On Saturday, March 20, my fellow Visionary Maja D’Aoust, “White Witch of Los Angeles,” led Esotouric’s “Maja’s Mysteries: Rapture & Release” bus tour. Over a period of four hours, we visited a number of locations which I would describe as “psychic hot spots.” So, what is a psychic hot spot? This has to be my definition because, to my knowledge, no one else has used this nomenclature. Let me describe some of my personal hot spots. When I get off the subway at Lenox and 135th Street in Harlem, I feel an incredible surge of energy rise from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. At the Capitoline Museum in Rome, I have discovered an 1800-year-old marble bust that could be my portrait. On my only trip to the souk in Fez, Morocco, it all looked familiar. I knew that I had been there before. After discussing these experiences with Maja, she concurred with my perceptions.       

Following Maja to a number of locations, mostly around Hollywood, I knew that I was moving in and out of psychic energy fields. On the surface, each one appeared to be a conventional Los Angeles location; however, I knew that there was something special to be explored at each location. Here is a recap of the highlights from my point of view.

Vedanta Society (1946 Vedanta Place, Hollywood, 90068)
Perched above the Hollywood Freeway, one is transported into the world of a sanctified Eastern religion with the peace and quiet that it embodies. “Vedanta teaches that man’s real nature is divine, that the true object of human life is to unfold and manifest this divinity, and that truth is universal.” Here one finds a temple, a convent, a monastery and an outstanding bookstore devoted to Eastern religions.

The Aetherius Society (6202 Afton Place, Los Angeles, 90028) 
“The Cosmic Teachings of The Aetherius Society were given by Masters from Beyond this Earth, operating mainly within our own Solar System and speaking through yoga Master Dr. George King.” We saw a video projection of Dr. King taking us on a terrestrial journey. Unfortunately, I slept through most of it. This recalled a similar somnambulist experience when I was in a graduate school art history seminar. When the lights came on, my professor pounded the table yelling  “Mr. Schoener we don’t sleep in my classes.” I should have apologized to our hosts, but was too embarrassed. 

The finale was a visit to the Parsonage of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Angelus Temple (1801 Park Avenue, Los Angeles, 90026). Our guide, Jackie Muller, never actually met Sister Aimee, but she provided a knowledgeable and impassioned tour of her private quarters. Hundreds of thousands of people in thirty countries became disciples of Sister Aimee’s Four Square Gospel evangelism. The first years of her ministry were spent in tents, tabernacles and auditoriums. Sister McPherson felt led by  God to build a permanent headquarters in  Los Angeles. The Angelus Temple, adjacent to the parsonage,  opened on January 1, 1923. Together, they serve as monuments to the memory of this extraordinary person. 

Is Los Angeles special because of its  psychic hot spots? I would definitely say so.

Illustration: Sister Aimee’s personal bathroom in the parsonage, photo: Kim Cooper

As a new LA resident (I landed here on January 15, 2010), I have been anxious to learn about the downtown that I hardly knew  existed.  Over the years, I have visited LA on a number of occasions and developed an impression of it as a sprawling constellation of suburbs linked by freeways.

It was only on my last visit two years ago that I learned that there was a real “Downtown LA.” It was a blurred memory of some 1920s multistory buildings lining Broadway and the modern monstrosities commanding Bunker Hill. Over the last six weeks, I would spend either Saturday or Sunday driving around downtown trying to make sense out of it. Much to my delight, I discovered that there was a real urban core configured around a rectangular street grid that was periodically punctuated by an expressway. When I felt safe shifting my vision to the sidewalk, I could see numerous pedestrians representing visible street life, but I could not make any sense out of it.

Today, I went on the Esotouric bus tour of downtown LA conducted by Richard Schave with assistance from Kim Cooper.

Having a passion for cities, this was an incredible experience for me. I was exposed to geography, architectural history, social and ethnic history, some local legends plus an insight into the loft/art community. All of this was inescapably viewed through a
current prism evaluating the impacts of “urban renewal” in the 1950s and 1960s and today’s loft gentrification. Richard exposed his well informed passions and prejudices; they were cogent and convincing. When appropriate. he called on members of the tour with specialized knowledge of certain areas to speak about them.

For me, the highlight was the Grand Central Market. I had no idea that such a viable urban commercial environment existed anywhere in LA. The Mercantile Arcade stretching from Broadway to Spring Street epitomizes the dilemma confronting future
developments downtown. Broadway and the Mercantile Arcade are viable segments of a Mexican American commercial district being threatened by loft gentrification. The Mercantile Arcade lends itself to becoming a replica of Boston’s highly successful Faneuil Hall Market. If this occurs, what happens to the Mexican American merchants?

On the tour, I made some comparisons with SOHO in New York. Primarily the remnants of a Civil War era industrial area, I have witnessed SOHO’s evolution over the last forty years from artists’ living/work space into a kind of Disneyland with it own Bloomingdales attracting “bridge and tunnel” people as well as tourists from around the world. I shared a fourth floor walkup space in a building at 26 Greene Street that had been owned by an Italian family for several generations. The building was sold and modernized. The ground floor is now the showroom for a Swiss office furniture manufacturer. The stairs remain as a relic of the past complemented by an elevator serving four floors of modernized lofts with price tags in the millions.

This demonstrates the potential danger of converting industrial space into artists’ space and then into residential lofts. The gritty character of the neighborhood which appealed to the artists can be transformed into expensive gentrified real estate devoid of personality. This danger lurks on many street corners in Downtown LA.

Having some previous experience organizing bus tours in Cincinnati, London, New York and Paris, I would give today’s tour four stars. Esotouric offers other tours; I hope to take as many as I can.

Cultural historian, author and exhibition originator, Allon Schoener has received international acclaim for his books and exhibitions. Of his THE ITALIAN AMERICANS, published by Macmillan in the United States and Rizzoli in Italy, John Gross wrote in the International Herald Tribune, “The pictures, inevitably predominate. Indeed, it is hard to see how anything short of a literary masterpiece could compare in impact with the succession of images that confront the reader.” Reviewing the exhibition based on that book, Gay Talese said in The New York Times, “While. . .the 200-picture exhibition draws its luster from the famous faces of some of the immigrants’ offspring . . . it suggests its strength through the portraits of the unheralded men and women who were Italy’s ‘boat people,’ the risk takers who endured the hardships, the insults and the reversals understood by all desperate travelers from foreign countries.”

In 1969 his HARLEM ON MY MIND: CULTURAL CAPITAL OF BLACK AMERICA at The Metropolitan Museum of Art transformed museums in the United States and around the world. It was the first time that the culture of a minority group had been dignified with a major exhibition in one of the world’s leading art museums. Needless to say, the exhibition was controversial. Today, it is considered a ground-breaking landmark. Of the book (twice reprinted) that served as a catalogue of the exhibition, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Program at Harvard University, said, “One of the richest and most comprehensive records of the history of the African-American in the twentieth century.”

Always an innovator, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Schoener created the first regularly broadcast television program produced by an American art museum. His 1966 “Lower East Side: Portal to American Life” exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York initiated the “blockbuster” era. For weeks, people were lined up from the museum door on Fifth Avenue along 92nd Street to Madison Avenue. Utilizing huge phtoto blow ups, films and sound, the exhibition captivated New York audiences with its portrayal of immigrant life in New York at the beginning of the 20th century. At the time, The Jewish Museum was New York’s leading avant-garde art museum. The exhibition drew praise from the grandparents, parents and children who saw their immigrant lives portrayed on the walls of the former Warburg family mansion on Fifth Avenue. Artists and intellectuals embraced its originality, its message and its modes of presentation.