History

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Tour the historic Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum

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To sign up for this free event: First register as a user on this site, and then return to this page. Refresh the page and the signup tab will appear just to the left, above this paragraph. Click “signup” and reserve your spot. No plus-ones; each guest must register individually.

Join us for a guided tour of the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum, the original seat of Rancho San Pedro, which is both a California Historical Landmark (#152) and on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Rancho was the first Spanish land grant in California, granted in 1784 by King Carlos III to Juan Jose Dominguez, a retired Spanish soldier who came twice to California: first with The Portolá Expedition and later with Father Junípero Serra. The Rancho encompassed 75,000 acres and included what would become the Los Angeles harbor. In 1826, Juan Jose’s heir Manuel Dominguez constructed the Dominguez Rancho Adobe as it is seen today.

The reconstructed environments throughout the adobe focus on what life was like in Los Angeles’ poorly understood Rancho era, which lasted roughly from the 1833 secularization of Mission lands through California’s Statehood (1850) and ending with the disastrous droughts and floods of the 1860s. Out of the failure of this fascinating agrarian culture and the subsequent rise of industrialization, the agricultural economy which carried the region into the 20th Century was born.

The museum also has an extensive collection on the Dominguez Hills Air Meet and its role in early Los Angeles aviation history and industry, including a miniature table-top model of dirigibles and planes featured at the 1910 Air Meet that was constructed by Paramount Studios artisans.

PARKING: Upon entering the grounds there is a large concrete pad on your left. Please park there and walk the short distance around the bend to the museum.

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El Ranchito: Tour of Pio Pico’s Historic Whittier Adobe (EVENT FULL)

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ABOUT THIS EVENT: 150 years ago, El Ranchito,–the home of Don Pio Pico, California’s last governor under Mexican rule–stood in all its glory on the banks of the San Gabriel River, offering gracious hospitality to countless souls.

The mansion contained 33 rooms, all with the richest and most elegant of furnishings, among them a $12,000 piano in a wonderful carved case, which was carried around Cape Horn. On the upper floor was a great ballroom, where Don Pio’s friends and business associates often gathered to dance and converse.

From hundreds of miles around the guests came, by horseback and clumsy, ox-drawn carretas. Their talk and laughter filled the house and the spacious patio, with its red brick paving, its central well and its famous black fig tree. Some especially favored guests were sent home with supplies of black figs, Pio Pico’s favorite fruit.

Twice, El Ranchito was flooded, and twice Pio Pico rebuilt. Of the original 33 rooms, only 16 remain. The vineyard and gardens are long gone. California came under American rule. Pio Pico died, penniless, in 1894. In 1907 his friend Harriet Russell Strong saved the adobe from demolition and began to restore it. In 1914, she gave the compound to the State of California, to be maintained for the education and enjoyment of the people. The State has restored the adobe three times: in 1946, 1968 and 2000.

But only 2000 people visited Pio Pico’s adobe in 2011, and this low attendance has put El Ranchito on the list of state parks marked for closure on July 1. In hopes of avoiding this sad shuttering, the Friends of Pio Pico non-profit is raising money in the community, and collecting cans and bottles for recycling.

We urge you to join us for a guided tour of this important historic home while it still remains open to the public, as was the wish of Harriet Russell Strong and in keeping with the communal spirit of Pio Pico himself.

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Memorial Day: Tour of historic Savannah Cemetery in Rosemead

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To sign up for this free event: First register as a user on this site, and then return to this page. Refresh the page and the signup tab will appear just to the left, above this paragraph. Click “signup” and reserve your spot. No plus-ones; each guest must register individually.

Join us for a Memorial Day celebration at Savannah Memorial Park. Established circa 1851 and recently made a California Historical Landmark (#1046), it is the oldest American cemetery in Southern California.

The City of Rosemead will host an official ceremony at 10:00am, complete with 21-gun salute and a bagpipe accompaniment. Around 11:15am, following the city ceremony, LAVA members will gather at the main gate and at 11:30am begin their tour of the cemetery.

Savannah Memorial Park’s executive director Dwain Carlo Crum, social historian (and LAVA co-founder) Richard Schave and special guests will recount the trials and tribulations of the pioneer families who braved the Santa Fe Trail and the Mojave Desert to make their homes in the lowlands of the eastern San Gabriel Valley, before finding eternal rest in these hallowed grounds. A focus of the tour will be early officers of the law. You won’t want to miss this very special LAVA excursion!

 

We are sorry, The Ukulady, previously scheduled to perform, is unable to attend due to an unexpected change in her schedule.

 

The Flâneur & The City: Hill Street
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The Flâneur & The City: Hill Street

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For the latest installment of urban historian Richard Schave’s site-specific discussion series “The Flâneur & The City,” Richard (Esotouric bus adventures, In SRO Land) is joined by architectural historian Nathan Marsak (1947project, On Bunker Hill).

On this excursion we’ll be casting our eyes along on one fascinating, but underappreciated, downtown boulevard: Hill Street.

The tour begins at Alfred Rosenheim’s Hamburger’s Department Store (the People’s Store) at Eighth Street and concludes high atop Bunker Hill, with a focus on the most interesting buildings along the way, and poignant memorials for a few that have fallen to the wrecking ball. The last stop will be at Fort Moore Memorial, where Hill Street meets the 101 freeway, a drab, functional place that now occupies what was once one of the most lyrical corners of old Los Angeles. We’ll share photos of the neighborhood’s beloved funicular Court’s Flight (Angels Flight’s forgotten competition), the Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill, and explain how the Hill Street Extension of 1959 destroyed this part of Bunker Hill and took out a large part of the even more ancient neighborhood of Sonora Town.

Tour attendees will meet on the 8th floor lounge of the Los Angeles Athletic Club. The snack bar will be open, and those who wish to purchase a sandwich or beverage before the walk are encouraged to arrive 20 minutes early to avoid a bottleneck. We will start with general historic overview of Hill Street in the lounge, and then make our way to Hamburger’s–no doubt following in the path of that store’s founder Moshe Hamburger, who lived at the Athletic Club in the early years of the 20th century.

ABOUT THE TOUR 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. The core notion of the series is of culture and history as commodities that are packaged and sold to a target demographic; meanwhile, it’s the ignored and seemingly worthless scraps of meaning found on the sidewalks and marketplaces where the true remnants of positive public space can be found. All interpretations and nuisances of the word flâneur are examined—from the modern-day aesthete dreaming of Baudelaire while carried along in the human tide past the stalls and shops of Broadway, to its more recent and perhaps relevant use, someone who is loitering. At its heart this series is a celebration of the simple act of getting out of your car, walking through a neighborhood and learning to see it with your own eyes.

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The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare

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Southern California 1931: Amongst the burgeoning urban sprawl built atop bulldozed orange groves and the bitter realization that you can’t eat the sunshine, recent emigré James M. Cain found a kernel of truth and his voice, which would eventually distill through his novels, ”The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity” and subsequent film adaptations into the unique American genre: Film Noir.

How did this East Coat sophisticate go from managing editor of “The New Yorker” to populist novelist accused of writing dirty books? The tour explores Cain’s L.A. from Hollywood to Glendale and along old Route 66, and includes illuminating visits to Forest Lawn Memorial Park (a Glendale institution and site of the funeral of Mildred Pierce’s “other” daughter, Ray), the Glendale Train Station where the “Double Indemnity” murder plot played out, and the punch line to a Billy Wilder joke so subtle, it’s taken 63 years for anyone to get. The tour will also cover the artisans who transformed Cain’s tales into film, including Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, each an important contributor to the Film Noir canon.

 

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Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice

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From the founding of the city through the 1940s, downtown was the true center of Los Angeles, a lively, densely populated, exciting and sometimes dangerous place. After many quiet decades, downtown is making an incredible return. But while many of the historic buildings remain, their human context has been lost.

This downtown double feature tour, hosted by Kim Cooper, Joan Renner and Richard Schave, is meant to bring alive the old ghosts and memories that cling to the streets and structures of the historic core, and is especially recommended for downtown residents curious about their neighborhood’s neglected history.

The Hotel Horrors portion is a true crime and oddities tour featuring some of the wildest, weirdest, goriest and most memorable happenings in historic hotels like the Alexandria, St. George, Barclay and Cecil. Get on the bus to see inside some of these legendary locales and find out where Night Stalker Richard Ramirez liked to stay and the hotel that saw a visit from the Skid Row Slasher, and where two traveling chocolate salesmen laughed so hard they fell backwards out a window to their deaths. You’ll also explore the fiery curse that repeatedly leveled the St. George Hotel. Included are some light hearted stories to help the blood and gore go down.

The Main Street Vice portion is a social history tour celebrating the ribald, racy, raunchy old promenade where the better people simply did not travel, but kicks were had by all who did. Burlesque babes and dirty picture parlors, mummified western outlaws and old time tattoo parlors, wax museums and pawn brokers, “professors” offering sex lectures and magazine peddlers with nudie Marilyn Monroe calendars under the counter, sophisticated steak houses and nickel donut dives — these were the pleasures and the people to be found along Main during the first half of the 20th century, a street that every Angeleno knew offered more (yet less) of what could be seen anywhere else. On this tour, we’ll visit the scenes of some more unforgettable debaucheries and share stories of crime, smut, passion and commerce.

Climb aboard for a time travel journey back to the downtown that’s not there anymore, and the surprising amount of gems that survive.

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Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Lowdown on Downtown

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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.

Our tour begins in the corporate public spaces of Bunker Hill and Pershing Square, each the result of deliberate social engineering (the razing of old Bunker Hill which displaced 9,000 residents; the elimination of positive public space in Pershing Square to thwart public address and gatherings). We segue to the underappreciated yet extremely successful public spaces of the Historic Core and then to the emerging live/work community of The Old Bank District, where developer Tom Gilmore’s gentrification and the popular monthly Art Walk are bringing life to spaces which have been dead for decades. The tour concludes in the DIY loft spaces of the Arts District for a reception at an artist’s gallery.

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: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Richard and his wife Kim Cooper work extensively with the history and lost cultures of downtown in their bus tours, in their work placing Art Walk into a non-profit, on blogs including On Bunker Hilland 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. It is broken up, but please be advised to be ready to stretch your legs.

Locations on the tour include:
Angels Flight
Grand Central Market
Mercantile Arcade Building
Bloom’s General Store
A visit to artist Dave Hollen‘s studio

 

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Blood & Dumplings crime bus tour

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A criminal and gastronomical excursion into the San Gabriel Valley, Blood & Dumplings rolls through Alhambra, Temple City, Monterey Park, Rosemead and El Monte, revealing dozens of weird, forgotten crimes and oddities from the valley’s past. Highlights include the mysterious Man from Mars Bandit, the lesbian couple whose bickering over spending cash resulted in one pumping the other full of downers until she died, the young bride who spent her wedding day buried under her parents’ house, the battling neo-Nazis of El Monte, Phil Spector’s spooky castle and the little bar where James Ellroy’s murdered mother Jean had her last drink. The tour includes a selection of dumplings from one of the San Gabriel Valley’s best Chinese restaurants.

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Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles tour

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Bungalows. Crime. Hollywood. Blondes. Vets. Smog. Death.

This was Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, which resonated under deft and melancholy fits from his writer’s bow.

Join us as we go down the mean streets that shaped his fiction, and that in turn shaped his hard-boiled times, in a four hour tour of downtown, Hollywood and surrounding environs: The Los Angeles Athletic Club, Musso & Frank, the Hotel Van Nuys, Paramount Studio’s gates, and much, much more, including a Chandler-themed gelato stop at East Hollywood cult favorite Scoops.

Through published work, private correspondence, screenplays and film adaptations, we trace Chandler’s search for meaning and his anti-hero Philip Marlowe’s struggle to not be pigeonholed or give anything less than all he has, which lead them both down the rabbit hole of isolation, depression, and drink.

 

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James Ellroy Presents: Elizabeth (private tours)

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This unique exhibition allows ticketed guests to become the first to view actual material from the LAPD files on the notorious Black Dahlia murder, and converse with LA’s great crime novelist, James Ellroy!

A limited number of tickets to an evening of conversation and hors d’ouvres with bestselling author James Ellroy are now available. James will take ticketed guests for a personal and conversational tour of the exhibition. Guests will receive refreshments and hors d’ouvres and receive an autographed copy of his best selling novel, The Black Dahlia.

A very limited number of tickets are available for this March 16th event at the LA Police Museum from 7 to 9 pm. Tickets are priced at $250 per person

The following day, March 17, 2012, Mr. Ellroy will host conversational tours with small groups of visitors through the new exhibition. Visitors will also receive an autographed copy of The Black Dahlia. Tours will last approximately 45 minutes and will be available at 10 am, noon and 2pm. Tickets are priced at $100 each. Tickets to either, or both events can be purchased by phoning (323) 344-9445.

Both events are unique opportunities to visit the Los Angeles Police Museum and support its programs and activities. The Los Angeles Police Museum is a 501 (C)(3) organization.

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