A PERSONAL JOURNAL, KEPT LARGELY TO RECORD REFERENCES TO WRITINGS, MUSIC, POLITICS, ECONOMICS, WORLD HAPPENINGS, PLAYS, FILMS, PAINTINGS, OBJECTS, BUILDINGS, SPORTING EVENTS, FOODS, WINES, PLACES AND/OR PEOPLE.
The Secret History of Los Angeles, An Urban Explorer’s Guide
It was a vision of California that I, for one, had rarely considered. Los Angeles was famously dubbed “a city without a past” by urban geographer Michael Dear a quarter-century ago. It’s an illusion that Hollywood has fostered: Thanks to the pervasiveness of film noir, even most Angelenos believe that their metropolis sprang from the desert some time around the 1940s. But L.A. was founded in 1781 by Spanish colonists, and it’s been through a string of colorful incarnations. Echo Mountain House was part of its first heyday, when SoCal, bathed in sunshine and filled with fruit groves, was promoted by railway companies as “America’s Italy” and Pasadena became a winning winter destination for rich Easterners. In 1900, the hotel burned to the ground, like most of the old Europhile resorts, but a little research revealed that L.A. is still littered with survivors from forgotten eras. So I decided to spend a week playing urban archaeologist, tracking down antique remains.
Pasadena’s 1908 Gamble House.
Photo: PIA RIVEROLA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Today, Pasadena is still filled with early 20th-century oddities such as the Gamble House, an Arts and Crafts confection from 1908, built by an heir of the Procter & Gamble company. Used as Doc’s home in 1985’s “Back to the Future,” the house is open for guided tours. Other landmarks exist in ghostly form. On the site of the late 19th-century Raymond Hotel, where the entire staff used to be shipped over from New England every season, I found the party still going at the original caretaker’s cottage, now a cozy restaurant called the Raymond 1886 that serves retro cocktails with its hamachi crudo. But the most complete immersion in the elegance of the era was the palatial Langham Huntington hotel. First built in 1907, it still feels like the Western version of Downton Abbey, with expansive gardens, patios serving high tea, ballrooms and antique redwood bridge across a pond. The nearby Huntington Library, meanwhile, remains a robber baron’s dream, a 1903 mansion filled with rare books and artworks.
“ Venice Beach began life in 1905 as a real-estate development, complete with gondolas and mock-Renaissance palazzos. ”
The idea of L.A. as a slice of Italy had its most literal and loopy expression by the Pacific. Few of the sun worshipers converging on Venice Beach today recall that it began life in 1905 as a theatrical real-estate development, complete with artificial canals, gondolas and mock-Renaissance palazzos. Today, eerie traces remain: I wandered a couple of blocks from the boardwalk to visit the last half dozen canals, whose traffic-free serenity still give them an otherworldly air. The more bohemian residents now decorate their bungalows with pink flamingos and, instead of gondolas, paddle about in pedal-driven swans. Back by the beachfront, meanwhile, you can wander the last of the old colonnades, where carved portraits of Italian nobles frown down on the skateboarders.
The canals of Venice Beach.
Photo: PIA RIVEROLA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
For even older relics, I pulled off the roaring 110 freeway in Montecito Heights to visit El Alisal, a rustic château open to visitors on weekends. Built from roughly 1897 to 1910 with stones salvaged from the nearby Arroyo Seco, it was the handiwork of a once-famous writer named Charles F. Lummis, a wildly eccentric Harvard buddy of Teddy Roosevelt. The mansion was fastidiously decorated with artifacts gathered by Lummis in a long career of promoting California’s Native American and Hispanic heritages, when he would shock Anglo Angelenos by wearing Mexican ponchos and Navajo jewelry. (Most of his collection is now housed in the Autry Museum of the American West.) His vision of L.A. as a decidedly non-Italian outpost would soon be echoed on the silver screen: In 1910, D.W. Griffith relocated his studio from New York to film the first movie ever shot in L.A., a silent Western “In Old California,” in a farming village called Hollywood.
The Bradbury Building, among the oldest commercial structures in downtown Los Angeles, dates back to 1893
Photo: PIA RIVEROLA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Another rich concentration of offbeat sites lies downtown. I stopped first at the Bradbury Building, an 1893 office block (also open to visitors) whose skylit interior soars like a modern cathedral, and whose wealth of ornate décor was featured in the climactic scenes of 1982’s “Blade Runner.” Today, it is matched for beauty by the many leftovers of the 1920s Jazz Age, when L.A. was booming and the commercial district was filled with glamorous hotels, bars and movie palaces. Downtown L.A. fell into sorry decay after World War II, but in recent years architects have realized that its bones—or its “architectural stock”—remain intact, with Beaux-Arts high rises from the first decades of the 20th century that can easily go unnoticed if you only keep your eyes fixed on the gritty (and often unlovely) street level. The renovations in the so-called Historic Core of downtown (see historiccore.bid for a map) have been led by stylish new hotels, which blend their history with contemporary design and exude an energy closer to nightclubs.
The Hoxton hotel, which opened last year in the 1924 L.A. Transit Authority’s building.
Photo: PIA RIVEROLA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
I whiled away hours bouncing from one thronged rooftop pool and bar to the next—the Ace, the NoMad, the Figueroa, the Hoxton and Soho Warehouse—sipping cocktails during oyster happy hours at dusk and taking photos of cinematic urban vistas. After dark, I explored such venerable institutions as Cole’s, L.A.’s oldest saloon (est. 1908) and among the originators of the beloved French Dip sandwich, and the multilevel Clifton’s Republic (est. 1931), with a restaurant in a faux-forest canopy and a speakeasy-style Polynesian tiki bar. Other nights, I delved into L.A.’s arsenal of silent movie palaces, newly revived, including the former United Artists Theater opened by Mary Pickford and Hollywood cohorts in 1927. Now the Theatre at Ace Hotel (and open to non-guests), its lavish interior, dripping with Gothic gilt, makes an amusing complement to of-the-moment acts like musician Kurt Vile and comedy duo Tim and Eric. Just as visually arresting is the Mayan theater around the corner, which also opened in 1927. Designed to evoke ancient Mesoamerica, it now hosts some classic L.A. events, including the cult Lucha VaVOOM, a mix of Mexican lucha libre and burlesque.
But old and new L.A. came together most seamlessly on my last night downtown, when I went to the Pacific Dining Car, a 24-hour steakhouse set in a train carriage, which first started serving in 1921. At first, when I sank into the plush velvet booth, I felt like a tuxedoed scion riding the rails to the Echo Mountain House. The atmosphere seemed heavy with old-school decorum. But then a group of guests strode in who were definitely not from the past: Marilyn Manson and his band. They were followed by a string of fashion models and actor Nicolas Cage. I ended up at the bar chatting with one of the Manson entourage, along with an amiable assortment of screenwriters, agents and musicians. “America’s Italy,” I thought, has come a long way.
THE NOSTALGIA FACTORY
For a quick tour through different eras of Los Angeles’s past, binge these seven films
Photo: Everett Collection
Long before “Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood,” filmmakers have been turning their lenses on the history of L.A. But be mindful: The depictions tend to be heavy on atmosphere and light on fact. 1800s: The dusty Spanish colonial Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles (aka L.A.) is the setting for the silent “Mark of Zorro” (1919), starring Douglas Fairbanks as the masked vigilante standing up for the oppressed—the start of an epic franchise.
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1920s: Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Cat’s Meow” (2001), pictured above, tackles one of the great scandals of L.A.’s raucous Jazz Age, the mysterious death of legendary Hollywood film producer Thomas Ince on the yacht of magnate William Randolph Hearst. At the heart of the film (and the scandal): a love triangle with silent film star Charlie Chaplin and Hearst’s consort Marion Davies. 1930s: Set in 1938, Roman Polanski’s haunting classic “Chinatown” (1974) has become the accepted popular vision of the water swindle that allowed L.A. to expand from an agricultural backwater to a major city. But, far from a docudrama, it is (very) loosely based on events related to the 1913 L.A. aqueduct and farmer resistance in the 1920s. 1940s: The stylish “Devil in a Blue Dress” (1995) reworks a Walter Mosley novel to capture L.A.’s simmering postwar racial tensions as amateur detective “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington) follows a murder trail around L.A. sites from Malibu to South Central and the Hollywood Hills.
Photo: Everett Collection
1950s: Based on a James Ellroy thriller, “LA Confidential” (1990), pictured above, set scenes at surviving sites like Boardner’s bar and Formosa Cafe, and invokes real-life incidents like the 1951 “Bloody Christmas” scandal, when drunken LAPD officers savagely beat jail inmates, mostly Mexican-American, after a holiday party. 1960s: “The Doors” (1991), Oliver Stone’s uneven biopic, lushly evokes Venice Beach hippie culture and features such classic music venues as the Whiskey a Go Go. 1970s: A delirious vision of ’70s porn industry, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” (1997) uses sun-splashed poolside locations and glamorous retro interiors. (For Dirk Diggler and his crew, the ’80s turn out to be way less fun.)
THE LOWDOWN // EXPLORING OLD LOS ANGELES
Staying There and Drinking There
The history of L.A. can be told through its hotels, which travelers can enjoy as entertainment complexes even if they don’t stay. The Europhile elegance of Gilded Age L.A. endures in Pasadena, where cucumber sandwiches can be enjoyed on Wedgewood porcelain every afternoon at the Langham Huntington Hotel (from $269 a night, langhamhotels.com/en/the-langham/pasadena), in art-filled chambers or landscaped gardens. In the once-desolate downtown, a list of historic renovations now reads like an “Architectural Digest” of Jazz Age Los Angeles. Six years ago, the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles led the way by turning a Spanish Gothic building from 1927 into a trendy urban hub, with a rooftop bar beneath a crenelated tower modeled on Segovia Cathedral (from $229 a night, acehotel.com/losangeles). The NoMad soon followed in a splendid former HQ of the Bank of Italy from 1923 (from $315 a night, thenomadhotel.com/los-angeles), while the storied Hotel Figueroa remodeled with riff on Spanish colonial style in a former YWCA from 1926 (from $299 a night, hotelfigueroa.com). And the renovation craze shows no sign of slowing: last year, the Hoxton opened in the 1924 LA Transit Authority’s Beaux-Arts building (from $179 a night, thehoxton.com/california/downtown-la/hotels) and the Soho Warehouse, a branch of the London club, opened in a century-old Arts District warehouse, complete with graffiti on interior walls, exposed industrial fittings and 48 bedrooms where non-members can stay (from $190 a night, sohowarehouse.com/hotel).
The Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel is slated to open this summer next door to the Hoxton in a renovated private club from the Prohibition era (from $365 a night, properhotel.com/hotels/downtown-la). It will complement the Santa Monica Proper Hotel, which opened last year with a wave-like contemporary design that envelopes the Professional Building from the 1920s (from $450, properhotel.com/hotels/santa-monica).
Not to be outdone, classic historic hotels elsewhere in Los Angeles are sprucing themselves up. The Hollywood Roosevelt dates from 1927 (and hosted the first Academy Awards two years later); it now has a speakeasy-style cocktail lounge, the Spare Room hidden on the mezzanine with its own antique wooden bowling lanes. Meanwhile, the poolside bungalows in the rose-pink Beverly Hills Hotel also re-opened after a renovation last year; they date from 1912 and were beloved by stars like Charlie Chaplin (from $645 a night, dorchestercollection.com/en/los-angeles/the-beverly-hills-hotel/legendary-bungalows).
Eating There
Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” used the 101-year-old Musso & Frank Grill as a set location, which has sent many fans to its red-leather banquettes (6667 Hollywood Blvd., mussoandfrank.com). Just as atmospheric (and a little over a decade older, dating to 1908) is the downtown shrine Cole’s, L.A.’s oldest continuously operating saloon (118 E. 6th St., colesfrenchdip.com). The multi-level Clifton’s Republic from 1931 is like a Coney Island for drinkers (648 S. Broadway, theneverlands.com/cliftons-republic).The Pacific Dining Car has been serving steaks in an elegant railroad carriage since 1921 (1310 W. 6th St., pacificdiningcar.com). Meanwhile near Glendale, the family-style 1922 Scottish roadside pub in a whimsical Tudor-style building, Tam O’Shanter, lured Walt Disney and his “Imagineers” to dine in its wood-paneled, neo-Hibernian halls (2980 Los Feliz Blvd., lawrysonline.com/tam-o-shanter).
Corrections & Amplifications The Downtown L.A. Proper Hotel is slated to open this summer. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the hotel will open this spring. (March 3, 2020)
1920s: Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Cat’s Meow” (2001), pictured above, tackles one of the great scandals of L.A.’s raucous Jazz Age, the mysterious death of legendary Hollywood film producer Thomas Ince on the yacht of magnate William Randolph Hearst. At the heart of the film (and the scandal): a love triangle with silent film star Charlie Chaplin and Hearst’s consort Marion Davies.
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