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Silicon Alleys Tours L.A.'s Underbelly

Gary Singh reports on his trip through the seedy haunts of the City of Angels

by Gary Singh on Jul 31, 2009
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LEONARD COHEN once said of the great poet Federico García Lorca: “He was the first poet who really touched me. ... The universe he revealed and the lands he inhabited seemed very familiar. I think that’s what you look for when you read poetry; you look for someone to illuminate a landscape that you thought you alone walked on.”

Such was also the case when Charles Bukowski—everyone’s favorite boozing laureate of lowlife—first discovered John Fante, who wrote about the dive bars, the cheap hotels, the 15-cent diners and the pawnshops of old Los Angeles. Since Fante’s oeuvre illuminates the underbelly of ’30s Los Angeles in much the same way that someone like James Joyce brings to life the locality of Dublin, Ireland, I just had to escape last weekend and ride along with the Esotouric tour company’s “John Fante: Dreams of Bunker Hill” bus tour of that long-gone neighborhood, following in the footsteps of Fante himself—the godfather of literary Los Angeles.

So there we were: skid row, downtown L.A., specifically the corner of Fifth and Los Angeles streets. As the tour bus rolled up to the side of King Eddy’s Saloon, a drunk wandered by and urinated on the side of the building, directly in front of us—in broad daylight. Tour guide Richard Schave instructed us to at least wait until the guy was finished before we got off the bus, so we did.

Eddy’s is the place in John Fante’s book Ask the Dust where his alter ego, Arturo Bandini, goes to squander his first royalty check on the B-girls. Today, the dive is infamous and people show up all the time inquiring about Fante and even Bukowski, who also apparently got hammered at the joint. The bar was even featured on the History Channel’s Cities of the Underworld program, with Schave himself hosting the sequence.

Bunker Hill was once a wealthy community of Victorian mansions and hilly estates where the affluent lived and played—one of the grandest districts in all of L.A., circa 1890. But during the first few decades of the 20th century, landlords slowly began to subdivide the houses, and the area continued to degenerate during the post-Depression era, which is when Fante showed up.

Once the late ’50s came around, Bunker Hill had become a carbuncle on downtown, so the largest eminent-domain seizure in U.S. history began to take place when the Redevelopment Agency of downtown L.A. swiped the land from its 9,000 residents and subsequently spent five years destroying it all. Now, it is populated mostly by skyscrapers. Fante’s fiction accurately describes what this neighborhood used to look like before the “federal bulldozers” rolled in.

A wide variety of folks attended the bus tour, including Fante fans, aspiring writers and even people who grew up on Bunker Hill in the ’50s but hadn’t explored it recently. Present on the tour were Fante’s son Dan and daughter Vickie, both of whom told poignant stories. Dan is an established novelist, playwright and poet in his own right, with several confessional-from-the-gutter books translated into several languages. He also has a tattoo on his right forearm, dedicated to his late brother, Nick, which says, simply: NICK FANTE. DEAD FROM ALCOHOL, 1-31-42 TO 2-21-97.

The bus journey also took us by several former sites of interesting Bunker Hill buildings that are now empty parking lots (much like downtown San Jose), with Schave explaining how classic public spaces in downtown L.A. are constantly being destroyed by the Redevelopment Agency in favor of hideous projects that just don’t work, like Pershing Square, and that the tour was equally about the preservation of public spaces in general, with Fante’s characters leading the way. Yeah!

Schave himself spent a few years at UC–Santa Cruz, where he studied with famed British architecture critic Reyner Banham. According to Schave, Banham often took him on impromptu drives through industrial wasteland neighborhoods right here in San Jose, which inspired him to create his own tours down south.

Geez. I thought I was the only one.



by Gary Singh on Jul 31, 2009
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