Bus Adventures into the secret heart of Los Angeles
BlogRemembering Clifton's Cafeteria (1935-2011-?)
There exist in this world those rare places where souls can linger, each one alone in their thoughts but feeling part of a lively community. Unlike so many contemporary spaces with their hard surfaces and excess of rules (read: Pershing Square), these spots are calibrated to welcome individuals. There are comfortable chairs, little corners of privacy, light for reading, reasonably priced and healthful food and drink available. In these places, lovers meet, tourists marvel, visions are nurtured and the old and lonesome can escape their rooms. Nobody will lean over you and clear their throat to suggest you've been sitting too long, and ought to be moving along in one of these magical places, for there, you are at home. This week, we say a fond farewell to one of these gems, Clifton's Cafeteria. Since 1935, Clifford Clinton's redwood-themed cafeteria has welcomed millions to its bosom in the heart of downtown. Clifton's was there when 7th & Broadway was among the busiest corners on earth, through the dark years of urban decline and into its renewal. Founded with a remarkable philosophy which fused solid business acumen with charitable works, Clifford Clinton's flagship restaurant was a lightning rod for right action that transformed this city. Clinton fed the hungry, treated his employees like family, and led the brave campaign that brought down the corrupt Mayor Frank Shaw and the octopus of vice which inhabited the LAPD. For his efforts he was harassed, his home bombed (by a cop), his cafeterias subject to false reports of food poisoning, but he and his friends fought on, armed with a vision of a better Los Angeles in which every person was treated with dignity, and had a full belly, a safe place to sleep and real opportunities to better themselves. Mayor Shaw and his venal cronies laughed at the Cafeteria Kid, but they weren't laughing when the jail bars slammed. Last year, Clifton's was sold to a sympathetic new owner, and attempts were made to renovate the building while remaining open as a restaurant. This didn't work. So on Monday, after 76 years, Clifton's closed its doors. There are plans for a soft reopening as a bakery soon, with the full restaurant and two cocktail bars to follow in time. We are working with the management to continue to lead tours through Clifton's, and to host our free LAVA Sunday Salon there (Sunday, closing day, marked the 19th month of this event). But today, the doors of Clifton's are closed, and the good people who felt so at home there are scattered to the winds. This edition of the newsletter goes out, with love, to all our friends from 648 South Broadway. We are thinking especially of the gracious associates, some of whom worked at Clifton's for upwards of thirty years. We're so pleased that Clifton's will live on, but it won't be the same without those friendly faces. We will leave you with Clifford Clinton's credo, which are words to live by: "We pray our humble service be measured not by gold, but by the golden rule." Now read on, for all the news you can use, noting especially announcement #5, a free screening that we are very excited to share with you. 1) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 - SOLD OUT! Our most popular crime bus tour, THE REAL BLACK DAHLIA begins in the historic Olive Street lobby of the Biltmore Hotel and ends in time for you to take tea and crumpets where Beth Short waited out the last hours of her freedom before walking south into hell. After multiple revisions, this is less a murder tour than a social history of 1940s Hollywood female culture, mass media and madness, and we welcome you to join us for the ride. This tour is now sold out, and will return in January. To get on the waiting list should any seats open up, send us an email, or visit: http://esotouric.com/dahlia-10-1-11 2) SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2 - SOLD OUT! Esotouric and 100.3 The Sound present WHERE THE ACTION WAS, the Hollywood rock and roll history tour. Co-hosted by pop historians GENE SCULATTI and KIM COOPER, with special guests 1960s pop sensation IAN "You Turn Me On" WHITCOMB and The Sound DJ RITA WILDE, the tour begins inside of Capitol Records with a reception and preview of the new Pink Floyd box set, then takes you deep into L.A.'s incredible rock and roll legacy on a time travel bus adventure. http://esotouric.com/action 3) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 - Esotouric's JOAN RENNER presents a free lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library, GOLD DIGGERS & SNAKE HANDLERS: DERANGED L.A. CRIMES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AGGIE UNDERWOOD. Presented by Photo Friends and featuring crime photos from the Herald-Examiner collection. Free and open to the public. For more info, visit http://lavatransforms.org/golddiggers 4) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 - Join us for the very popular RAYMOND CHANDLER'S LOS ANGELES: IN A LONELY PLACE, a journey from the downtown of Chandler's pre-literary youth (but which always lingered at the fore of his imagination) to the Hollywood of his greatest success, with a stop along the way at Tai Kim's SCOOPS for unexpected gelato creations inspired by the author. We'll start the tour following in the young Chandler's footsteps, as he roamed the blocks near the downtown oil company office where he worked. See sites from "Lady in the Lake" and "The Little Sister," discover the real Philip Marlowe (Esotouric's exclusive scoop), and be steeped in noir LA. To reserve, see http://esotouric.com/chandler-10-15-11 5) THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20 - You are invited to attend a FREE ROOFTOP SCREENING of an astonishing, newly-discovered 1949 short color film shot on Main Street in downtown L.A. -- OF SCRAP & STEEL. This is an event celebrating the our new blogging project in the archives of the Union Rescue Mission, and we are so excited to share this amazing footage with fellow fans of L.A.'s fascinating lost lore. Space is quite limited! For more details or to reserve your spot, visit: http://lavatransforms.org/scrapsteel 6) SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23 - Forget Hollywood, babe, 'cause the quintessential LA town in definitely El Monte, its history packed with noirish murders, brilliant thespians, loony Nazis, James Ellroy's naked lunch and the lion farm that MGM's celebrated kitty called home. See all this and so much more, including the Man from Mars Bandit's Waterloo, when you climb aboard the BLOOD & DUMPLINGS crime bus tour, the daffiest crime tour in our arsenal. Info is at http://esotouric.com/bnd 7) SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30 - You are invited to be part of a transformative downtown experience. The SUNDAY SALON is the free monthly gathering of our creative consortium LAVA - The Los Angeles Visionaries Association. From noon to 2pm, at Clifton's Cafeteria (location subject to change--check the website!), we hope you'll join L.A.'s most innovative artists, writers and performers to enjoy good company, hearty comfort food, and presentations from fascinating LAVA Visionaries. At this Salon you'll discover how science and art can play well together as evidenced in "Circuitry & Poetry" where LAVA Visionary JEFF BOYNTON's DIY electronics accompany LAVA Visionary MONA JEAN CEDAR’s communicative arts of dance, poetry and sign language. More black art than science, circuit bending entails the subversive act of ripping open inexpensive electronics devices -- ranging from children’s toys to professional keyboard instruments -- exposing their circuit boards, and attacking their vulnerable insides by poking, probing, and prodding in the spirit of exploration to search for new sounds which are then activated at will. Mr. Boynton’s deep classical music background influences his performances on these ingenious circuit-bent instruments, providing a soundscape over which Mona Jean Cedar performs. Ms. Cedar creates her singular multi-layered approach to spoken word and movement by composing and choreographing with sign languages, both American and foreign. Concurrently cryptic and clearly communicative, the highly visual nature of sign language exponentially increases the expressiveness of the poetry and the dance. Together their unique talents create performances that astound with sound, pique with poetry and delight with dance. Plus, back by popular demand, LAVA Visionary JOE OESTERLE, author of the newly-released Weird Hollywood and the classic Weird California and Weird Las Vegas. Joe will be reading some spooky stories from his books as well as sharing some anecdotes from his weird road travels. Joe also promises to bring along one of the real life Weird Hollywood characters from his book. The multi-talented Joe Oesterle is a former Senior Editor of National Lampoon, a visual artist, musician, animator and curator of the strange and marvelous. Joe will be signing copies of Weird Hollywood. The Sunday Salon is an amazing gathering of the nicest and most thoughtful folks anywhere--you don't want to miss this one! For more info, click below: http://lavatransforms.org/salon1011 8) SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5 - Here's a most infrequent bus adventure to add to your butterfly collection. Come take the WEIRD WEST ADAMS crime bus tour, through the Beverly Hills of the early 20th Century, a mysterious neighborhood of decaying manors, dark secrets and souls that rest unpeacefully in their pretty graves. From the Krazy Kafitz family who simply could not behave, to the woe-begotten Marvin Gayes Junior and Senior, jazz age bootleggers, poison-gobbling kiddies, fiends and freaks, it's a tour packed with oddities and the unexpected. And the architecture too is to die for, from courtly Alvarado Terrace to the lovely lawns of Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, where some of the most fascinating characters are buried. You won't want to miss this grim day out, so join us, do. Info http://esotouric.com/westadams 9) SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12 - City Lights Books & Esotouric invite you to come explore CHARLES BUKOWSKI's lost Los Angeles and the fascinating contradictions that make this great local writer such a hoot to explore. HAUNTS OF A DIRTY OLD MAN is a raucous day out celebrating liquor, ladies, pimps and poets. The tour includes a visit to Buk's DeLongpre bungalow, where you'll see the Cultural-Historic Monument sign that we helped to get approved, and a mid-tour provisions stop at Pink Elephant Liquor. On this special edition of the tour we celebrate the publication of "More Notes of a Dirty Old Man," featuring rare Bukowski columns unseen in decades. After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," and a book of that name in 1969. He continued writing this column, from its inception in "Open City" to its conclusion in "High Times," through the mid-1980s. "More Notes of a Dirty Old Man" gathers many uncollected gems from the column's 20-year run. And five lucky passengers will win a free copy on tour day, More details are at http://esotouric.com/hank-11-12-11 10) Don't forget, there are DISCOUNTS to be had on the Esotouric bus. Take 15% off if you are a KCRW subscriber (for gift certificates, too). Spring for a SOLO 6-PACK or a SHAREABLE 12-PACK and save big on every seat, visit http://www.esotouric.com/6pack for the skinny. Call us if you have a group of 8 or more people wanting to ride a tour for a special quote. Or rent the whole bus and make a private party of it... you can even bring Crimebo the Clown along, if you must. There really are no limits except your imagination, our driver's patience and gravity. 11) Come BUY OUR WARES - they make great gifts! We're the exclusive LA distributor of Bob Waldmire's amazing ROUTE 66 maps and postcards and RAYMOND CHANDLER MYSTERY MAPS. You can hang GEORGE MANN'S rare color images of BUNKER HILL on your wall. And our 9-photo set of vintage HISTORIC CORE IMAGES is an instant Downtown L.A. history lesson. See links below for more info. 12) Come BROWSE OUR SHOP - FREE! Have you seen the ESOTOURIC FILM NOIR SELECTION? It's a virtual DVD shop containing some delightfully dark tales. Should you happen to buy something, we'll get a share of the sale price to help support our esoteric explorations, but the cheap dates among you can just use the links below to augment your library wish list.http://onbunkerhill.org/purefilmnnoir 13) And finally, links! "This is false. Many people had heard of Ralph Cuomo." Russell Brown, our Art Walk nemesis, refuses to go gentle into that good night Of scrap, steel and the street culture of Main Street Kim's keynote speech from post45 at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is now online Mother time Bottle tree farm Secrets of the grave R.I.P. KFWB In search of lost downtown murals Down the rabbit hole with abandoned report cards Frank Jones' haints and horrors Save Glendale's modern courthouse Lost James M. Cain novel found? Discovering Dan Fante An influential L.A. home/gallery survives Scotland Yard cries out for a Wikileaks Of ruby slippers and sneaky costumers Farewell to Sunset Junction's most charming commercial block Barb Cabot rides our James M. Cain bus yrs, Upcoming Esotouric bus tour and special event schedule Esotouric road trip, June 2011 - A giant shoe in Bakersfield and other Central Californian odditiesFor their fifth anniversary celebration, Esotouric's Kim Cooper and Richard Schave headed off on California's old, lost highways in search of the unexpected. First stop, the remote Saint Francis dam disaster site, with its surprising companion, the stunning Art Deco D.W.P. Power Plant #2. The 1928 disaster provided an architectural opportunity to rebuild in the high style of the day, and it's certainly a gem. To access the spot where the dam collapsed and millions of gallons of water poured to the sea at Ventura, dragging about 500 souls to their death, one must stop on the two-lane highway and walk out along an abandoned, partially washed-out road. Within moments, the heat of the canyon dissipates and all mechanical sounds vanish.
The walk is short. Round a bend where bullet holes dot old road signs, and there it is: the big canyon with unmistakeable signs of Mr. Mullholland's hubris in building atop an ancient landslide. Shaken by this quiet monument to the suffering caused by L.A.'s booster egotism, we left quietly, our spirits much buoyed by the sight of a colony of incredibly tiny frogs, too small to photograph, frolicking in their mud puddle. Next on the agenda was a stop in Tehachapi, that little mountain town best known for the prison which used to house all the southland's Tiger Women and Black Widows.
After exploring the cute little downtown with its replica train station (a recent fire ate the landmark original), German bakery (try the Harvest Loaf)
Eager to settle in for the night, we gunned it on to Bakersfield, where Richard posed with the object of our trip, Mr. Deschwanden's shoe repair shop which is, yes, shaped like a shoe. It seems to be vacant. A business opportunity for you, perhaps?
At Richard Neutra's Norwalk Service Station, now a Sir Lube, we learned that the roof leaks, but the old gal is otherwise holding up nicely.
We admired many fine neon signs.
And found an old iron hitching ring in the sidewalk, in front of what used to be a popular saloon, but is now a vacant lot.
The heat was getting to us, so after a cozy night in the restored Padre Hotel
The road to the coast followed James Dean's last drive, and we pulled off the road at the spot where he crashed his Porsche to muse for a spell on the life lost and myth gained. Kim had Phil Ochs' lovely song about him stuck in her head for the next couple hours.
After the outrageous heat of the central valley, San Luis Obispo felt like heaven, so of course we had to seek out the putti and pink fluff of The Madonna Inn
It was just about a year ago that we'd last dropped by, on the way home from our Nittwitt Ridge Excursion, and we were delighted to see that the innkeepers have again welcomed a family of swallows to nest under the eaves of the porte-cochère. A little luck, and we captured an image of feeding time.
Down to town the next morning, Richard was reluctant to go thrift shopping, but happy he had when he came away with a beautiful set of vintage Samsonite luggage, cheap.
Breakfast was served at Louisa's Place, which we liked for our sassy waitress and the ingenious addition of grilled mushrooms to the Eggs Florentine. Last stop before home to kiss the cats was a long stroll out onto the boardwalk through the dunes at Guadalupe, a strange and beautiful place.
Somewhere out there are the ruins of exotic silent film sets, but we were more keen on bird watching and admiring the very odd plants that thrive in the sand.
Thanks for tagging along with us for this latest road trip adventure, and stay tuned for more peculiar excursions. For more photos, click here. Esotouric visits the Tom Waits In The Neighborhood video locationOnce a year, the Los Angeles tour company Esotouric makes a very special excursion - CRAWLING DOWN CAHUENGA; TOM WAITS' L.A. In this brief clip from the 2011 tour, host David Smay shows off the unassuming Echo Park alley where legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler shot Waits' "In The Neighborhood" video, and talks about his favorite things about being an Esotouric tour guide for the day. More tour info here. Buy David Smay's "Swordfishtrombones" book here. L.A.'s best independent tour guides unite to launch "7 Days In L.A." website calendarLINK: 7 Days in L.A. LOS ANGELES- America's second largest city just got easier to navigate, with today's launch of 7 Days in L.A., a one-stop website calendar featuring the city's most interesting guided bus, car, bike and walking tours. Why 7 Days in L.A? Because this city is too big and too complicated to understand without a native guide, and because you're smart enough to know that a one-size-fits-all experience is the wrong size for you. 7 Days in L.A. isn't a tour operator, but a consortium of the region's best independent tour operators. Whatever your interest--from architecture to true crime, film locations to graveyards, gay history to iconic L.A. literature--you'll find the perfect excursion on the 7 Days in L.A. community calendar, and all the information needed to book a high quality tour to suit any budget. Sign up for the weekly newsletter to receive coming event announcements and special offers, exclusively for 7 Days in L.A. subscribers. Like the website says, "Give us few hours, or your whole week, and we'll change the way you think about Los Angeles forever." 7 Days in L.A. is the brain child of Kim Cooper and Richard Schave, the husband and wife behind Esotouric bus adventures, the cultural tourism company known for eclectic offerings like "The Real Black Dahlia," "Pasadena Confidential" and "Charles Bukowski's L.A." Because Esotouric only offers tours on weekends, Kim and Richard regularly recommend select L.A. tour companies to customers inquiring about weekday excursions or companies on a similar wavelength—and these folks often return the courtesy. 7 Days in L.A. is a real world extension of that spirit of cooperation and mutual support that makes L.A.'s independent tour guide community so special. Participating tour companies and solo guides include: Architecture Tours L.A., Crimebo the Clown's Downtown Art Walk Gallery Tour, Dearly Departed Tours, The Dorothy Parker Society, Esotouric Bus Adventures, The Felix in Hollywood Tour Company, Hollywood Forever Cemetery Tour, Hollywood Movie Tours, L.A. Gang Tours, L.A. River Tours, Out & About - Hollywood's 1st & Only Gay Bus Tour, Take My Mother*Please (*or any other VIP), Terry Bolo - The Hollywood Gal, Tizzle Bike Tours and Urban Photo Adventures. Esotouric's Kim Cooper says, "I'm thrilled to announce 7 Days in L.A. because L.A.'s independent tour guides are not competitors, we're peers and friends. Now when somebody asks me what to do in L.A. in the middle of the week, I can just point them to this website, where they're sure to find several top quality tours to choose from." Jenny Price of L.A. River Tours says "This is such a tough city to understand--and it's so MIS-understood—that I'm excited to assemble this cadre of folks who can show visitors and Angelenos alike the real Los Angeles." "I think these bigger tour companies are like McDonald's, but we're like Musso and Frank," notes Karie Bible of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery Tour, "What we offer is something unique and specialized for the more discerning tourist." Jim Anzide of Out & About Tours agrees: "7 Days in L.A. is exactly what's needed for the discerning traveler. It offers a rare collection of seldom heard and less frequently told stories that are truly the lifeblood of this city. Each specialty tour is a perfectly crafted hidden gem." And Scott Michaels of Dearly Departed Tours points out that you don't have to be a tourist to discover the real Los Angeles: "Locals who wish to become better acquainted with their own city don’t have to go any further to plan a month of Sundays." "In Sightseeing, like in Real Estate, 'Location, Location, Location' is important," notes Philip Mershon of the Felix in Hollywood Tour Company. "What sets the 7 Days in L.A. group apart is that we are also firm believers in 'Research, Research, Research'! It's what makes the difference for a really satisfying experience." And Anne Block of Take My Mother*Please (*or any other VIP) raves, "Finally, a unique mix of tour offerings for visitors to Los Angeles -- and local devotees, too! -- in an easy to access calendar format. Our merry coalition of expert guides represents many facets of the city we love, so rich in beauty, history, and oddity." And Scott Michaels of Dearly Departed Tours adds, "I think people will welcome these unique perspectives of Los Angeles – and each is truly unique. There’s no competition here. We are just people who love Los Angeles and are eager to share what we’ve learned from it." For more info, visit 7 Days in L.A. L.A. Noire fans ride the Real Black Dahlia bus
On April 16, Esotouric was delighted to welcome fans of the much-anticipated Rockstar / Team Bondi video game "L.A. Noire" aboard The Real Black Dahlia crime bus, for a moody excursion following in the footsteps of Elizabeth Short, whose unsolved 1947 murder, notorious then as now as the Black Dahlia case, figures in the plot of the game.
From the Biltmore Hotel where she rested, to the Olive Street bar that was the real last place she was seen alive, then out to Leimert Park to the now disarmingly suburban crime scene, it was an emotional day spent in great company. We hope taking the tour helps our new friends solve all the virtual crimes that "L.A. Noire" can throw at them (in the character of Cole Phelps, newly-minted 1947 LAPD Detective) while revealing the real, sad girl behind all the mystery and bluster of the Black Dahlia myth.
For more photos from our day exploring, see the Flickr set . And if you're excited about playing "L.A. Noire" and want to visit the real city that's its source, then come out with us on any one of our 1940s-themed tours: The Real Black Dahlia, The Birth of Noir, Raymond Chandler's L.A. or Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice. Raymond Chandler's wife comes homeOn Valentine's Day 2011, Esotouric took a road trip to San Diego to attend the Cissy Chandler burial service at Mount Hope Cemetery in San Diego. This video is a short version of the ceremony, with a very special surprise at the end.
Speakers at the Cissy Chandler burial service included Loren Latker (Shamus Town website), Ann Lispcomb Hill (San Diego Historical Society), Dr. Annie Thiel-Latker, Powers Boothe reading selected bon mots by Raymond Chandler, Judith Freeman reading from "The Long Embrace" and Randal Gardner, Rector of St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church of La Jolla, officient. Music by the Crown Island Jazz Band. For information on Esotouric's occasional bus tour "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles: In A Lonely Place" visit this link. For a full set of photos from the burial ceremony, click here. Photos by Chinta Cooper, video by Esotouric, all rights reserved Esotouric road trip, February 2011 - Angeles Abbey, ComptonOnce upon a time not so very long ago, Los Angeles was a city full of retired burghers and their wives from the central plains--hard-working, respectable people who were easily awed and expected no less in their retirement. In "Day of the Locust," Nathanael West paints these drab souls with a sinister brush, and we do not doubt that they were boorish and hard to share a streetcar with. And yet.
Way down in Compton there survives, improbably, one of the architectural follies built to make these plain people gape. It still manages to boggle any mind that happens across it today. Angeles Abbey is a phantasmagoria of Indian, Moorish, Spanish, Byzantine and High Modernist concrete elements, plopped down in such a way that its delirious towers can be viewed from every home in the modest neighborhood that grew up around it. Squint, breathe the jasmine and orange-scented air, and it's not Compton around you, it's Hollywood's dream of Arabia--in Technicolor.
The visionary builder was George Craig of the Long Beach (via Toledo) shipbuilding Craigs, who it is said sent his architects to sketch the dome of the Taj Mahal around the same time that Adolph Schleicher commissioned drawings of royal Assyrian walls in Berlin's Pergamon museum for his Samson Tire Factory (now Citadel) and the firm of Meyer & Holler tweaked the loudest aspects of Cairo and Peking into Sid Grauman's theaters. By 1931, the corporation was spending a purported $500,000 on a new, central mausoleum containing 4000 crypts, which when combined with the 6000 in the first building made Angeles Abbey one of the largest American structures of its kind. Angeles Abbey rose up on the gentle plains of Id, far from the bustle of Long Beach and Los Angeles. The exquisitely decorated halls, all marble and leaded stained glass, were pure palaces of the dead, and a source of pride to those burghers who reserved eternal homes within.
Aerial photograph taken 1928 by Spence Airplane Photos, collection of Los Angeles Public Library
But before the decline, there were golden years, and some peculiar happenings that attracted note. In March 1935, 52-year-old Lois Ludwick, who really, really loved her car, was interred at Angeles following an unusual funeral in which her automobile was draped with flowers and towed behind the hearse bearing her remains. Automotive culture would become a theme that year: race car driver H.W. "Stubby" Stubblefield, killed during a practice run for the 1935 Indianapolis 500 would be interred at Angeles alongside his mechanic Leo Whitikar, who perished with him when their steering failed.
In 1937, a strange lawsuit was dismissed, thus denying us the opportunity to know why the family of J. Allen McManis (later the author of the New Guinea travel narrative "Flesh of My Brother, or, Kia Kia [Flesh Eaters])" believed the corpse of 5-year-old J. Allen Junior had vanished from his crypt. And in 1938, Richard V. Brady, 16, was memorialized after a game of Russian Roulette among high school chums resulted in the inevitable. In 1969, Angeles Abbey welcomed Clinton "Cy" Chamberlin, 94, called the "last of the smoke-eaters" for his work training the front ends of the horse-drawn fire-trucks that were phased out circa 1921. He was in later life fire chief for MGM and Warner Brothers. The cemetery's advertising slogan circa 1964 was "Lowest Cost - Finest Protection - And Beautifully Maintained "For Those Who Care" but the time would come when these phrases would ring as hollow as the rap of a heavy flashlight against an empty wall crypt. The 1965 Watts Riots played a role, as did the shifting demographics which would leave Angeles Abbey on the wrong side of a very long commute for those who still cared to visit their dead.
But the death knell for Angeles Abbey tolled decisively in August 1976, when headlines blared the grim tale of the murder of 76-year-old Martha Eddington of Rosemead, beaten and strangled as she visited the mezzanine-level crypts of her daughter Margaret Brown and son-in-law Ralph Pejsa. It was initially reported that she had been killed over the weekend, but not found until Monday afternoon, when an anonymous tip advised police to look behind a curtain. The autopsy, less widely publicized, showed that she had been killed a few hours before she was found, in a pool of blood, with a broken vase bearing the name of her dead daughter close by. Martha Eddington died very near to her own reserved crypt, and she was interred there as planned. What follows was a series of scandals and miserable incidents. In 1984, Angeles Abbey and the Neptune Society were jointly named in a civil suit filed by eight persons who believed the ashes of their loved ones had been improperly commingled with "persons or things unknown." Jean Sanders, who managed the property in the 1980s and 1990s, gained some celebrity for her careful management of rival gangs during services for those killed in gang-related incidents, while lamenting the vandalism that neighborhood youth visited on the place. And in 2002, $5 million was awarded in a class action suit that alleged that hundreds of bodies had been secretly stowed six-deep beneath the cemetery's main road, while the management conducted fraudulent burials in a pretty, grassy part of the grounds. Sod has since been laid over the graves in question, rendering the place exceptionally confusing to drive through. Now the dead rest as easily as they are able, beneath tightly-locked towers so beautiful that they hardly seem real.
For more photographs from Angeles Abbey, please visit the Flickr photo set. The Flâneur & The City: Olvera StreetUrban historian Richard Schave's site-specific discussion 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 and walking through a neighborhood and learning to see it with all your eyes. In this installment, held on July 25, 2010, we visited Olvera Street, the historic seed of Los Angeles and the first place where issues of urban preservation entered the city's consciousness. On this free 45-minute walking tour, we explored the site's history, from the founding of the city (1781) to the present day, with a focus on the "classic" era: Christine Sterling's nearly thirty years of preservation and reinterpretation, which resulted in the entire Plaza becoming a State park, now managed by the city of Los Angeles. The excerpt presented here is a brief discussion of Christine Sterling's conflicting motivations in preserving Olvera Street, and her alliances with business and publishing interests. On this informative stroll through a provocative and multi-layered space, we explored such key questions as: * What core challenges, goals and strategies are shared by Christine Sterling at the Plaza in the early 20th century and the developers of downtown's Old Bank District (4th & Main) in the early 21st century? * Can arts and culture succeed as a tool for economic development for reinvigorating historic neighborhoods? Was Jane Jacobs right when she proclaimed that "new ideas need old buildings"? * Is there a point on the continuum where the creeping kitsch of a tourist attraction overwhelms the value of a vital community space? Can a positive public space be ruined by popularity and accessibility? For more on free events held under the umbrella of LAVA - The Los Angeles Visionaries Association, visit http://www.lavatransforms.org The New Chinatowns tour previewCome discover the secret history of the San Gabriel Valley on this provocative and occasional Esotouric architecture tour from the series Reyner Banham Loves LA. Next tour: August 7, 2010.
Esotouric Road Trip, May 2010 - Cambria CemeteryJust before Memorial Day, your intrepid urban adventurers stepped outside of their asphalt-coated comfort zone for a lightning 40-hour road trip to explore some notable, rural Central Californian attractions. This is the third of several blog posts sharing scenes from the road. While Nitt Witt Ridge is definitely the granddaddy of all folk art environments on the Central Coast, anyone interested in manifestations of amateur creativity and raw feeling should schedule a visit to Cambria's historic, eclectic, mountain cemetery. Unlike tidy urban graveyards that frown on mourners placing their own messy memorials on loved ones' burial sites -- it makes it so hard to mow, after all -- Cambria Cemetery welcomes all manner of personal expressions of grief, from elaborate sculptures showing the deceased in life...
...to collections of shiny treasures reflecting their former passions.
Exploring the shaded woodland paths populated with expansive expressions of love and loss, one gets the sense that this is a community that's learned how to say goodbye in a way that encourages healing and personal growth. While all of the deceased were strangers to us, as is typically the case when visiting an historic graveyard, we left Cambria Cemetery feeling as though we had spent an hour with hundreds of distinct individuals. While serene and lovely, it's the farthest thing from sad as a cemetery could be.
For more photos from Cambria Cemetery, click this link.  |
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