The Barclay Hotel is, more or less, right in the navel area of the dark underbelly of downtown Los Angeles.The Hotel Cecil has become famous in the last few years, reaching a peak in 2021 with the Netflix mini-series The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. However the Barclay has just as dark a history as the Cecil,…

Amongst Los Angeles hotels the Hotel Cecil holds a unique place. It’s a marquee name that not only a lot of Angelenos know, but also many visitors too. It’s been the subject of numerous documentaries, articles and, even, a TV horror series, yet you can’t actually rent a room there (at time of publication). In…

By the 2000′s the Los Angeles River had become little more than a joke in the city to which it gave its name. used only as a post-apocalyptic location for action movies and as a punchline for late-night chat show hosts. Despite the fact that many of Los Angeles’ inhabitants probably still don’t even know of…

The Ambassador Hotel is one of Los Angeles’ most famous hotels, which is no mean feat in a city which boasts the Beverly Wilshire, the Biltmore, the Chateau Marmont and countless other famous – and infamous – establishments. The Ambassador’s fame principally comes from its reputation as a place of entertainment and glamor from it’s opening…

Los Angeles Union Station is to LA what Grand Central Station is to New York. It’s our major rail terminus, designed and built to reflect the history and feel of the city back at us as we pass through. It opened in May 1939 with much fanfare, ironically just as the US was falling out of…

Did Los Angeles have streetcars guests often ask us on tours, whenever the subject comes up. Many visitors, and even a few Angelenos, don’t even know that we have a Metro rail system, they assume that “everyone drives in LA”. So it comes as a shock to them to learn that in the 1920’s we…

For Women’s History Month I want to look at someone from the earliest years of Los Angeles, Toypurina. In many cultures and countries around the world there are legendary historical women, leaders who rallied their people to fight foreign invaders. Examples include Joan of Arc in fifteenth century France, who emerged from a humble background…

America is almost unique among developed countries for its ban on alcohol during the 1920’s, known as ‘Prohibition’. Although it’s now synonymous with the corruption and organized crime that it spawned, at the time it was intended to address the harm inflicted on society by excessive consumption of alcohol. This is of particular interest at…

The South Park neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles is undergoing enormous change at the moment, as new apartment and condominium blocks sprout upwards and older buildings (such as the beautiful Herald Examiner Building and the Commercial Exchange Building) are renovated and repurposed, often as lofts or ‘creative’ offices. The crypto.com Arena and the many restaurants,…

With this month marking the date of the Lunar New Year (as celebrated in China and much of Asia) we wanted to take a look at the birth of Chinese-American culture in Los Angeles and, specifically, the history of LA’s Chinatown. The oldest surviving Chinese building in Los Angeles is the Garnier Building (not to…

In honor of Black History Month we’re remembering an all time Los Angeles legend, Bridget ‘Biddy’ Mason. An African American woman who was born in the old South, Biddy was brought to Los Angeles in the 1850’s (much against her will), only to become a free woman, and then a property developer and much beloved…

There is something particularly LA about Film Noir. In the same way that the novels of Charles Dickens recreate the feel of Victorian London, Film Noir captures the aesthetic of 1940’s Los Angeles. The city’s varied demeanor (from sunny, beautiful, beaches to downtown concrete jungle) was the perfect foil for these dark stories, as the paranoid protagonist falls into a hellish labyrinth of his own making, lured…

People from the Spanish-speaking countries of Spain, Central and South America have had an enormous impact on Los Angeles. Which isn’t at all surprising when you consider nearly fifty per cent of the population of Los Angeles today has a Hispanic background. In fact Los Angeles County’s five million people of Hispanic descent works out…

Los Angeles has a lot of fascinating history – many great things have happened here – but, then again, a lot of VERY bad things have taken place here too and one of the things we strongly believe in at The Real Los Angeles Tours is talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly.…

This week Musso & Frank Grill announced that they are reopening on May 10, for Mother’s Day celebrations, and having originally opened up just as the Spanish Flu pandemic was finally petering out in 1919, it seems hugely appropriate that this venerable and much loved institution should be one of the first to reopen as…

It’s hard to think about anything other than Coronavirus or Covid-19 right now. It’s taken over the news cycle and our lives. Los Angeles is almost entirely shut down – schools, movie theaters, restaurants, bars and most businesses (including The Real Los Angeles Tours). Most of us have never experienced anything like it before. Life…