…and beyond! The Crime Bus now sails under the Esotouric flag, offering bus adventures into the secret heart of Los Angeles. Kindly visit our new site for the scoop on exciting new tours like James Ellroy Digs LA, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, John Fante’s Dreams of Bunker Hill, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice.
They are under the asphalt of most of the central city area. About two years ago, I picked a few hundred cobblestones when they were tearing up the streets downtown, but the city has since stopped giving them away and either re-use them or warehouse them for later use. I have several hundred more from back east, where municipalities just give them away or toss them. I don’t like the cobblestones laid after the 1880s, they set them in asphalt goo, and they are still covered with them….the earlier cobbles were sett in sand and are much nicer. A little muriatic acid (use with MUCH care), a hammer & chisel, and a mechanical sanding device will clean the asphalt off pretty well. As for SUVs tearing them up, both paving bricks and cobblestones are much stronger than asphalt, concrete, or any modern brick.
Interesting story about the Zanja. When I was a kid, the local Chinese and Mexican ladies used to take bricks by the dozens from the Zanja for their gardens. My grandmother actually had an arched section in her garden that must have contained several dozen bricks and weighed a few hundred pounds, I don’t know how my dad got it up the hill!!! As time passed, I had forgotten where exactly in Chinatown the Zanja had been, so in 1975, with a compass and a stick, I set out from Olvera street and found it once again behind the Union Pacific paint shed…so you can imagine my surprise when I opened the LA WEEKLY in 2004 to find that some yuppie guy had “discovered” the Zanja Madre, and using the same compass-and-stick method I had used 30 years before, LOL!!!