tour.
And Sunday, it’s The Run, which investigates LGBTQ+ cultural history through underground speakeasies, literary touchstones and bold legal battles in the dark years when homosexuality was criminalized, to learn how local activists used humor, guts and reverse psychology to take on the political and medical establishment and change the world. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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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 our main 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 tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
• Broadway: Downtown Los Angeles’ Beautiful, Magical Mess (Sat. 10/12) • The Run: Gay Downtown L.A. History (Sun. 10/13) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sun. 10/27) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (Sat. 11/2) • The 1910 Bombing of the Los Angeles Times Walking Tour with Detective Mike Digby (Sat. 11/9) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Downtown L.A. (Sat. 11/16) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (Sat. 11/23) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 12/7) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 12/14) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sun. 12/22) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher (Thurs. 12/26)
On the occasion of the burning of Diamond Bakery (1946-2024), the gutted Fairfax Theatre has a beautiful secret