TBA
Los Angeles Historic Core
A walking tour of the City of Los Angeles' historic core, by the Los Angeles Conservancy.
Essentially, it's a leisurely morning jaunt through a couple blocks of downtown LA centered around Pershing Square, where you go through some of the older, more important buildings in Los Angeles' development from the 1890s to present. Sophia and Joycelyn are big fans of this thing, so they managed to drag a bunch of us to go with them this time around.
Pershing Square, the Biltmore Hotel, Pacific Mutual Building (including the inside, which is very elegant) are the first few stops on the tour, emphasizing the 1890s and early 1900s, particularly with the internal construction, pneumatic mail systems, and cool things like that. The Mayflower Hotel (Hilton Checkers), Southern California Edison Building, and the Los Angeles Central Library continue things, although the library gets only superficial coverage (since the library does their own tours). The SoCal Edison Building is kinda cool, but we had to absorb it a bit too quickly-- plus the distraction of the US Bank Tower and Title Guarantee and Trust Building and the story of their exchange of airspace permission with the library made it hard to concentrate.
Getting further along to the Subway Terminal Building and the Broadway Department Store (Junipero Serra State Office Building) along with some of the other buildings and spires along the way seemed less impressive. I'm not quite sure why, but the fact that we couldn't see as much of the insides might have had something to do with it. Angels Flight and Grand Central Market are adjacent; since I've seen both of those before they weren't nearly as interesting. The bathroom break at Grand Central Market with the very large group we had on the tour also didn't help things stay focused.
We had some pointers with regard to the elevated section of Grand Avenue before walking over to the Million Dollar Theater and then into the Bradbury Building. The Bradbury Building, as featured in Blade Runner, is the highlight of the trip for people like me whose tastes aren't nearly as appreciative of early 1900s architecture. It's got a strange appeal of old-world wrought iron and stained wood with the gothic high ceilings-- only glass instead of stone-- and it just works. A park to Grandma Mason, one of Los Angeles' more prominent freed slaves, exists out back.
We sucummbed to lunch at Grand Central Market. Pearl and Simon had some very large tacos while I had a ridiculous chicken dish. I forget what everyone else had.
Hung out with Pearl most of the rest of the day-- the 2 hour car wash and interior shampoo for Pearl's Volvo were a bit crazy, met up with Julie to go shopping at Beverly Center (got dragged into the L'Oreal store by Pearl and Julie after doing my shopping and ended up looking at 16 different shades of tan makeup whose purpose only made vague sense to me)... throw in a trip to Volcano Tea for a snack and then dinner at The Counter (mmmmmmmmmmm good!). Somehow Dan got lost and was an hour late despite the fact that he was online at Volcano Tea and could have pulled up a map, plus I texted him precise directions. Pearl almost starved to death as we waited for him, and fortunately for Dan, was too weak from hunger to stab him to death with her fork when he finally arrived. =ق
Finished the day off partying with some of the grad students-- Travis' going-away party at Irish Times.
