Esotouric

In the past three decades the communities of Alhambra and Monterey Park, nestled in the foothills of the southwestern San Gabriel Valley, have transformed themselves from sleepy suburban bedroom communities (bursting at the seams from a 1950s housing explosion) to the nexus of a pan-Asian megalopolis spreading east to Diamond Bar and beyond to the county line. Fueled by immigration from Taiwan, Hong Kong, more recently South East Asia, these communities have found their identity, their economic base, and have come into their own as a new type of American “chinatown.”

Hosted by Richard Schave, the Esotouric founder recently featured as Downtown L.A. ambassador on the BBC's "Globe Trekker" series, THE NEW CHINATOWNS is an entertaining and illuminating historical and cultural bus tour that rolls through Alhambra, San Gabriel, Rosemead and (mainly) Monterey Park exploring significant people, remarkable places and delicious delicacies. Join us as we explore the region's fascinating history, from the land and oil booms of the 1920s, its halcyon postwar days as a suburban outpost for lower middle class Angelenos, the birthplace of the Hula Hoop (Wham-o Industries), to the “white flight” of the 1970s which created the vacuum that facilitated the first wave of migration from China. Among the significant sites on our itinerary:

* Paradise Trailer Park (Rosemead), a picture perfect time capsule of gracious, tree-shaded mobile home living in the postwar Southland.
* Site of the Wham-O toys manufacturing plant (San Gabriel), birthplace of millions of Hula Hoops, Frisbees, Superballs and Water Wiggles.
* The Venice Room (Monterey Park), a groovy grill-your-own-steak bar, still family-run after forty years.
* Browning Realty (Monterey Park), site of the 1920s oil mania and still a family enterprise after eighty-plus years.
* El Encanto (Monterey Park), exquisite showplace of the failed 1920s luxury housing development intended as the Beverly Hills of the East.
* Mission Superhardware (San Gabriel), still run by the Fabriano family after more than seven decades, and previously where Howard Roach built some of the Southland's first television sets.
* Site of the original Laura Scudder potato chip factory (Monterey Park).
* Pioneering purveyors of high quality Asian herbs, teas and notions Wing Hop Fung, where French-born wine dealer Guillaume Galand will host a pairing of savory dim sum from Capital Seafood and wines from WHF (Monterey Park).

Today Monterey Park is at the crossroads of economic development. After three decades spent fostering independent businesses-fueled by immigrant’s dreams and sweat, the city is looking to bring in big business, which it claims is desperately needed for its tax base. Can this unique and quintessentially independent community survive another identity crisis, another land boom, this time of a distinctly corporate nature?

Special attention will be paid in the route to a compelling side effect of this sociological revolution: the best Asian food in the world is here as well. We will end the tour with a wine pairing with dim sum at Wing Hop Fung organized by their wine merchant, Guillaume Galand.

We are pleased to offer several architecture and urbanism tours which stem from host Richard Schave's course of study with the British art historian Reyner Banham, author of the seminal monograph Los Angeles: A Study of Four Ecologies. Taking the essence of Reyner’s work--reverence, passion, and an eye to context--we tackle the development of Southern California as a built environment, looking at how the growing populations shaped the climate and ecologies, creating a unique sense of place which has captivated the world.

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: South Los Angeles

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Many Downtowns

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: Route 66

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The New Chinatowns (San Gabriel Valley)

Esotouric’s “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” tours each explore themes of industry, infrastructure, architecture and the built environment.

In this third installment in our ongoing architecture series, we explore California's Mother Road and the building of its dream. The dream manifests at the turn of the 20th century as we explore how the climate was sold, the growth of the citrus industry and Tuberculosis hospitals. Then come the programmatic roadside architecture of the 1920s and 1930s and postwar V-8 visions fueled by gasoline and good climate (too bad you can't run an engine on it).

The Reyner Banham tour series is dedicated to revealing greater L.A.'s infrastructure, history, the built and natural environment, transportation corridors, drive-ins, attractions and oddities.

This tour will focus on the built environment along the Mother Road with an emphasis on old and historic alignments of Route 66 as well as signage.

Highlights of the Route 66 tour include:

E. Wald Ward Farm. Purveyors of fine preservatives and other delicacies. We will visit the barn store of this venerable Sierra Madre citrus family which has been in business of producing and selling the highest quality preserves from their orchards since 1918. We will tour the orchard and hear more about the history of this family from 4th generation member, Jeff Ward.

Aztec Hotel. Though really Mayan in decoration, this 1924 Robert Stacy Judd-designed gem in the San Gabriel Valley's crown is becoming the place again to get your kicks. Judd's buildings in Southern California were an important influence on Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan houses.

Covina Bowl. Destination, gathering point, icon, masterpiece of thin membrane construction. The Covina Bowl is all this and more. Built in 1955, it helped define and create the community of Covina and environs through the 1960s and 1970s. As a roadhouse, nightclub, 24-hour bowling alley and diner, the sprawling entertainment center continues to serve the community beneath its landmark neon sign. The venue's history, shared with passengers by long time staff members, offers an engaging glimpse into life along the Mother Road.

Monrovia AKA Bungalotopia. We will trace the history of this great city through its early architecture at the heart of its historic core, and in the context of the larger real estate boom of the 1880s which gripped the whole Southland.

This five hour tour will include a complimentary coffee and cookies stop in the early afternoon. We recommend bringing a sandwich from Philippe's or a bag lunch as well.

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles Tour Overview page

User's Guide to accompany the tour.

The second installment in Esotouric’s ongoing Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles architecture series is an ambitious and provocative bus and walking tour which sets out to provide a good overview of downtown Los Angeles in the beginning of the 21st century by tracing the neighborhoods’ roots and slow decline leading up to the current boom.

Downtown LA was depopulated fifty years ago by a series of decisions at the highest levels of local government. Now, in a seemingly overnight rebirth (actually ten+ years in the making), new residents are filling formerly commercial structures and new businesses are arriving. Where the old and new downtown meet, a thin red line runs, mapping out the desire lines of two sets of opposing forces. But the story is more complex and more interesting than the cartoon of Skid Row Crackhead versus Loft-Dwelling Yuppie, and this tour exists to put the many unique downtown communities into historical and cultural perspective.

Our tour begins in the corporate public spaces of Bunker Hill and Pershing Square, each the result of deliberate social engineering (the razing of old Bunker Hill; the elimination of green space that could be used to hide vice). We segue to the underappreciated yet extremely successful public spaces of the Historic Core and then to the emerging live/work community of The Old Bank District, where developer Tom Gilmore’s gentrification and the popular monthly Art Walk are bringing life to spaces which have been dead for decades. We’ll explore the fascinating history of the rag trade in Los Angeles, with a spin around the thriving Fashion District under the direction of Urban Adventures own Christine Silvestri . The tour concludes in the DIY loft spaces of the Arts District for a reception in the studio of celebrated downtown painter Emmeric Konrad.

Having studied under architecture critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1980s, tour host Richard Schave has taken it upon himself to correct his teacher’s gross oversight of downtown Los Angeles, relegated to a dismissive coda in his seminal Los Angeles guidebook Los Angeles: A Study of Four Ecologies.. Richard and his wife Kim Cooper work extensively with the history and lost cultures of downtown in their bus tours, in their work for Art Walk, on blogs including On Bunker Hill and 1947project, and through public lectures on the subject.

This tour has a significant walking component, down the stairs along Angels Flight, around Pershing Square, through several other pedestrian locations. It is broken up, but please be advised to be ready to stretch your legs.

Locations on the tour include:

Grand Central Market
Title Guarantee Building (including its landmark Hugo Ballin murals)
Angels Flight

Santee Alley

This tour will include refreshments in Emmeric's studio at the end of the tour. Bringing a sandwich or bag lunch along as well is recommended.

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles Tour Overview page

“I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original” -Reyner Banham, Architecture of Four Ecologies

This new Esotouric bus adventure begins downtown and works its way south through Vernon, Bell Gardens, Santa Fe Springs and Downey, and through the past two centuries, exploring some of L.A.'s seldom-seen gems. Turning the West Side-centric notion of an L.A. architecture tour on its head—just like Banham's book did for the historical monograph – the bus goes into areas not traditionally associated with the important, beautiful or significant, raising issues of preservation, adaptive reuse and the evolution of the city. The locations all speak to the power, mutability and reach of the Southern California Dream. Some of the tour stops are:

Pueblo del Rio (1942), the first African-American housing development in LA, is a fascinating public project designed by Paul Williams and Richard Neutra, among others. Its application of the International Style and mass-produced pre-fab methods to the needs of the growing Southern California population leaves room for considerable dialogue.

The Gage Mansion (1808). The oldest adobe structure in Los Angeles County, this fascinating home sits smack dab in the middle of a 65-year-old trailer park on the banks of the Rio Hondo River in Bell Gardens. Between the layers of context at this site is the history of migration and growth in the Southland, from Spanish land grants to the dust bowl to the vast waves of stucco suburbs.

The Clarke Estate (1919). A lost masterpiece by tilt-slab concrete architect Irving Gill, this Mission Revival-inspired dwelling features symbolic leaves pressed into the walls and feels like a time capsule from a simpler California.

The Downey Space Plant (1929-present). It began as airplane factory carved out of a castor bean field and grew to be the hub of North American Aerospace development, before being sold off in pieces in the early 2000s. Currently it's a motion picture sound stage. Is the only long-term solution for this awe-inspiring, 160-acre space a vertically-integrated condominium and retail development?

East Los Angeles Train Station (1932). A prominent location in the 1946 film "The Postman Always Rings Twice," it was built to deal with congestion and overcrowding in the existing downtown terminals. Currently a picturesque Mission-style ruin in the shadow of the wacky Citadel shopping center, will it rise again as the rail lines reassert themselves?

Johnie's Broiler (1958/2008). A cautionary tale about historic preservation, this beloved Downey diner with its landmark neon sign was illegally demolished by a renter who wanted to park use cars in its place. The site was barred from further commercial use due to public outcry, and is now being restored as a Bob's Big Boy.

No other city has so fascinated architecture critics and scholars of urban and cultural studies than L.A., that sprawling, self-referential zone of mystery and glamour. British writer Reyner Banham was the first to love Los Angeles for what she was, her ugliness as well as her beauty. In the early 1970s he abandoned his academic preconceptions to revel in this city of freeways, foothills, beaches and suburbs, built on mobility and flux by a series of invaders. Along the way, he discovered extraordinary spaces in neighborhoods that were often overlooked for being too remote, too industrial, or simply occupying invisible "flyover country" beneath the great L.A. freeways.

In this city on the edge of the western dream, nothing was like what came before. Status was no longer communicated through the construction of stone palaces that looked like they fought every step of the journey over the Rocky Mountains, but rather by freeway access and wacky drive-thrus, light, ventilation, organic design and a sensitivity to a built environment— commercial and architectural innovations which would have been unthinkable anywhere and anytime else.

Gone was the unified vision of a city, and yet there was a method to L.A.'s madness. What Banham saw was something far more complicated: behind this urban sprawl was a pattern, almost a language, which could not be understood through old modes of architectural and urban criticism, but which had to be viewed through the organic facts of its own ecologies.

Esotouric guides Richard Schave and Kim Cooper studied under Banham as undergraduates at UCSC, and both were deeply influenced by his work. In Fall 2007, we launched the "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles" architectural series in tribute to our late professor, who showed us our native Southern California through fresh eyes.

ABOUT REYNER BANHAM: Reyner Banham(1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic best known for "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age" (1960) and "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" (1971). Professor Banham taught at the University of London, SUNY Buffalo and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Chair of the Art History Department.