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Esotouric Celebrates Los Angeles Historic Preservation, 1900s-1980s

About This Webinar

Almost as long as Los Angeles has been a city, Angelenos have worried that it is changing too fast and its landmarks being lost. The threat to historic places has never been greater than in today’s climate of relentless development and political corruption. And yet, this is also a golden age for preservation activism, with powerful digital tools that let citizens organize, communicate and often succeed in saving the places they love.

Every 21st century L.A. preservationist stands on the shoulders of giants—so let’s get to know them.

Join Esotouric, L.A.'s most eclectic sightseeing tour company, for a virtual celebration of the preservation people of Los Angeles from the 1900s through the 1980s, telling the stories of the passionate, colorful and just plain cranky folks who took a stand for our shared history and left the city better than they found it. You’ll also learn about the public policy wonks who shaped one of the nation’s earliest and strongest preservation ordinances, ensuring that some very special landmarks and landscapes were preserved.

Your hosts Kim Cooper and Richard Schave are Los Angeles cultural historians, and passionate preservationists, having worked on such varied campaigns as landmarking the Los Angeles Times buildings and writer Charles Bukowski’s East Hollywood bungalow, spearheading restoration of Sheila Klein’s dismantled streetlight sculpture Vermonica and restoring Angels Flight Railway to service. Learn more about their preservation work.

The webinar will reveal:

  • How author and civic booster Charles Fletcher Lummis rallied Edwardian Angelenos to form the Landmarks Club and fund restoration of California Mission buildings whose adobe walls were on the verge of melting into mud.

  • How single mother Christine Sterling worked relentlessly to halt demolition of L.A.’s oldest house, the Avila Adobe, and to transform the seedy surrounding neighborhood into the abiding small business district and tourist attraction, Olvera Street.

  • How City Planner Calvin Hamilton brought the Indiana model of preservation to Los Angeles in the 1960s, and created a public policy framework for designating and protecting significant landmarks.

  • How the Cultural Heritage Board under Carl Dentzel created Heritage Square, where significant houses were moved from redeveloping neighborhoods like Bunker Hill.

  • How the citizens of Angelino Heights restored their landmark Victorian homes, buried unsightly modern electrical wires and advocated to become the city’s first Historic Preservation Overlay Zone.

  • How preservation nonprofits like Hollywood Heritage, Keep Old Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Conservancy became a powerful force in shaping preservation policy.

Special guests will include Margaret Bach, founding president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, and Jean Bruce Poole, the first curator of El Pueblo, sharing insights into their work preserving and interpreting the historic built environment of Los Angeles. Plus, Bunker Hill native son Gordon Pattison will talk about how his family’s Bunker Hill Victorians were the first buildings moved to Heritage Square, and the tragic tale of their loss to fire.

This webinar is an illustrated lecture packed with rare photos and ephemera that will bring the history of preservation in Los Angeles to life on your digital device. 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, you’ll have a chance to ask 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.

Who can view: Everyone
Webinar Price: $10.00
Featured Presenters
Webinar hosting presenter Kim Cooper
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.
Webinar hosting presenter
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.
Webinar hosting presenter
Founding Director of the Los Angeles Conservancy
Documentary filmmaker, historic preservationist, writer, interior designer: Margaret Bach wove her interest in film, history, architecture, and the built environment into the pattern of her life work. In the 1970’s she worked on the restoration and historic designation of the Horatio West Court, made the documentary film, Landscape With Angels, received her MFA from UCLA, worked at KCET on the LA History Film Series, and worked at LACMA producing a film series showing how movies have portrayed Los Angeles.

When the City of Los Angeles planned to sell the Bertram Goodhue- designed Los Angeles Central Library, Margaret worked on the LA AIA report, “The Light of Learning,” a history and defense of the Library. Out of the effort to save the Library, the Los Angeles Conservancy was founded. Margaret was both a founding member and, in 1978, its first president.
Webinar hosting presenter
First Executive Director of the Los Angeles Conservancy
Architectural historian. Co-chair of the Conservancy’s Advocacy Committee. Served three terms on the Santa Monica Landmarks Commissioner. First Executive Director of the Los Angeles Conservancy. Former President, California Preservation Foundation.
Webinar hosting presenter
From Bunker Hill
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.
Webinar hosting presenter
Curator, El Pueblo Monument, Los Angeles. 1977-2003
Hosted By
Esotouric webinar platform hosts Esotouric Celebrates Los Angeles Historic Preservation, 1900s-1980s
Richard Schave's webinars
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