Tiki Tour of Southern California Book

Since 1994, I have been researching, hunting and tracking down as many tiki apartment complexes in Orange and Los Angeles Counties (ground zero for tiki apartments) as I could document. I spent countless hours in libraries scanning old phonebooks, newspapers and real estate guides and driven LOTS of miles trying to document what was left of these exotic places.

I didn't want all of that research to go to waste, so in 2005 I put it all together into a booklet titled A Tiki Tour of Southern California. At the time, it was pretty accurate list of what was left if you wanted to go out and explore exotic tiki architecture.






There was a little artwork included.







The first edition contained over 70 listings for tiki places, also included were another 40+ mid century modern and googie points of interest. Each listing I provided a picture of the place (most of them I had visited) and the address. There was also a main map which showed all of the listings around the two counties.




The map was 11 x 17 and folded into the booklet 'click to enlarge'



I updated the booklet a year later and the second edition of the contained over 100+ tiki listings. It also had two bonus tiki tours. The first was a tour of Palm Springs and the second was a tour of San Diego. The tour of San Diego was created by San Diego artist Bosko and was originally published in Tiki News #8 (Fall 1996 Issue).







I made about 40 copies of the booklet and gave them away for free to friends at the Tiki Oasis event the last year that it was hosted in Palm Springs. My friend Tiki Kate was the first (and only other person I know of) to complete the tour a few years ago, so I made a mock up badge for her.