SOLD OUT! The Flâneur & The City: Charles Bukowski’s Downtown
(Sorry, the Bukowski walking tour is now sold out, but you can still reserve a spot on Richard Schave’s Bukowski bus tour, next scheduled for April 10.)
Urban historian Richard Schave’s site-specific discussion series “The Flâneur & The City” is an ongoing attempt to explore some of the more important issues revealed by the constantly changing heart of the Metropolis. This installment, hosted by Richard Schave and Born Into This documentarian John Dullaghan, is a free walking tour of writer Charles Bukowski’s downtown. It will start in the historic core at Clifton’s Cafeteria and make its way northeast along Broadway and Main, ending at the corner of 5th & Los Angeles at the King Eddy Saloon, the last surviving Skid Row bar.
The tour includes discussion of the poem “Downtown” (which references Clifton’s and the nearby amusement arcade), and the history of Main Street’s great burlesque houses (favorite haunts for a teenage Bukowski, as described in the short story “Bop, Bop Against that Curtain”).
We’ll wrap up the tour with a discussion of “Skid Row” then and now. What was 5th Street like in the late 1940s? What did Charles Bukowksi see that we don’t? Finally we’ll get a well-deserved beer at the King Eddy Saloon, where Arturo Bandini, the hero of Bukowski’s favorite novel, John Fante’s Ask The Dust, blew his first royalty check on the B-girls.
Space is very limited for this special LAVA walking tour, so please only reserve if you intend to join us on 2/27.
For more of Bukowski’s lost Downtown, or if you don’t manage to snag a space on the walking tour, you can join us at the Sunday Salon from 12-2pm, for John Dullaghan’s pre-tour presentation.
