History

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Crimebo’s Downtown L.A. Art Walk Gallery tour

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Thursday March 10th during the Downtown Art Walk, Crimebo will be conducting his famous Art Gallery walking tour. Starting from the amazing Alexandria Hotel, at the corner of 5th and Spring Streets, you will follow Crimebo through the streets of Downtown LA while he regales you with horrific stories of Downtown crime history between gallery visits and blowing balloon animals.

For a sneak peek at Crimebo’s Art Walk capers, click this video link.

The tour is $10 dollars. Please Call: (323)638-4097 or email bookings@crimebo.com to reserve your spot in history.

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The Real Black Dahlia tour

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“This bus tour… has established itself as an L.A. classic.” -The Los Angeles Times

The Black Dahlia murder in 1947 is the most compelling unsolved crime Los Angeles has ever known. What Jack the Ripper is to London, the Torso Killer to Cleveland, the Black Dahlia is to L.A. And yet unlike those other cases, the name Black Dahlia refers not to the killer, but to the victim. What was it about Elizabeth Short that keeps her the object of obsessive fascination by writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, cops and readers, more than sixty years after she was slain?

Esotouric’s Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus Tour seeks to answer this question by intimately exploring the last weeks of Elizabeth Short’s life, asking not “who killed her?” but “who was she?”

The tour takes us from the human hustle of Main Street to the serene lobby of the Biltmore (the second-to-last place she was seen alive), to the newspaper offices and the Greyhound station where she checked her bags, and concludes at the site where her bisected body was found in Leimert Park and with a little known suspect who lived nearby.

From the few personal possessions she left behind to the friends who scarcely knew her, from the mass hysteria of the investigation with its fruitless leads, wacko suspects and false confessions, the tour reveals all that’s known about this enigmatic black-haired girl who reinvented herself at whim, and shows how she came to be the unfortunate symbol of her time and place.

 

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Haunts of A Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles tour

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This Esotouric bus adventure focuses on Bukowski’s great passions: writing, screwing and Los Angeles. We’ll take in the canonical locations of his life and myth: the Postal Annex Terminal where he gathered the material for “Post Office,” the De Longpre apartment where he briefly experimented with marriage and fatherhood, one of his favorite bars and liquor stores, and many other spots. Along the way, we’ll explore the people and ideas that made up the warp and weft of Buk’s rich inner life. This Esotouric bus adventure is hosted by Richard Schave.

“Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s LA” spans Bukowski’s personal city, from Skid Row to once-genteel Crown Hill, to Bukowski’s favorite East Hollywood liquor store, the Pink Elephant.

Esotouric has made its name with true crime bus tours (Black Dahlia, Pasadena Confidential) and explorations of literary LA (Raymond Chandler, John Fante, James M. Cain). Now they turn their creative attentions to Bukowski, the prolific poet, novelist and screenwriter whose rough-hewn tales of boozing, wild women and rotten jobs never obscure the deep vein of sweetness and hope that runs through all his work.

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John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill tour

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Early editions of this Esotouric bus adventure lamented John Fante’s obscurity. On April 8, 2010, the City of Los Angeles declared the corner of 5th & Grand, beside the Central Library, JOHN FANTE SQUARE. Today John Fante might be best described as the most famous unknown writer in America. Climb aboard to hear his story and that of the lost neighborhood where he found his voice.

Before Kerouac, before Bukowski, there was John Fante, author of “Ask the Dust,” “Dreams of Bunker Hill,” “Full of Life,” “The Road to Los Angeles” and “Wait Until Spring, Bandini.” This five-novel cycle, written over sixty years, introduced the world to Arturo Bandini, an outspoken, down-and-out Mr. Hyde to Fante’s Dr. Jekyll.

As Bunker Hill’s prodigal son, Fante-as-Bandini chronicles a forgotten Los Angeles neighborhood teeming with immigrants, criminals and dreamers like himself. With genuine compassion and wonderful craft, he sketches the hopes and dreams which fly round their heads, and in the process finds his own voice, a revelation which carries him all the way to Hollywood. Once there, he is distracted by fame and fortune, and settles for easy answers to the questions of faith in oneself, the nature of inspiration, and the duality of failure and redemption. “Dreams of Bunker Hill” was dictated by a blind Fante two years before his death, and “Road to Los Angeles” was published posthumously. Bunker Hill is gone now, flattened, its mansions torn down, long since redeveloped by corporate and civic interests. But in today’s downtown communities the same stories play out, in thriving micro-climates where artists and writers find their voices, where some are making it big and others breaking up on the reef, some moving away and others coming back in search of what they have lost. Arturo Bandini is alive and well, and his lament is as relevant today as it was 75 years ago. So please join us as we follow in his footsteps, to the Goodwill store, King Eddy’s, Clifton’s Cafeteria (“pay what you can”), the Los Angeles Library’s Reading Room and the Post Office Terminal Annex (important landmarks for Bukowski and Fante), aboard the newly-restored Angels Flight Railway, and other evocative scenes of old L.A.

This tour is a meditation not only on John Fante, but the preservation of Public Space. The depopulation of Bunker Hill in the early 1960s became the benchmark for Community Redevelopment across the country-the term “Federal Bulldozer” came out of the many lawsuits filed against the city at the time. And now that corporate interests have decided it is time to repopulate western downtown Los Angeles with market-rate housing the ensuing catastrophe has spawned many new monikers (elegant density is one of the more polite ones) and problems. Public Space downtown can be saved and Arturo Bandini can lead the way. Please Note: This tour will have several sections which involve walking through parts of Downtown for up to ten minutes at a time. Walking shoes and sunscreen are advised.

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LA River tour–Elysian Valley to Long Beach, w/Boyle Heights taqueria (special water-in-LA tour)

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Tour LA’s mighty river!– w/ Friends of the LA River.

Special water-in LA tour–with speakers from Santa Monica Baykeeper, Food & Water Watch, & Environment Now

Everyone in Los Angeles has seen the LA River, and has heard that it’s being revitalized. But who knows where it is, exactly–and what exactly is happening on its banks?  On this carpool tour, we’ll walk and drive along the river, as we talk about its central role in the city’s history and the necessity of the ambitious revitalization to LA’s future.

The tour convenes at the River Center, where we form carpools, and stops at the verdant Glendale Narrows, a new stormwater park in the same stretch, and the historic Arroyo Seco confluence, and the industrial downtown stretch that everyone’s seen in movies and on TV.  We’ll eat lunch at an excellent Boyle Heights taqueria en route (or you can bring your own)–and we’ll head into the even less well-known South, to the new Maywood Riverfront Park and the stunning new Dominguez Gap wetland.

Led by Jenny Price.  Carpool tour– Option to leave midday.
 
$25 adults, $20 students/seniors/nonprofits, kid rates. Family and group rates available.  

To sign up, and for more info, click HERE

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Walk Among The Dead Tour

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Post-event update: LAVA does not offer tours of this hospital. Please do not contact LAVA asking about tours. For info about any past or present LAVA event, you should contact the event host. In this case, Boyle Heights Paranormal Project.

This is your chance to get inside the 100 year old historical landmark – normally closed to the public. The property is considered one of the most paranormally active locations in the world and has been the featured subject on a plethora of paranormal genre TV shows. 

Join the Boyle Heights Paranormal Project for a lecture on the fascinating history  of the hospital- of course, this includes the site’s paranormal history. We’ll even play you some of the EVPs that have been captured here. Guests will then be led on a tour of Linda Vista by some of the most well known and respected paranormal researchers in the Los Angeles area. Along the way they will demonstrate various tools and techniques paranormal investigators use and you will get  a chance to participate! You will also get to hear first hand experiences from the investigators who have spent  countless hours in Linda Vista’s dark, creepy hallways.

There will be the obvious rules and regulations – if you are intoxicated in any manner you will be removed by security. You may bring your cameras, however, there will not be any video/filming permitted unless you use your cell phone to do so. 

$20.00 per person – arrive promptly – bring a small flashlight -dress warmly and wear comfortable shoes – no one under the age of 18 will be admitted

 

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Pasadena Confidential crime bus tour with Crimebo the Clown

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The Crown City masquerades as a calm and refined retreat, where well-bred ladies glide around their perfect bungalows and everyone knows what fork to use first. But don’t be fooled by appearances. Join Esotouric, L.A.’s most eclectic tour company, and their pal Crimebo the Clown for a dip into the confidential files of old Pasadena where you’ll meet meet assassins and oddballs, kidnappers and slashers, Satanists and all manner of maniac in a delightful little tour you WON’T find recommended by the better class of people! From celebrated cases like the RFK assassination (with a visit to Sirhan Sirhan’s folks’ house), “Eraserhead” star Jack Nance’s strange end, black magician/rocket scientist Jack Parsons’ death-by-misadventure and the 1926 Rose Parade grand stand collapse, to fascinating obscurities, the tour’s dozens of murders, arsons, kidnappings, robberies, suicides, auto wrecks and oddball happening sites provide a alternate history of Pasadena that’s as fascinating as it is creepy. Passengers will tour the old Millionaire’s Row on Orange Grove, thrill to the shocking Sphinx Murder on the steps of the downtown Masonic Hall and discover why people named Judd should think twice before moving to Pasadena.

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The Lowdown on Downtown bus & walking tour

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Esotouric’s “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Lowdown on Downtown”

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: 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, in their work for Art Walk, on blogs including On Bunker Hill 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. 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

This tour is just one of Esotouric’s our Reyner Banham Tour Series.

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Blood & Dumplings crime bus tour

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WHAT: Esotouric, L.A.’s most eclectic tour company, looks across the L.A. River with the EAST SIDE BABYLON / BLOOD & DUMPLINGS crime bus tour weekend 

WHEN: East Side Babylon tour Saturday, March 12, 12pm-4pm; Blood & Dumplings tour Sunday, March 13, 12pm-4pm

WHERE: East Side Babylon tour departs from Cafe Metropol, 923 E. 3rd. Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013; Blood & Dumplings tour departs from Philippe The Original, 1001 Alameda, Los Angeles, CA 90012

COST: East Side Babylon tickets $58/person; Blood & Dumplings tickets $62/person. Weekend pass for both tours $95/person

INFO: https://www.esotouric.com, 323-223-2767

LOS ANGELES- Ask most people to name a true crime location in Los Angeles and you’ll hear about Nicole Brown’s Brentwood condo, the Manson Murders scene in the Hollywood Hills, the Black Dahlia’s disappearance from the Biltmore Hotel or Bugsy Siegel’s Beverly Hills death house.

But when the crack researchers of Esotouric, L.A.’s most eclectic bus tour company, go crime hunting, they throw out the map to the stars homes and cast their eye to less glamorous L.A. neighborhoods that prove to be packed with bizarre crime histories. True crime buffs have already heard the famous stories a dozen times before on cable TV, but the forgotten crimes Esotouric digs up are fresh, fascinating and truly chilling. And in mid-March, Esotouric offers a weekend double feature packed with the weirdest crimes ever committed on the East Side of town.

On Saturday, March 12, a select crew of urban explorers will climb aboard for EAST SIDE BABYLON, the latest addition to Esotouric’s popular crime bus tour series. Passengers on this unusual bus adventure will discover fascinating, little-known historic neighborhoods and the grim memories they hold. With crimes spanning the 20th Century, some hideously gruesome, others weird and frankly unbelievable, the tour provides a new way of discovering the city, via crime scenes and oddities that make ordinary houses and intersections seem to vibrate with a mysterious energy. Come visit Boyle Heights, where Night Stalker Richard Ramirez was captured and a mad dad ran amok. Roam the hallowed lawns of Evergreen, L.A.’s oldest cemetery and home of some memorable haunts and strange burials. Visit East Los Angeles, where a deranged radio shop employee made mince meat of his boss and bride–and you can get your hair done in a building shaped like a giant tamale. Explore the ghastly streets of Commerce, where one small neighborhood’s myriad crimes will shock and surprise. Visit Montebello, for scrumptious milk, eggnog and cookies at Broguiere’s Farm Fresh Dairy washed down with a horrifying case of child murder. All this, and so much more on EAST SIDE BABYLON, Esotouric’s exploration of L.A.’s most horrifying forgotten crimes.

And on Sunday, March 13, it’s a most demented crime bus tour, BLOOD AND DUMPLINGS. Starting from the premise that the secret heart of Southern California’s weirdo pop culture beats strongest in the Eastern San Gabriel Valley, the tour introduces passengers to such fascinating local characters as the costumed Man from Mars Bandit, eccentric record producer and ladykiller Phil Spector, lion farmers Charles and Muriel Gay, and DIY filmmaking icon Timothy Carey, whose notorious “The World’s Greatest Sinner” was shot on location in 1960s El Monte. Heading due East out of downtown, the tour explores several historic communities that reflect the growth and eccentricity that are hallmarks of 20th century Los Angeles. Crime Bus passengers will discover notorious, strange, fascinating and forgotten tales from the past hundred years, each told at the scene of the crime. They’ll thrill to the freakish case of the Man from Mars Bandit who stalked area supermarkets for months in 1951 before meeting his match in a police sharpshooter, shock to discover the deadly infighting among El Monte’s hippie-era American Nazi Party members, mourn the Case of the Buried Bride dragged beneath her home on her wedding day by her secret lover, gnash teeth at the famous lion farm (home to every MGM lion) that served lion meat BBQ on special occasions, and view scenes of notorious cases including Phil Spector’s spooky hilltop castle and James Ellroy’s slain mother Geneva (the true-life inspiration for his Black Dahlia novel). And since no visit to the San Gabriel Valley is complete without a delicious Chinese meal, the Crime Bus will stop at 101 Noodle Express (one of L.A. Weekly critic Jonathan Gold’s picks for 99 L.A. restaurants not to be missed) to pick up a dumpling feast, which will be enjoyed picnic-style at Monster Park, a remarkable folk art playground environment recently saved from demolition and named a State monument. All this, plus wild shootouts, dope-dealing druggists, missing Salvador Dali paintings and the original “little girl down a well” 1940s television sensation. Don’t miss the Crime Bus tour that guide Kim Cooper calls “My personal favorite of all our tours, packed with more offbeat history, horror, roadside architecture and fabulous Route 66 vistas than any other.” 

Upcoming Esotouric bus tour and special event schedule 

Sat Feb 19 – Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: Route 66 (weekend package available)

Sat Feb 20 – Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: Boyle Heights (debut, weekend package available)

Sat Feb 26 – Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Lowdown on Downtown-The Secret History of Los Angeles 

Sun Jan 27 – LAVA’s Sunday Salon at Clifton’s Cafeteria (free, info at lavatransforms.org)

Sun Jan 27 – Charles Bukowski’s Downtown L.A. walking tour (free, info at lavatransforms.org)

Sat March 5 – Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice crime bus tour

Sat March 12 – Eastside Babylon crime bus tour (weekend package available)

Sun March 13 – Blood & Dumplings crime bus tour (weekend package available)

Sat March 19 – Pasadena Confidential crime bus tour

Sat April 9 – John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill (weekend package available)

Sun April 10 – Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s L.A (weekend package available)

Sat April 16 – The Real Black Dahlia crime bus tour

Sun April 17 – Trace: inside the world of Lynne Herold, Criminalist (info at lavatransforms.org)

Sat April 23 – In A Lonely Place: Raymond Chandler’s L.A.

Sat April 30 – Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: Route 66 (weekend package available)

Sun May 1 – Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: South L.A. (weekend package available)

Sat May 14 – Weird West Adams crime bus tour

Sat May 28 – Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits’ L.A. 

Esotouric’s Richard Schave, Kim Cooper and Joan Renner are proud members of LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association.

For more info on Esotouric, visit https://www.esotouric.com

 

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LA River tour–Elysian Valley to Long Beach, w/Boyle Heights taqueria (special water-in-LA tour)

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Tour the mighty Los Angeles River!– w/ with Friends of the LA River, Santa Monica Baykeeper, Food & Water Watch, and Environment Now.

Everyone in Los Angeles has seen the LA River, and has heard that it’s being revitalized. But who knows where it is, exactly–and what exactly is happening on its banks?  On this carpool tour, we’ll walk and drive along the river, as we talk about its central role in the city’s history and the necessity of the ambitious revitalization to LA’s future.

This special Water-in-LA tour convenes at the River Center (near the 5/100), where we form carpools. We’ll visit the verdant Glendale Narrows, the historic Arroyo Seco confluence, the downtown spot you’ve seen in all the movies, a new park in Maywood, and the spectacular new Dominguez Gap wetland in Long Beach. We’ll stop for lunch at a terrific taqueria near Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights–or feel free to bring your own.

Led by Jenny Price, Santa Monica Baykeeper, Food & Water Watch, & Environment Now. 

Option to leave midday.  Bring snacks and water and shoes that can get a little wet.  Dogs welcome.
 
$25 adults, $20 students/seniors/nonprofits, $5 kids. Family and group rates available.  

To sign up, and for more info, click HERE.

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