Esotouric Presents In The Shadow of the Hotel Cecil: A Main Street Time Travel On Demand webinar

This is a recording of a webinar that previously streamed live. You can purchase a ticket to watch the recording, but you won’t be able to participate in the live chat or Q&A.
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One of the most fascinating, mysterious and poorly understood buildings in Los Angeles is the Hotel Cecil.

Prominently situated in the heart of historic Skid Row, the Cecil has witnessed the neighborhood’s transformation from central business district to anything goes vice zone, from cheap flophouses to gentrified loft district.

When Esotouric gave its first tours of Downtown L.A. true crime and cultural history in 2007, the Hotel Cecil was a featured location, notable for its association with the Richard Ramirez Night Stalker murders and with dark tourism slayer Jack Unterweger, and several less high profile deaths.

But it wasn’t until 2013, when Canadian tourist Elisa Lam vanished under mysterious circumstances, only to be discovered floating in the Cecil’s rooftop water tank, that the hotel became an object of fascination for armchair true crime sleuths around the world.

So what else is there to say about the Hotel Cecil? Everything!

Join Esotouric, L.A.'s most eclectic sightseeing tour company, for a virtual exploration of the notorious, beautiful and misunderstood Hotel Cecil and its history of mysterious deaths, peculiar management choices and central role in popularizing the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program. We’ll talk about the high profile crimes associated with the building, and some lesser known tales. And we’ll step outside to get to know the lost world of tattoo parlors, freak shows, burlesque houses, B-girl bars, pawn shops, dime a dance halls, dirty movie houses and rescue missions that once were the hotel’s neighbors.

Esotouric’s Kim Cooper and Richard Schave are the go-to experts for journalists covering the Hotel Cecil and Skid Row history, and appear in the forthcoming Netflix series “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.”

This webinar is an illustrated lecture packed with rare photos that will bring the Hotel Cecil and Main Street to life. 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 presentation, Kim and Richard 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.

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.