Welcome to Esotouric's Deep Los Angeles History Channel

We’re so glad you’ve found our little corner of the web, where it’s all Los Angeles lore, all the time. Video topics include true crime, literature, landmarks, cemeteries, legacy businesses, historic preservation, crafting, neon signs, infrastructure, photography and the movies. Scroll down for the full catalogue.

We’re your L.A. obsessed hosts, Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric, native Angeleno tour guides, preservationists, mystery novelists, guidebook authors, map makers and bloggers. If you’ve got 11 minutes, you can get to know us by watching Nick Coles’ award-winning short documentary, True Love / True Crime on An American Bus. And we’ve got a regular Substack newsletter packed with historic preservation and public corruption news here.

Whether you’re a native in love with this unlikely city at world’s end, or if you’re new in town and wonder what all the fuss is about, these 2-to-3 hour webinars are guaranteed to reveal the secret nets that hold Los Angeles together and where you fit in. Each one is an immersive time travel trip illustrated with photos drawn from special collections libraries and archives, many of them unpublished, and featuring original research insights you won’t find anywhere else.

You can sign up for one month of unlimited streaming video for $50, or a full year for $100. New for the 2023 holiday season: we’re adding the option to rent single webinars to stream, so if you don’t see the webinar you want to watch on our Gumroad channel yet, send us a message and we’ll add it for you! When you stream, subscribe, or gift a subscription, you’ll directly support the advocacy work we do every day, to tell the stories of places that matter, designate new landmarks, assist and amplify grassroots preservation campaigns and call out the corruption that hurts the city we love. We also offer souvenirs you can hold in your hands, and gift certificates good on Esotouric tours.

DEEP LOS ANGELES HISTORY VIDEOS

Read the descriptions without subscribing here, or click any title below to watch.

TRUE CRIME: Black Dahlia Days • Hotel Cecil • Sunset Boulevard • The West Side • 13 Uncanny Crimes & Mysteries • 1910 L.A. Times Bombing with Det. Mike Digby

BOOKS & THE MOVIES: Raymond Chandler • Charles Bukowski • Birth of Noir • John Fante’s Bunker Hill • John Bengtson's Silent Echoes in Westlake

LOS ANGELES: The Bradbury Building • The Dutch Chocolate Shop • Tunnels • Bunker Hill • Grand Central Market • Angels Flight Railway • Programmatic Architecture • Cafeterias • Pershing Square • George Mann’s 3-D Photos • Crawford’s Markets • Architecture of Death • Historic Preservation 1900s-1980s • Paul R. Williams, Architect • Saving South L.A. Landmarks • Storybook Architecture • Downtown Treasure Hunt • Wilshire Boulevard • Preserving Art Deco • Downtown Artists • Fourth & Main • Llano del Rio Desert Utopian Colony • Victorian Relics • Elysian Park • Making Miniature Landmarks • Vintage Streetlights • Neon Signs • Freeways • Boyle Heights • Rancho Los Amigos Poor Farm

ROAD TRIPPING: Visits with Preservation Pals in the Ohio River Valley