Susan and I made half a day of it today walking around the neighborhood. We had spied a brief in the Home section in Thursday’s L.A. Times on the L.A. Conservancy’s monthly Angelino Heights walking tour taking place today and I was lucky enough to nab the last two available spots when I called yesterday afternoon. I was told the tour had actually been fully booked Thursday but that some cancellations then came in from people concerned about the weather.
Thank gawd for idiots because it was an absolutely gorgeous day when Susan and I set out from the house down Sunset, and around Echo Park Lake and onto Bellevue over to the tour’s meeting point in front of the old fire station a couple blocks away at East Edgeware, where we arrived shortly before the tour’s 10 a.m. start time.
I’ve known about the historic 1300 block of Carroll Avenue and its meticulously restored Victorian-era homes since I was a teenager, but the best I’d ever done in visiting them were occasional drive-bys. It was absolutely awesome to be able to spend some quality time with these gorgeous testaments to the city’s history — and we even got to walk through the first floors of a couple of them.
More photos of the houses there can be found in this set of images on Flickr. Susan’s got some of her own up on Cinnamon Thoughts.
After the two-hour trip back in time Susan and I walked a little bit more around the way before making it up to Sunset and back over to Costa Allegre for excellent tacos.
We then got buzzed directly overhead by the blimp that’s often seen cruising over the area (and Susan wondered how we might go about getting a ride on it):
And we stopped into Peron, an awesome antiques store on the north side of Sunset a couple blocks east of Alvarado. With it chock full of knick knacks and paddywhacks I could spend hours exploring that wonderful little hole-in-the-wall: