Los Angeles Underground: Sleuthing Tunnels Lost & Found On-demand Webinar
Our deep Los Angeles history videos are now available on a subscription streaming channel, with all you can watch by the month or the year. To learn more and see everything on the channel, click here.
If you’d like to subscribe and watch this webinar first, you’ll find it here.
Your hosts Kim Cooper and Richard Schave have been exploring L.A.’s underground, on foot and through archival research, for many years.
Kim was a member of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society, which organized unsanctioned group incursions into streetcar tunnels and through the sanitary sewer system off the Los Angeles River. Since founding Esotouric in 2007, Kim and Richard have explored the basement service tunnels beneath historic Downtown hotels like the Barclay and King Edward, and have visited the legendary Subway Terminal Building basement to document the time capsule Pacific Electric station and the capped tunnel mouth.
In this webinar, you’ll slip beneath the city streets for an immersive survey of some notable small- and large-scale tunnel systems, learn their history and mythology and get to know the engineers, architects and amateur human moles who carved these secluded spaces out of the earth.
We’ll explore the evolving uses of privately owned service tunnels, ghost signs and graffiti left behind by departed Angelenos, the formation of mineral stalactites and stalagmites, dangerous illegal excavations, intriguing rumors of lost tunnels, peculiar discoveries and legendary hordes of gold. And we’ll talk about how these unique spaces could be repurposed for public use, and how you can virtually visit one historic service tunnel today.
This webinar is an illustrated lecture packed with original research, rare photos and archival material that will illuminate the mysterious tunnels beneath Los Angeles. 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.
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.
