For meeting planners interested in the “other side” of downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood, perhaps no better adventures exist than the bus tours organized by Esotouric, a company specializing in neglected neighborhoods, fringe occult sites, noir literary history, and the dark urban underbelly of the “City of Angels.”
Among Esotouric’s offerings is Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles: In A Lonely Place, which takes riders through specific downtown locales that appeared in Chandler’s fiction.
Another twisted romp, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles: The Many Downtowns, explores the entire history of downtown’s architectural degeneration and urban decay in the mid-20th century straight up to its current turnaround, all based on the British architecture critic’s classic work, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State: California’s Spiritual Landscape, leads the Visionary Hollywood tour, in which riders are taken to various sites of fringe spirituality, such as The Aetherius Society, a bizarre center for cosmic consciousness and healing founded by UFO “contactee” Dr. George King in the 1950s.
Irregularly scheduled and normally about $58 per seat, Esotouric’s tours are led by crackpot historians, eclectic literati and beautifully mawkish fans of L.A.’s underbelly. The tours have garnered a wide variety of national press coverage, and private tours for meeting planners and their groups are always available.
“The tours are a good match for a corporate group that has high expectations for the level of entertainment they’re provided,” explains Kim Cooper, one of Esotouric’s founders. “Our most successful private tours have been one with visiting advertising executives and a mixer at a downtown law firm for senior partners, new hires and summer interns. These groups were composed of bright people who appreciated the opportunity to see a side of Los Angeles that even the natives had not seen before, both neighborhoods that are off the beaten path and a subject matter that challenged their expectations for what a guided bus tour could be.”
Davis’ first Visionary Hollywood tour sold out and attracted a wide variety of people.
“I believe that all cities become more alive and more engaging when you start exploring the hidden pockets of history and architecture,” Davis says. “Not just the hot new bars or clothing stores, but the churches and art galleries and party houses where the city of the past becomes the city of now.”
For More Info
Esotouric 323.223.2767 www.esotouric.com
