The 6th-Annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar featuring L.A. Noire architecture tour & virtual Bunker Hill excursion

Los Angeles history comes alive at the 6th-annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar. Organized by L.A. as Subject and presented by the USC Libraries, the annual event celebrates the diversity of Southern California’s history. For scholarly researchers, journalists, history buffs, and those simply interested in exploring the stories of Los Angeles, discovery awaits everyone at the Archives Bazaar. This event is free and open to the public.

The Archives Bazaar draws its strength from the breadth and variety of its participants’ collections. Large institutions such as the Autry National Center of the American West and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will be represented at the bazaar along with smaller organizations and private collections whose materials fill the gaps left in the city’s official history. Other participating organizations include the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the California African American Museum, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, and the Japanese American National Museum. In all, more than 70 archives are expected to be represented. The USC Libraries serve as the host institution for L.A. as Subject, an alliance of libraries, museums, and other archival and cultural organizations. The relationship complements the USC libraries’ strong Regional History Collection and is a natural outgrowth of the libraries’ efforts to preserve and expand access to the primary sources of L.A. history.

Numerous LAVA Visionaries will be on hand representing local history organizations, including Kim Cooper & Richard Schave of Esotouric, and Joan Renner of the Los Angeles Police Historical Society.

Schedule of Esotouric table programs

11:00am – 12:00pm – Using vintage photographs and film stills, Bunker Hill’s native son Gordon Pattison leads a virtual walking tour of the lost neighborhood of his childhood, including the two iconic Victorian mansions owned by his family, The Salt Box and The Castle, which were the last two homes left standing before the hill was cleared. Bunker Hill is gone, but it lives on in the memories of the few remaining Angelenos who loved it and lived it. Join us to learn just how special this community was, straight from the heart of a boy who knew it well. 

1:00pm – 2:30pm – As a follow up to their sold-out LAVA walking tour The Flâneur & The City: Downtown Los Angeles in the age of digital reproduction, architectural historians Nathan Marsak and Richard Schave will be demonstrating the new video game L.A. Noire and taking visitors on a live journey through the downtown cityscape that has been digitally re-created in the game. Using rare vintage photographs, postcards and film clips and stills for comparison, they’ll explore how Rockstar/Team Bondi’s simulacrum of 1947 downtown Los Angeles holds up, where and how it succeeds and fails —  the game developers failed to build L.A.’s most iconic lost neighborhood, Bunker Hill — and why you should care. Featured locations include the Spring Arcade, a 1923 reproduction of London’s iconic Burlington Arcade (1819), the Barclay Hotel (whose halls and color palate have been borrowed for various other places within the game), Clifton’s Brookdale, Angels Flight, and various historic sites which no longer remain, but which “live again” in one of the most ambitious video games ever released. Plus, see a side-by-side comparison of the game’s virtual recreation of 1947 L.A. and the recently unearthed circa 1949 Columbia Pictures b-roll footage which has made quite a splash in the L.A. history community. Expose yourself to the review that L.A. Noires publisher didn’t want you to read. Nathan Marsak’s April blog post at 1947project previewing the game by criticizing its architectural accuracy has been viewed by nearly 10,000 people, was widely discussed on game sites and history blogs and resulted in multiple requests from the game’s publisher that it be removed from the internet. It remains the top search engine hit for “L.A. Noire accuracy.”

Also featured at the Esotouric table, a raffle for free tickets for upcoming Esotouric bus adventures and a slide show of newly-discovered color images of Downtown’s Main Street and Skid Row from the Union Rescue Mission’s 1949 short film “Of Scrap and Steel,” which is getting its first screening in fifty years on the roof of the URM on Thursday, October 20, with an introduction by Nathan Marsak and Richard Schave. The screening is free, but reservations are required from LAVA – The Los Angeles Visionaries Association.