Esotouric Presents: The Treasures and Tragedies of Elysian Park webinar
If you asked a random sampling of Angelenos to name a mountainous municipal green space, most would say Griffith Park. But its smaller easterly neighbor Elysian Park, ten years older than Griffith, is equally packed with history, intrigue, beauty and tragedy.
Join Esotouric, L.A.'s most eclectic sightseeing tour company, for an immersive webinar exploring the cultural, natural, redevelopment, public policy, art and architectural history of Elysian Park, and the fascinating characters who have made history within its 600 acres.
Featured on this webinar:
• The story of the dedicated activist group Citizen's Committee To Save Elysian Park (established 1965) and how founder Grace E. Simons used her experience as a journalist to turn neighbors into bare-knuckles public policy warriors protecting their beloved park from City Hall land grabs.
• A virtual tour of Francios Scotti’s sprawling faux bois waterfall gardens (1937), a city landmark hidden inside the Police Academy. Joining us is Terry Eagan, Southern California’s premier craftsman and restorer of faux bois, who will walk us through Scotti’s masterpiece and explain the tools and techniques of this traditional decorative landscaping technique.
• The story of how Barlow Respiratory Hospital’s historic campus, a city landmark, has served the community through more than a century of public health crises, from its founding as a TB sanitarium through establishment of California’s first AIDS hospice and our current pandemic.
• All about the long-forgotten World War I Victory Memorial Grove at Lilac Terrace and its recent restoration and reactivation. Joining us is historian and advocate Courtland Jindra, who studied the history and got city approval to bring in a volunteer crew to bring the lost memorial back from decades of neglect and vandalism.
• The grim tale of the city’s eminent domain seizure of Chavez Ravine for a failed public housing project, and the subsequent eviction of the remaining families in 1959. Our special guests are Bunker Hill redevelopment historian Nathan Marsak and Gordon Pattison, whose family was displaced from Bunker Hill in the 1960s. Gordon will give his evictee’s eye view of the Chavez Ravine tragedy and discuss the long term effect of displacement on communities.
And more Elysian Park lore to be revealed! This webinar is an illustrated lecture packed with rare photos that will bring the history of Elysian Park. And you'll find the look of an Esotouric webinar is a little different than your standard dry Zoom session, with lively interactive graphics courtesy of the mmhmm app.
After the presentations, Kim, Richard, Terry, Courtland and Gordon will answer your questions, so get ready to be a part of the show.
Can't join in when the webinar is happening? You'll have access to the full replay for one week. Please note: the 90 minute running time is just an estimate, and we often run long because the stories take on a life of their own. You can always come back and watch the last part of the webinar recording later.
So tune in and discover the incredible history of Los Angeles, with the couple whose passion for the city is infectious.
FYI: Immediately upon registering, you will receive a separate, automated email containing the link to join the webinar. The webinar is reliable on all devices, Mac, PC, iOS and Android.
About Esotouric: As undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz, Kim Cooper and Richard Schave inexplicably hated one other on sight. (Perhaps less inexplicably, their academic advisor believed they were soul mates). A chance meeting 18 years later proved much more agreeable. Richard wooed Kim with high-level library database access, with which she launched the 1947project true crime blog, highlighting a crime a day from the year of The Black Dahlia and Bugsy Siegel slayings. The popular blog’s readers demanded a tour, and then another. The tour was magical, a hothouse inspiring new ways for the by-then-newlyweds to tell the story of Los Angeles. Esotouric was born in 2007 with a calendar packed with true crime, literary, architecture and rock and roll tours. Ever since, it has provided a platform for promoting historic preservation issues (like the Save the 76 Ball campaign and the landmarking of Charles Bukowski’s bungalow), building a community of urban explorers (including dozens of free talks and tours under the umbrella of LAVA) and digging ever deeper into the secret heart of the city they love.
About Terry Eagan: Terry is the artisan of the Faux Bois Concrete Restoration Project at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. His website is http://www.fauxboisconcrete.info
About Courtland Jindra: An early campaigner in California for the centennial of WW1, Courtland Jindra is an amateur historian and volunteer since 2014 for the United States World War I Centennial Commission. His "Great War" interest is largely focused on America's contribution to and remembrance of it. Delving into Los Angeles Times' archives, Jindra has located numerous memorials to the war in Southern California. He is a passionate advocate for highlighting their importance, and through them the war effort writ large. Learn more about his Victory Memorial Grove preservation campaign here: https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/100-cities-100-memorials-blog/110-save-victory-memorial-grove-a-los-angeles-memorial-restoration-project-submitted-to-100-cities-100-memorials.html
About Gordon Pattison: Gordon Pattison is a native son of Bunker Hill. His family owned the Salt Box and the Castle, the last two homes standing after the neighborhood was cleared for redevelopment. To learn more, see Gordon's LAVA Sunday Salon presentation Old Bunker Hill: One Family's Perspective. Gordon can also be found talking about Angels Flight Railway on Off-Ramp, visiting the few remaining pieces of his family's houses at Heritage Square Museum, on KCET's Lost L.A. series Lost Hills episode, L.A. As Subject's funicular feature and remembering novelist John Fante at his square dedication and atop Bunker Hill. He can also be found on Esotouric's The Lowdown on Downtown tours, sharing memories of lost Bunker Hill.
Rights and permissions: By attending an Esotouric webinar, you acknowledge that the entirety of the presentation is copyrighted, and no portion of the video or text may be reproduced in any fashion.
After his undergraduate studies in art history at UC Santa Cruz, Richard Schave set out to explore the American interior as an itinerant brick mason. His return to his native Los Angeles coincided with a renewed acquaintance with Kim Cooper, a once-detested academic colleague who would become his bride. Together, fusing scholarly research with new digital tools, they launched the 1947project time travel blog, along with In SRO Land, and On Bunker Hill, as well as the Esotouric tour company. With the success of Kim’s True Crime tours, Richard developed a series of Literary and California Culture excursions. Richard is a dedicated preservationist, and the host of the LAVA Sunday Salon and the LAVA Literary Salon series, named Best L.A. Literary Salon by Los Angeles Magazine. He also curates an ongoing series of forensic science programs at Cal State Los Angeles. Richard is also a reader at the Huntington Library.
Kim Cooper (“one of L.A.’s brightest torchbearers” – Electric Literature) is the creator of 1947project, the crime-a-day time travel blog that spawned Esotouric’s popular crime bus tours, including Pasadena Confidential, the Real Black Dahlia and Weird West Adams. She is the author of The Kept Girl, the acclaimed historical mystery starring the young Raymond Chandler and the real-life Philip Marlowe, and of The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Her collaborative L.A. history blogs include On Bunker Hill and In SRO Land. With husband Richard Schave, Kim curates the Salons of LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association. When the third generation Angeleno isn’t combing old newspapers for forgotten scandals, she is a passionate advocate for historic preservation of signage, vernacular architecture and writer’s homes. Kim was for many years the editrix of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture. Her books include Fall in Love For Life, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth, Lost in the Grooves and an oral history of Neutral Milk Hotel.
I came to praise Los Angeles, not to bury her. And yet developers, City Hall and social reformers work in concert to effect wholesale demolition, removing the human scale of my town, tossing its charm into a landfill. The least I can do is memorialize in real time those places worth noting, as they slide inexorably into memory.
In college I studied under Banham. I learned to love Los Angeles via Reyner’s teachings (and came to abjure Mike Davis and his lurid, fanciful, laughably-researched assertions). In grad school I focused on visionary urbanism and technological utopianism—so while some may find the premise of preserving communities so much ill-considered reactionary twaddle, at least I have a background in the other side.
Anyway, I moved to Los Angeles, and began to document. I drove about shooting neon signs. I put endless miles across the Plains of Id on the old Packard as part of the 1947project; when Kim Cooper blogged about some bad lunch meat in Compton, I drove down to there to check on the scene of the crime (never via freeway—you can’t really learn Los Angeles unless you study her from the surface streets).
But in short order one landmark after another disappeared. Few demolitions are as contentious or high profile as the Ambassador or Parker Center; rather, it is all the little houses and commercial buildings the social engineers are desperate to destroy in the name of the Greater Good. The fabric of our city is woven together by communities and neighborhoods who no longer have a say in their zoning or planning so it’s important to shine a light on these vanishing treasures, now, before the remarkable character of our city is wiped away like a stain from a countertop. (But Nathan, you say, it’s just this one house—no, it isn’t. Principiis obsta, finem respice.)
And who knows, one might even be saved. Excelsior!
About Gordon Pattison: Gordon Pattison is a native son of Bunker Hill. His family owned the Salt Box and the Castle, the last two homes standing after the neighborhood was cleared for redevelopment. To learn more, see Gordon's LAVA Sunday Salon presentation Old Bunker Hill: One Family's Perspective. Gordon can also be found talking about Angels Flight Railway on Off-Ramp, visiting the few remaining pieces of his family's houses at Heritage Square Museum, on KCET's Lost L.A. series Lost Hills episode, L.A. As Subject's funicular feature and remembering novelist John Fante at his square dedication and atop Bunker Hill. He can also be found on Esotouric's The Lowdown on Downtown tours, sharing memories of lost Bunker Hill.
