Tour

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, the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 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.

Exclusive on this tour: the fascinating story of Raymond Chandler’s lost comic operetta The Princess and the Pedlar, a bombshell in Chandler studies, discovered by our own Kim Cooper in 2014.

Tour passengers will have the opportunity to purchase an autographed copy of co-host Kim Cooper’s mystery novel The Kept Girl, inspired by this tour and starring the young Chandler and the real-life Philip Marlowe on the trail of a cult of murderous angel worshippers, as well as the new Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles.

New from the deranged minds of Esotouric, an historical crime bus tour meant to honor the lost souls who wander the hills and byways of the “streetcar suburbs” (Echo Park, Silver Lake, Elysian Park, Angeleno Heights) that hug Sunset Boulevard. Climb aboard to see seemingly ordinary houses, streets and commercial buildings revealed as the scenes of chilling crimes and mysteries, populated by some of the most fascinating people you’d never want to meet. Featured cases include Edward Hickman’s kidnapping of little Marion Parker and the bizarre “Man in the Attic” love nest slaying, plus dozens of incredible, forgotten tales of Angelenoes in peril. Guests will also see some of the most beautiful historic architecture in Los Angeles, including a visit to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s exquisite Parsonage, her one-time home, now a museum.

First things first: this is not a tour about beautiful buildings, although they’ll be all around us. Nor is it a tour about brilliant architects, although we’ll gaze upon their works and marvel. What the Lowdown on Downtown is, is a deeply researched “warts and all” history, with a focus on urban redevelopment, public policy, protest and political power.

It is the revealing tale of how the New Downtown became an “overnight sensation” after decades of behind the scenes work by public agencies and private developers. This complicated story will fascinate and infuriate, break your heart and thrill your spirit. So get on the bus for the real Lowdown on Downtown, as no one but Esotouric’s Richard Schave, also the founding director of the Downtown L.A. Art Walk, can reveal it. Our tour begins in the corporate public spaces of Bunker Hill and Pershing Square, each the result of deliberate social engineering. Bunker Hill’s redevelopment displaced 9,000 people, the largest eminent domain land seizure in American history.

Down the hill, we find the formerly positive public space of Pershing Square paved over, rendering downtown’s “living room” into a place where even the indigent become architecture critics. In the historic core, we’ll explore the tragedy of St. Vincent Court, a thriving open-air restaurant district hobbled by the interests of rival property owners. Then down Broadway and Spring Street, where adaptive reuse and the monthly Art Walk have brought life to spaces which have been dead for decades, even as Broadway’s longtime Latino vendors are leaving in droves. The tour concludes in the Arts District, with the bold urban explorers who reclaimed vacant warehouse space at great personal risk, the public policy shift that legalized this creative community, the astonishing growth of the “new” Arts District and what it means for the artists who remain.

WHY “THE LOWDOWN ON DOWNTOWN?” – 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 guidebookLos 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 Hill, In SRO Land and 1947project, and through public lectures on the subject. This tour has a significant walking component. It is broken up, but please be advised to be ready to stretch your legs.

Locations on the tour typically include the following (check the listing for the date you’re interested in booking for special additions):

• Angels Flight
• Pershing Square
• Bunker Hill
• St. Vincent Court
• Bradbury Building
• Grand Central Market
• Mercantile Arcade Building
• Bloom’s Square
• The Dutch Chocolate Shop.

This tour is just one of our California Culture tour series (formerly known as the Reyner Banham Loves L.A. series).

Press clips: Los Angeles Times feature article on this tour.

On the east side the Los Angeles River, some of the most fascinating Southern California stories are waiting to be told. Join Esotouric, L.A.’s most eclectic bus adventure company, on a century’s social history tour through the transformation of neighborhoods, punctuated with immersive stops to sample the sites, smells and cultures that make our changing city so beguiling.

Voter registration, citizenship classes, walkouts, blow-outs, anti-Semitism, adult education, racial covenants, boycotts, The City Beautiful, Exclusion Acts and Immigration Acts, property values, xenophobia, and delicious dumplings—all are themes which will be addressed on this lively bus and walking tour.

THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY:

In the mid-1920s, Monterey Park was poised on the brink of becoming the Beverly Hills of the east. The Wall Street crash put an end to opulent residential development, but left some beautiful remnants of what might have been. In the 1950s, a thriving Italian-American community settled in the hills, and established some of the area’s most beloved landmark businesses. Since the 1980s, the communities of Alhambra, San Gabriel and Monterey Park 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. Fueled by immigration and investment from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South-East Asia, these communities have found their 21st Century identity, and their economic base—but at the expense of aging long-time residents, who have seen familiar neighborhoods and retail zones become unrecognizable.

BOYLE HEIGHTS:

In the 1890s, Rev. Dana Bartlett ministered to and taught the Russian Molokons in the cramped riverside neighborhood known then and now as “The Flats.” Today, the area contains public housing projects–a belated mid-century solution to the social problems that worried Bartlett, and an ongoing challenge for residents and city planners. In the 1960s, the Chicano Moratorium emerged from the same streets where in the 1920s and 1930s Jewish activists helped change the face of labor in California and the nation. Using the organizing tools first honed by their Jewish neighbors, young Chicanos stood up and rejected the military machine that sent so many of their peers to die in Vietnam, and developed an empowered social identity that lead all the way to the Mayor’s office.

SO GET ON THE BUS:

This whirlwind social history tour of some of the most interesting and dynamic neighborhoods on the east side of Los Angeles will include stops at:

• The Vladeck Center
• Hollenbeck Park
• Wyvernwood Garden Apartments
• Evergreen Cemetery
• The Venice Room
• El Encanto & Cascades Park
• Divine’s Furniture
• Wing Hop Fung for a complementary tea tasting

This tour is part of Esotouric’s California Culture tour series (formerly known as the Reyner Banham Loves L.A. series).

This provocative Esotouric bus adventure begins downtown and works its way south through Vernon, Maywood, Bell Gardens, Santa Fe Springs and Downey, and through the past two centuries, exploring off-the-beaten path Los Angeles landmarks that have had enormous influence on the cultural life of the city and the world beyond.

Turning the West Side-centric notion of an L.A. architecture tour on its head, the bus goes into areas not traditionally associated with the important, beautiful or significant, raising issues of preservation, adaptive reuse and the evolution of the city. The locations all speak to the power, mutability and reach of Southern California as a creative engine. Some of the tour stops are:

Rancho San Antonio (1840). One of the oldest adobe structure in Los Angeles County, it was built by the Lugo family, whose rancho spread all the way to South Gate–the south gate of the property. This fascinating home sits smack dab in the middle of a 65-year-old trailer park on the banks of the Rio Hondo River in Bell Gardens. Between the layers of context at this site is the history of migration and growth in the Southland, from Spanish land grants to the dust bowl to the vast waves of stucco suburbs. Tour host Richard Schave will share his years-long efforts to reopen the California landmark property to the public

Canning Hardware and the Ed “Big Daddy” Roth studio (1950s). This modest stretch of Slauson Avenue was ground zero for Southern California high performance and hot rod culture. Come discover how aerospace, social mobility and teenage ingenuity transformed the automotive industry and created new modes of self-expression that spread worldwide.

The Clarke Estate (1920). A lost masterpiece by tilt-slab concrete architect Irving Gill, this Mission Revival (with a smattering of Mayan)-inspired dwelling feels like a time capsule from a simpler era, and offers insights into how the California style of architecture was born and popularized through Gill’s modernist fans Schindler and Neutra.

Harvey’s Broiler (1958/2008). One of the most prominent stops on the South Los Angeles cruising circuit, the teen culture promenade of the 1950s and ’60s that had enormous influence on fashion, automotive design, popular music and leisure, Harvey’s is also a cautionary tale about historic preservation. The beloved Downey diner with its landmark neon sign was illegally partially demolished by a renter who wanted more space to park used cars. The site was saved due to public outcry, and has been restored as a Bob’s Big Boy built to the original specifications.

Casa de Parley Johnson (1926). The Downey Assistance League is inviting us into the courtyard and grounds of this residence designed by noted architect Roland Coate. This two-story Monterey-style house is a classic design which exemplifies the Southern California lifestyle of the 1920s and 1930s.

This tour is just one of Esotouric’s California Culture tour series (formerly known as the Reyner Banham Loves L.A. series).

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, the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 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.

Exclusive on this tour: the fascinating story of Raymond Chandler’s lost comic operetta The Princess and the Pedlar, a bombshell in Chandler studies, discovered by our own Kim Cooper in 2014.

Tour passengers will have the opportunity to purchase an autographed copy of co-host Kim Cooper’s mystery novel The Kept Girl, inspired by this tour and starring the young Chandler and the real-life Philip Marlowe on the trail of a cult of murderous angel worshippers, as well as the new Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles.

“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 The 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.

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. Dip into the confidential files of old Pasadena and 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.