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Union Rescue Mission Walking Tour: 124 years on Skid Row
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Union Rescue Mission Walking Tour: 124 years on Skid Row

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Please use the form on the left to register for this event. No “Plus Ones.”

ABOUT THIS EVENT:

Please join Richard Schave of Esotouric, Prof. Paul Rood of BIOLA and Rev. Andy Bales of the Union Rescue Mission (URM) for a 90-minute walking tour along the historic paths that have delineated Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. This tour derives from the ongoing 1947project In SRO Land blog series that uses the archives of the URM (founded 1891) as a tool for exploring the social and architectural history of the forgotten people and places of Downtown Los Angeles.

The tour begins with a survey of the early history of the outreach by the URM through its gospel wagon and at two now-lost buildings: the original home at 145 N. Main (now City Hall Lawn) and the long-time location at 226 S. Main (now a parking lot next to the former St. Vibiana’s Cathedral).

The main themes will be the evolution of public policy on Skid Row from the private philanthropy of Lyman Stewart to today’s Continuum of Care, the transformative work of the URM, and the architectural history of the neighborhood.

The route will include Main Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets (for a then/now comparison of the surviving and demolished locations featured in the 1949 URM-financed short film Of Scrap & Steel, which will be screened later in the evening in a free event that requires a separate reservation). At 3rd and San Pedro Streets we will discuss the Azusa Street Revival, a transformative event in the spiritual history of Los Angeles and the West. During the walk back to the current home of the URM, Rev. Andy Bales will talk about issues and challenges facing the neighborhood and the URM today.

The rendezvous point for the tour is the URM‘s headquarters at at 6th and San Pedro Streets. A free shuttle bus will take tour attendees to 2nd and Main Streets, where the walking tour begins. Registration is required, and each attendee must register separately, to ensure sufficient seating on the shuttle bus.

Parking is available at the URM’s underground parking lot for registered attendees. Just tell the attendent you are there for the walking tour. If everyone attending arrives with one other person in their car, there should be enough parking for all. Those arriving latter will have to leave their keys with the parking attendent.

Nearest Metro station is Little Tokyo.

glassPlate-59

20 Years After: Charles Bukowski Memorial
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20 Years After: Charles Bukowski Memorial

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On the 20th anniversary of Bukowski’s death, LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association hosted an evening of poems, toasts and memories at the King Eddy Saloon on East Fifth Street in Downtown Los Angeles.

The evening was hosted by Richard Schave (Esotouric’s Haunts of a Dirty Old Man bus tour & the De Longpre bungalow preservation campaign) and included readings from five notable Los Angeles poets and friends of the late writer: Dan Fante, S.A. Griffin, Suzanne Lummis, Joan Jobe Smith and Fred Voss. The event concluded with a toast from S.A. Griffin.

Raymond Chandler's 125th Birthday Celebration
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Raymond Chandler’s 125th Birthday Celebration

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This event is now full. Please sign up for a LAVA account if you do not already have one, then use the contact link at the top right corner if you would like to request a place on the waiting list. No “plus ones.” Each person attending, or requesting a spot on the waiting list, must have a LAVA account.

Birthday sale: Raymond Chandler Mystery Maps of Los Angeles (rare and out of print) just $25.

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959)

Tonight, LAVA celebrates the great Los Angeles novelist Raymond Chandler on the 125th anniversary of his birth, in the historic spaces where he got a priceless education in civic corruption, wealth and vice.

Please join us at the Los Angeles Athletic Club at the corner of 7th and Olive Street, Chandler’s old stomping grounds, for a celebration of his life and work. We’ll gather in the club’s newly redecorated third floor bar, Invention, where the young oil executive played bridge and avoided returning to the offices of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, which can be viewed through the bar’s tall windows. Later, we’ll move down the block to the Oviatt Building, the seat of power for Chandler’s greatest villain, Derace Kingsley (not-so-loosely based on James Oviatt), in the novel The Lady in the Lake, before returning to the club for a last toast to the departed.

The evening will include readings and musings on Chandler’s legacy and his impact on how we see Los Angeles—past, present and future. There will be a no-host bar, and opportunities to order bar food.

Space is limited and reservations are required for this free event, and can be made on this page after 10am on July 8. There are no “plus ones” — each guest must reserve, using their own LAVA account and email address.  Please do not reserve if you are not certain you can attend.

John Fante's Dreams from Bunker Hill
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John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill

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Early editions of this tour 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.

The King Eddy's Last Blowout
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The King Eddy’s Last Blowout

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The countdown begins in the Final Days of the historic King Eddy Saloon, the last Skid Row bar (open since 1933, officially). Today is the date of the final liquor shipment, and your last chance to pay a visit and be assured that they have your favorite tipple in stock. Come help the bar and patrons get off to a good start with the bittersweet task of drinking the taps and bottles dry through closing day: December 16th. During these final two weeks under the ownership of the Croick family, you’re encouraged to come enjoy the King Eddy’s famous hospitality and all-day specials, and soak up the spirit of a place that’s seen downtown through many transformations. We will not see its like again.

Penthouse of the Oviatt Building Visit
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Penthouse of the Oviatt Building Visit

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On August 30, 2012, a few lucky subscribers to the LAVA newsletter gathered in the lobby of the art deco Oviatt Building on Olive Street for a very special free private evening tour of the Penthouse from the building’s historian, Marc Chevalier.

If you weren’t fortunate enough to join us on the tour, you will enjoy these photographs of this unique and mysterious place above the city. For more info on this event see lavatransforms.org/oviattrooftop1

Lit Fest at the King Eddy: Fante, Shaw, Ortega
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Lit Fest at the King Eddy: Fante, Shaw, Ortega

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On June 13, 2012, it was announced that after more than 50 years of family management, the King Eddy Saloon had been sold and would be closing at the end of the summer. This news has been received with great concern by the many people who consider this last Skid Row bar to be an essential part of the cultural and social life of downtown Los Angeles, as well as a place of pilgrimage for fans of the great Los Angeles novelist John Fante, whose anti-hero Arturo Bandini famously squandered his first royalty check on the b-girls of the King Eddy’s basement speakeasy.

LAVA co-founder Richard Schave loves the King Eddy, and has done extensive research on the place and its role in LA’s literary and cultural history. In addition to the John Fante connection, it is the last bar standing in the neighborhood where novelist James M. Cain came to soak up the vernacular speech that he adapted into the hard-boiled American lingo of his breakout novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934).

In recognition of the importance of the King Eddy as a place of abiding human comfort and cultural significance, LAVA is pleased to present this night of poetry and fiction, featuring three presenters who are great voices of Los Angeles:

• Dan Fante will read selections both from his poetry and his recently published memoir about growing up with his father, novelist John Fante, “Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving.” https://danfante.net/

• Novelist and poet Jonathan Shaw will read a short story about his meeting with Charles Bukowski and the fist fight which ensued. https://www.scabvendor.com/blog/

• Ruben Ortega is a local L.A. writer of short stories.

Dutch Chocolate Shoppe Redux
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Dutch Chocolate Shoppe Redux

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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.
For this 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).

ABOUT THIS TOUR:

Please join us for a sneak preview of the ongoing refurbishment of the Dutch Chocolate Shoppe interior, in our second dedicated visit to the space.

Commissioned circa 1914 for the “Dutch Chocolate Shoppe” on the ground floor of 217 West Sixth Street, the vaulted interior includes twenty tile murals, and is the largest extant custom interior designed and executed by Pasadena tile artisan Ernest A. Batchelder. Preserved behind steel grates and particle board storefronts for decades, the space is soon to re-open, and can now be seen much as the designer intended it.

The storefront has seen numerous uses since its early days as a provider of hot cocoa to jazz age Angelinos. In the course of our half hour tour and discussion, we will trace the palimpsest of this treasure of the California Arts & Crafts Movement. Discussion topics will include the proposed revisions to the city’s Cultural Heritage Ordinance and the impact these would have on important interiors like this one, a history of the storefront from 1914 to the present, and future plans for the space.

The Dutch Chocolate Shoppe is Historic Cultural Monument #137.

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 flaneur 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.

Of Scrap & Steel: 1949 color film on Main Street
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Of Scrap & Steel: 1949 color film on Main Street

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LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association is pleased to announce a free roof-top screening of a newly-discovered circa 1949 short color film of Main Street and other downtown Los Angeles locations, the Union Rescue Mission-produced Of Scrap & Steel. The screening celebrates the launch of a new series of downtown stories on the In SRO Land time travel blog, featuring material from the Union Rescue Mission Archives.

ABOUT THE FILM: In mid-1948 the Board of Directors of the Union Rescue Mission approved the expenditure of $5,000 to make the 30-minute film Of Scrap & Steel which portrays the redemption and good works of Arthur Hawkins, an alcoholic executive who ended up on the streets of Los Angeles and whose life was saved when he turned to the URM for help. Porter Hall (Arthur Hawkins) is one of only two actors in a film otherwise populated by real Los Angeles characters. (You may recall Hall’s performance as the pesky guy on the train in Double Indemnity.)

Of Scrap & Steel  was only shown in screenings organized by the URM or related organizations, and would have been completely lost if Liz Mooradian, URM historian, had not saved a deteriorating 16mm print and had it transferred to video before it was too late. Of Scrap & Steel is just one of the remarkable artifacts discovered in the Union Rescue Mission archives and explored in the In SRO Land blog.

This entertaining and powerful short film is a compelling snapshot of life on Skid Row (Main Street) circa 1949, and a fascinating document of the important work that the URM continues to do with the most needy in the community. Although downtown Los Angeles features in numerous noir films, it is extremely rare to see color images of eastern downtown, and rarer still to see full-color live-action footage of the vibrant street scene that included rescue missions, pawn shops, amusement parlors, bars, restaurants and the ever-patrolling paddy wagon in search of drunkards to haul away to jail or County work crews.

This free rooftop screening is jointly organized by LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association, the In SRO Land time travel blog and the Union Rescue Mission. Seating will be provided, and attendees are encouraged to dress warmly for the cool night air.

Gourmet box dinners: “Meals with a purpose” will be available for purchase ($7, cash only), with a choice of sandwich (vegetarian, roast beef or chicken), cookie, fruit, crackers and beverage. 100% of proceeds from your meal donation goes to the URM, and the proceeds from each dinner will feed two other people.

Limited free parking is available at the URM’s underground parking lot. Just tell the attendant you are there for the film. Please carpool: if each guest arrives with one other person in their car, there should be enough parking for all. Those arriving later will have to leave their keys with the parking attendant. Should the URM lot fill up, there is also off-site, paid parking available at Joe’s Parking Lot at 1st & San Pedro. A free shuttle will run between this parking lot and the Union Rescue Mission from 5pm-9pm. Nearest Metro station: Little Tokyo.

Rain check: if it’s raining on October 20, this event will be rescheduled for October 27.

Schedule

6pm Doors open (reserved guests check in at the main entrance and are sent up to the roof)

6pm-7pm Box dinners available for purchase, guests can watch the sunset (6:13pm)

7pm

  • Introduction to the URM by Rev. Andy Bales, CEO
  • Historians Nathan Marsak & Richard Schave introduce the film in the context of the neighborhood’s history, and their work on the In SRO Land time travel blog.

7:30pm Film screening

8pm Q & A

8:30pm Event ends

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.

 

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