History

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Raymond Chandler’s Bay City

retro
0 1.5k

Introducing Chandler’s Bay City: Crook town, run down, shabby town, gambling town. Novelist Raymond Chandler gravitated to sin and debauch, so Santa Monica in the 1930s was a frequent stop for Philip Marlowe. From doctors feelgood to second wives with pasts to crooked cops with a loathing for a mouthy PI, this tour has it all. Chandler’s canonization of sin, wealth and sunshine on L.A.’s Westside fed the abiding myths of the American hard-boiled genre and play into the popular conception of the region.

 

Focusing on Chandler’s middle period – “Farewell My Lovely,” “Lady in the Lake” and a few short stories upon which these novels are built, “Bay City Blues” among them– this tour will explore Chandler’s take on the Westside, the real life rackets and murders which gave Bay City its wild reputation, and the elements of the old community that have survived layer upon layer of gentrification.

 

As the bus rolls from point to point, your guides will draw the lines between Chandler’s life and his fiction, offering insight into his nomadic life with wife Cissy, the enigmatic redhead who appears in many forms in his short stories and novels.

 

Locations for the tour include:

 

The ruins of Pickfair (Mary Pickford’s former beach house, and close to the launch for the gambling ships)

 

Site of the former Santa Monica City Hall (4th & Santa Monica) immortalized in “Farewell My Lovely.”

 

Former site of Thelma Todd’s sidewalk cafe (just West of Sunset on the PCH), inspiration for the Lindsay Marriot House in “Farewell My Lovely.”

 

Santa Monica and Brentwood residences for Ray & Cissy.

 

Books & Short Stories covered in the tour: Farewell My Lovely, Bay City Blues, Lady in the Lake, Red Wind, The Little Sister

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Maja’s Mysteries: Rapture & Release

retro
0 1.3k

 

MAJA’S MYSTERIES is a series of guided excursions to some of the city’s most fascinating spiritual sites hosted by Maja D’Aoust, lecturer and librarian at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz, in association with Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric. Come join us on an Esotouric bus adventure into the hidden realms of Los Angeles spirituality, with stops at some of the most unique and compelling worship spaces in the Southland.

TOUR THEME: This tour explores the fundamental contradiction in the two primary paths to salvation: Grace or Karma. The concept of Grace sees salvation and the Messiah (rapture) as imminent and tangible.  Karma is predicated on reincarnation, the cycle of many, many lives lived through selflessness and right action as the soul strives to achieve release.

 

These two notions, while irreconcilable, both inspire real and profound relationships with God in Los Angeles, from the church basements where believers speak in tongues, or in brightly light congregation rooms praying over gigantic crystals.

 

Join Maja as we explore tantric Vedic practices, the Pentecostal rapture, the channeled Venusian stylings of an alien entity and other fascinating paths to salvation.

 

TOUR LOCATIONS

 

The Aetherius Society. A center for cosmic consciousness and healing founded in 1955 by UFO contactee Dr. George King, where we will hear actual recordings of an extraterrestrial voice conveying significant messages.

 

Krotona Apartments. A former Theosophical retreat founded in 1914, where we will have a rare opportunity to visit the central courtyard and view the Rosicrucian window of this now-private residence.

 

Parsonage of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson. On the northern edge of Echo Park lake is the rock upon which Sister Aimee Semple McPherson built her Foursquare Church. One of Los Angeles’ most charismatic characters, Sister Aimee spread her technologically-inspired Pentecostal gospel from the Angelus Temple, while enjoying quiet moments in her adjoining Parsonage home. Recently restored, the Parsonage is now a museum of her life and work, which to this day contains to ring clear to millions of believers worldwide.

 

The Vedanta Society of Southern California. Founded in 1930 to bring sacred Hindu philosophy to the West, where we will be given a presentation on the Society’s history and programming, and browse in its fine gift shop.

 

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Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

retro
0 1.2k

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

 

This was Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, which resonated from deft and melancholy fits of 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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The Birth of Noir: James M. Cain’s Southern California Nightmare

retro
0 1.1k

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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Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Lowdown on Downtown tour

0 1.2k

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
 

Mercantile Arcade Building

St. Vincent’s Alley

artist David L. Caldwell’s studio

 

This tour will include a snack break. You may also bring a sack lunch if you wish.

 

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Reyner Banham Loves LA: The New Chinatowns

0 1.2k

In the past three decades the communities of Alhambra and Monterey Park, nestled in the foothills of the southwestern San Gabriel Valley, have transformed themselves from sleepy suburban bedroom communities (bursting at the seams from a 1950s housing explosion) to the nexus of a pan-Asian megalopolis spreading east to Diamond Bar and beyond to the county line. Fueled by immigration from Taiwan, Hong Kong, more recently South East Asia, these communities have found their identity, their economic base, and have come into their own as a new type of American “chinatown.”

Hosted by Richard Schave, THE NEW CHINATOWNS is an entertaining and illuminating historical and cultural bus tour that rolls through Alhambra, San Gabriel, Rosemead and (mainly) Monterey Park exploring significant people, remarkable places and delicious delicacies. Join us as we explore the region’s fascinating history, from the land and oil booms of the 1920s, its halcyon postwar days as a suburban outpost for lower middle class Angelenos, the birthplace of the Hula Hoop (Wham-o Industries), to the “white flight” of the 1970s which created the vacuum that facilitated the first wave of migration from China. Among the significant sites on our itinerary:

* Paradise Trailer Park (Rosemead), a picture perfect time capsule of gracious, tree-shaded mobile home living in the postwar Southland.
* The Venice Room (Monterey Park), a groovy grill-your-own-steak bar, still family-run after forty years.
* Browning Realty (Monterey Park), site of the 1920s oil mania and still a family enterprise after eighty-plus years.
* El Encanto (Monterey Park), exquisite showplace of the failed 1920s luxury housing development intended as the Beverly Hills of the East.
* Mission Superhardware (San Gabriel), still run by the Fabriano family after more than seven decades, and previously where Howard Roach built some of the Southland’s first television sets.
* Site of the original Laura Scudder potato chip factory (Monterey Park).
* Pioneering purveyors of high quality Asian herbs, teas and notions Wing Hop Fung, for a tea tasting.

Today Monterey Park is at the crossroads of economic development. After three decades spent fostering independent businesses-fueled by immigrant’s dreams and sweat, the city is looking to bring in big business, which it claims is desperately needed for its tax base. Can this unique and quintessentially independent community survive another identity crisis, another land boom, this time of a distinctly corporate nature?

Special attention will be paid in the route to a compelling side effect of this sociological revolution: the best Asian food in the world is here as well. We will end the tour with a tea tasting at Wing Hop Fung.

 

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