Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Lowdown on Downtown tour
Join your host Richard Schave, the founding director of the Downtown LA Art Walk non-profit, on a tour that reveals the secret history, and the fascinating future, of this most beguiling LA neighborhood.
This is a tour about the populated, vibrant mid-20th Century Downtown Los Angeles you’ve only heard about, and about the 21st Century Downtown which will rise again with a richness of heritage and quality of life that leaves natives and visitors gaping in disbelief. This is a tour about Downtown’s invisible neighborhoods and great public spaces which managed to escape the wrecking ball. This is a tour about how gentrification sprung up on the city’s meanest streets, with all the conflicts that go along with a major socio-economic shift in a small community. This is a tour about the real Los Angeles, the city even natives don’t know. Get on the bus for the real Lowdown on Downtown, as no one but Esotouric’s Richard Schave can reveal it.
Having studied under architecture critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1980s, tour host Richard Schave has taken it upon himself to correct his teacher’s gross oversight of downtown Los Angeles, relegated to a dismissive coda in his seminal Los Angeles guidebook Los Angeles: A Study of Four Ecologies. Richard and his wife Kim Cooper work extensively with the history and lost cultures of downtown in their bus tours, on blogs including On Bunker Hill, In SRO Land and 1947project, and through public lectures on the subject.
This tour has a significant walking component, down the stairs along Angels Flight, around Pershing Square, through several other pedestrian locations. We return to the bus to cool down and rest, and passengers can remain on the bus if they wish, but please be prepared to take a stroll.
Locations on the tour include:
Angels Flight
Grand Central Market
artist David L. Caldwell’s studio
This tour will include a snack break. You may also bring a sack lunch if you wish.
