In the late 1960s, after the Community Redevelopment Agency bought up all the boarding houses, hotels, shops and taverns, displaced 9000 people and brought in the bulldozers, it seemed like the end for Bunker Hill, the Victorian neighborhood above Downtown. But a funny thing happened, as the proposed redevelopment stalled and new ideas about adaptive reuse, historic preservation, environmentalism and tenants rights took root: people who never visited old Bunker Hill began to study, celebrate and explore it–virtually–through the thousands of photos, film clips, stories and paintings that survive. Bunker Hill might be dead, but its ghosts are active and eager to meet you.

Join Esotouric and Bunker Hill historian Nathan Marsak for an immersive time travel trip onto modern Bunker Hill, to explore the lost neighborhood and how it grew, with stops to memorialize iconic landmarks and fascinating personalities, and its double life as a favorite film noir location. Then once you’ve fallen in love with the lively and lovely old neighborhood, we’ll break your heart with how local and Federal officials conspired to knock it all down, and the lessons this failed redevelopment scheme can teach Angelenos of today. Plus, we’ll explore the new Bunker Hill’s best buildings and public spaces, an open-air Museum of Modernism, featuring remarkable examples of Late Moderne, New Formalist, Postmodernism and more, and revisit some notorious crime scenes from the past.

If that sounds like an unusually rich and layered walking tour, that’s because it is! Our guest host Nathan Marsak is the author of three very different books about Bunker Hill–Bunker Hill Los Angeles, Bunker Noir! and Marsak’s Guide to Bunker Hill–and this tour includes elements of all of them. You’ll have a chance to buy copies and get them autographed after the tour.