Esotouric's Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice downtown double feature LA history bus tour
WHAT: Esotouric presents Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice
WHEN: Saturday November 22, 12pm-4pm
COST: $58/person (15% off for KCRW or KPCC members)
WHERE: Departs from Cafe Metropol at 923 East 3rd Street, LA 90013, tour covers downtown LA's historic core
From the founding of the city through the 1940s, downtown was the true center of Los Angeles, a lively, densely populated, exciting and sometimes dangerous place. After many quiet decades, downtown is making an incredible return. But while many of the historic buildings remain, their stories have been lost.That's why Esotouric, the eclectic bus adventure company whose tours reveal the secret history of L.A. through crime, culture, literature and architecture, is offering HOTEL HORRORS AND MAIN STREET VICE, a tour meant to bring alive the old ghosts and memories that cling to the streets and structures of the historic core.
The HOTEL HORRORS portion is a true crime and oddities tour featuring some of the wildest, weirdest, goriest and most memorable happenings in historic hotels like the Alexandria, Hayward, Barclay, King Edward and Cecil. Get on the bus and you'll get inside all of these legendary locales, and find out where Night Stalker Richard Ramirez liked to stay and the hotel that saw a visit from the Skid Row Slasher, plus which hotel was the choice of Columbian drug mules with cocaine in their platform shoes, what lobby hosted a small scale anarchist riot and where two traveling chocolate salesmen laughed so hard they fell backwards out a window to their deaths.
You'll also learn the truth about the myth that Beth "The Black Dahlia" Short was last seen alive at the Biltmore and explore the fiery curse that repeatedly leveled the St. George Hotel. Also included are some light hearted stories to help the blood and gore go down.
The MAIN STREET VICE portion is a social history tour celebrating the ribald, racy, raunchy old promenade where the better people simply did not travel, but kicks were had by all who did. Burlesque babes and dirty picture parlors, mummified western outlaws and old time tattoo parlors, wax museums and pawn brokers, "professors" offering sex lectures and magazine peddlers with nudie Marilyn Monroe calendars under the counter, sophisticated steak houses and nickel donut dives -- these were the pleasures and the people to be found along Main during the first half of the 20th century, a street that every Angeleno knew offered more (yet less) of what could be seen anywhere else.
On this tour, we'll visit the scenes of some more unforgettable debaucheries and share stories of crime, smut, passion and commerce.
Climb aboard for a time travel journey back to the downtown that's not there anymore, and the surprising number of gems that survive.
Upcoming Esotouric bus tour schedule:
Sat Nov 22- Noir November: Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice
Sat Nov 29- Noir November: Blood & Dumplings
Sat Dec 6- Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski's LA
Thurs Dec 11- The Hippodrome & Hazard's Pavilion (Downtown LA Art WalkShuttles, free)
Sat Dec 13- Pasadena Confidential
Sat Jan 10 - The Real Black Dahlia
Sat Jan 17 - Reyner Banham Loves LA: Route 66
Sat Jan 24 - Weird West Adams
Sun Jan 1 - Reyner Banham Loves LA: South LA architecture tour
Sat Feb 14- Blood & Dumplings
Sat Feb 21- Raymond Chandler's LA
Sat Feb 28 - Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits' LA
For more info on Esotouric, visit http://www.esotouric.com
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