History of horror
Esotouric shows visitors LA’s dark side
By Carl Kozlowski 06/10/2010
In three years of offering unusual tours of the Los Angeles area with her husband Richard Schave, Esotouric co-founder Kim Cooper has explored the infamous Black Dahlia murder case, spotlighted an array of Pasadena's bizarre crimes and deaths and led tourists along the back alleys and through the bars haunted by the famously debauched poet and author Charles Bukowski.
But this Saturday's “Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice” tour might just be the strangest one yet.
“This is a really unusual one in that we’ve decided to work it as a double bill, like two card decks shuffled together,” explains Cooper. “Hotel Horrors is one of our crime tours, so we’re looking at our interesting old hotels and the locations that are still there and where people can still stay the night or even live there. The Cecil, Hayward, Barclay and Alexandria hotels are all part of it. And the Cecil is the only hotel where two known serial killers have lived in LA.”
Indeed, the Cecil served as home base for the notorious Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, and the lesser-known Jack Unterweger of Austria. Yet despite his being relatively less famous, Unterweger “was the kind of guy who talked his way out of prison by becoming friends with American intelligentsia,” as Cooper explains it. He was a writer of some renown who convinced major Austrian figures to defend him and get him released from prison there, only to come to LA to do research on hookers on skid row before he wound up killing some of his subjects.
The other half of the tour consists of one of Esotouric’s patented “social history” tours, where the dynamic duo traverses Los Angeles neighborhoods that have been almost completely transformed by time and shines light on the dark moments of their pasts. While she offers tours in areas from Sierra Madre to Downey, and Vernon to Santa Fe Springs, the downtown tour is particularly juicy as it was long a home for, as Cooper states, “sex, drugs, drinking, con artists and craziness.
“This has been like this forever. My granddad is 98 and remembers a guy named Indian Joe, on Sundays when he was 15, who would sell elixirs — cures for STDs — in the doorway of a store,” says Cooper. “My grandfather would listen to him and be fascinated. There were bar girls there to hustle you out of your money, but they would get tricked for weak drinks anyway. Plus, really cool stuff, like freak shows and a wax museum that displayed a human mummy for years without realizing what he was: an Old West gunslinger. There’s a lot of wild, forgotten history out there.”
Esotouric’s “Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice” tour is from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, departing from Cafe Metropol, 923 E. Third St. (at Third Street and Santa Fe Avenue in downtown Los Angeles). Tickets are $58. For reservations, call (213) 915-8687 or visit esotouric.com/mainhotel.
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