From 6 feet under to a mile high

IT’S 2 p.m. on a Monday, and the tour guide is showing off all the usual SoCal suspects: the Sunset Strip and the Hollywood sign, the Valley and the coast. Nothing strange here, except the sights are being seen from 2,000 feet above ground -- and the tourist is flying the plane.

No previous piloting experience is required for this Take the Controls! tour, during which the sightseer operates the throttle, rudder pedals and yoke (though a trained pilot has a duplicate set of controls, should there be trouble).

The most popular tour offered by Hollywood Aviators, a flight school in Van Nuys, Take the Controls! is, undoubtedly, unusual. But it’s just one of several off-the-beaten-path sightseeing packages offered by various L.A. outfits and enjoyed, for the most part, by curious locals looking to experience more of the city’s hidden culture, history and novelties than they would on their own.

“It’s the Look What You Didn’t Know You Had in Your Own Backyard phenomenon,� says Chris Nichols, a longtime L.A. Conservancy Modern Committee member who’s led Angelenos on tours of Space Age college campuses, San Gabriel Valley coffee shops and other treks.

“L.A. is so massive that nobody can comprehend the enormity of it in one gulp. People tend to cluster and cocoon in their little neighborhoods and eventually become serious about the rest of this megalopolis that they never get the chance to experience.�

Preservation organizations, business improvement districts, independent tour companies, museums and individual Southern California aficionados are among the many groups leading urban adventurers into places unexplored. Whether it’s shopping excursions into the daunting downtown fashion district or architectural explorations of vintage neon signs, tours that live in the present or look back at the past, there are plenty of opportunities for inquisitive natives to get out of their comfort zones and explore the city.

Leave the garden-variety tours to out-of-towners. As we head into this busy touring season, more adventurous types will be on foot or in a bus, helicopter, Cadillac or Segway.

SCOTT Michaels prefers a “tomb buggy� -- OK, it’s a minivan -- for his Dearly Departed Tours. Five days a week, the self-described “director of undertakings� takes visitors past the many murder and suicide sites long gone but not forgotten. They include the Knickerbocker Hotel, where a pre-lobotomized Frances Farmer was arrested for a parole violation; the Hollywood sign, where Peg Entwistle threw herself from the top of the H; and Waverly Drive, site of the infamous LaBianca murders. In three hours Michaels visits almost 100 locations, talking through a microphone headset as he steers through traffic recounting gory details he’s gleaned from autopsy reports, tabloids and trash TV.

“L.A. is like living in a big trivia game. You never know who or what’s around the corner. People drive through these neighborhoods every day of their lives and have no idea of the amazing things that happened right there,� said Michaels, who in the ‘90s drove a hearse leading the similarly themed but now defunct Grave Line Tours. “I can’t tell you how many phone calls I get from people asking, ‘Who died on this street?’ because they’ve seen my bus there.�

Anne Block drives a gold ’98 Cadillac with a vanity plate that reads “TAKE MOM� -- shorthand for her Take My Mother, Please tours. For 12 years, the Arkansas transplant has been leading custom tours, taking passengers to see whatever they desire, whether it’s the work of African American Paul Williams or the sites referenced in Raymond Chandler novels.

“It’s so exciting to live in a place where you want to add to your knowledge of where you live all the time,� said Block. “I have people who’ve lived in L.A. 40 and 50 years, and they get in the car with me and say, ‘I never knew this was here!’ That is the best compliment of all.�

Historical sites, especially gruesome or novel ones, don’t often come with signage. And property values being what they are, the L.A. landscape is constantly shifting as new buildings replace old, obscuring their rich history. Tours, especially the many run by preservation groups, offer a means of keeping that history alive.

In the 22 years that the Modern Committee has been operating as an adjunct of the Los Angeles Conservancy, it has led a variety of one-off sightseeing excursions. Most recently, ModCom, as the group is known, led a McDonald’s history tour to uncover the roots of the fast-food empire, pre-Ray Kroc. Beginning at the world’s oldest McDonald’s in Downey, which opened in 1953, the seven-hour bus tour took budding McHistorians to a working orange grove and a 19th century blacksmith shop where the ketchup squirter and other automation tools were developed.

Whereas Nichols is the sort of person “who can’t take the same path home twice,� he said, most of the people on ModCom’s tours are locals hoping to get off the beaten tracks of their commutes and learn a bit more about the city they call home.

“We’re living in the layers of an incredible lost civilization,� said Nichols, whose group is putting together an art and architecture tour featuring mosaic and mural artist Joseph Young, whose work appears in the lobby of the Parker Center and Los Angeles County Hall of Records downtown.

“Downtown is the great example. Broadway or Spring Street, when you’re wandering along the endless swap meets and botanicas, you look up and realize you’re standing in a grand old movie palace or in the lobby of some spectacular bank.�

For years, downtown has been the focus of walking tours offered through the Los Angeles Conservancy, including the Biltmore Hotel, Little Tokyo, Union Station and Broadway theaters. But over the last few years, as development has taken over the area, it’s become a popular subject and setting for other tour offerings.

This year, the 1947Project led tourists through the sites of mostly obscure and long-forgotten L.A. crime scenes on its Crime Bus. The tour was an outgrowth of a blog by the same name, which, throughout 2005, posted daily updates on the lurid happenings of 1947; one of the stops included the now vacant lot where, nearly 60 years ago, the body of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, was discovered.

On June 10, 1947Project founders Nathan Marsak and Kim Cooper will take Nightmares of Bunker Hill -- their new tour of early L.A. history -- on a second run. Stops include the site of a popular turn-of-the-century French restaurant, where a severed hand on the roof once caused quite a stir, and the spot in Chinatown where a scorned woman began what would later become the Victorian-era trend of throwing acid in the faces of former lovers.

Where 1947Project favors gore, Charles Phoenix goes with quirk. Each spring for the last two years, the entertainer best known for his retro slide shows has been leading “Disneyland tours� of downtown Los Angeles, showing visitors the area re-imagined as the Orange County theme park. Among the stops on his six-hour tour: Adventureland (a.k.a. Chinatown), Fantasyland (a.k.a. the Bob Baker Marionette Theater) and the Haunted Mansions on Carroll Avenue in Echo Park.

FOR 2 1/2 years, Christine Silvestri has been running Urban Shopping Adventures, leading intrepid fashionistas on shopping tours of Melrose Heights and L.A.’s sprawling 90-block fashion district, where buyers are rewarded with 30% to 70% off retail prices -- if they know where to look.

On a recent Friday, sisters Shayne Johnson, Leslie Bridges and Julie Buelteman met at Silvestri’s office to begin celebrating their respective April birthdays. It was 10:30 a.m., and Silvestri was giving her five-minute “shopping lesson,� telling the Redondo Beach natives that stores are both retail and wholesale, that cash is preferable to credit and that prices are often negotiable.

She then handed them each a large vellum shopping sack equipped with the essentials -- a map, snack bar and bottle of water -- and they were off.

First stop: California Mart and the designer shoe shop on its first floor, Shooze. Then it was off to a place called Silhouette, where Buelteman scored the first buy of the day -- an embroidered military-style jacket, purchased 15 minutes into a three-hour walking tour that had the women, who range in age from 38 to 50, giggling like schoolgirls as they tried on tops, skirts and other “cute everyday stuff.�

Anyone who doubts the necessity of a fashion district shopping tour hasn’t spent much time there. It is an overwhelming swirl of gypsy skirts and scoop-necked tanks, faded jeans and knockoff handbags.

“It’s just not what we’re used to when we go shopping for apparel especially, so I can save them a lot of time wandering around trying to find the best streets or best locations for the merchandise they want,� said Silvestri, who leads tours any time stores are open, Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“I could totally go to the garment district on my own,� said Johnson, who organized the trip for her sibs. “But when you have someone giving the tour, it takes the pressure off you. You’re not responsible� for everyone having a good time.

As much as tours are about having fun, they’re also about learning and trying something new. In the case of Segwow, it isn’t the sightseeing packages the company offers that are so unusual. Celebrity homes, downtown L.A., Santa Monica and the other 12 tours are pretty much standard destinations. It’s how tourists get there that’s different. The two-hour guided tours are on Segways, making it a tossup as to which is the bigger draw -- the tour or the trip itself.

“The mixture would be too hard to figure out. From what I can tell, there’s probably a little bit higher interest in the Segways, and the tours are a reason and a source of entertainment,� said Axel Schine, chief executive of the 2-year-old company.

The advantages of touring by Segway, he said, are that travelers aren’t trapped inside a vehicle, so they have a 360-degree view, and they’re much faster than walking. According to Schine, Segways travel as fast as 12.5 mph. Each two-hour tour covers six to 10 miles.

Segways have been on the market since 2003, but they remain a bit of a novelty. According to Schine, it isn’t at all unusual, when he’s leading packs of 10 to 20 tourists, to hear hoots, hollers and honks of approval.

At Hollywood Aviators, the sounds are similar; they just come from inside the cockpit.

“The biggest thrill anybody can have in flying a plane is the takeoff,� said Dan Katz, a former ad agency owner who launched Hollywood Aviators and its Take the Controls! discovery flights two years ago.

“That’s the coolest thing, pushing that throttle forward and suddenly going, ‘Oh, my God. I’m flying!’ �