La Coroner Gift Shop
La Coroner Gift Shop - Copyright © 2004–2023 Yelp Inc. Yelp, , and related marks are registered trademarks of Yelp. Who says there's no humor in death? In Los Angeles, you can visit one of the country's two Coroner's gift shops. The store was founded in the 1990s and is still going strong.
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La Coroner Gift Shop
Located in the coroner/medical complex, the shop offers a variety of gifts that will entertain anyone with a dark sense of humor. The gift shop is located in the original building that was the former location of Los Angeles General Hospital. Administrative and public offices are located in this building;
in another building in the back is the real work going on. The skeletons in the Closet are located to the right, just inside the front door, in room 208. The glass door has an unobtrusive "Gift Shop" sign to let you know you're in the right place.
The store has a wide selection of clothes, such as t-shirts, hoodies and hats. The store's specialty is the iconic chalk frame, synonymous with crime scene investigations. You can get post-it notes in the form of chalk outlines or beach towels. You'll find gifts for everyone on your list, including coffee mugs, tumblers, and mini skeletons.
Know Before You Go
In front is a beautiful mosaic from Los Angeles General Hospital. Skeletons in the Closet is located at the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, 1104 N Mission Rd, Los Angeles. The store is open from Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. However, it might be wise to call first to make sure they are open.
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Several Yelp reviewers have reported that coverage can be unclear at times. The Los Angeles County Morgue sells gruesome memorabilia for a good cause in the Gift Shop, and I tend to disagree. They want my money and I want to be entertained by something I haven't seen a hundred times.
That's not a problem with Skeletons in the Closet, a treasure trove of unique items designed to tickle my funny bone. A good thing considering the setting. This gift shop is upstairs at the Los Angeles County Morgue, so being so close to several hundred bodies, even unseen ones, can be eerie.
So it's just as well to mix something funny into the stuff. There's an $18 garment bag that looks like a body bag. Red fingerprint tags, identical to the ones used downstairs, cost $5 with your name printed on them. The boxers, known as Undertakers, are covered in the miniature chalk outlines that police sometimes draw around strewn bodies at crime scenes.
Know Before You Go
After looking at t-shirts, jackets and hoodies with the same theme, buyers torn about the actual purchase may be encouraged by the store's display: "Some think it's bad taste - some want XL." Skeletons in the Closet rushes, but the plot itself is no joke.
It is the official gift shop of the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, staffed by department officials and approved by the government of the state's most populous county. Started ten years ago by employees in a closet (hence the name), it has become profitable, generating about $300,000 in sales last year without spending a dime on advertising.
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Walk-ins are encouraged, but signs are prohibited because overt commercialism may offend family members who come to the mortuary to identify their loved ones. Located four miles and two freeways east of downtown, the store is tucked away in a corner of the sprawling Los Angeles County USCMedicalCenter complex.
As I entered the lobby, I buzzed through the locked door and the clerk nodded toward the old elevator that groaned up to the second floor. Halfway down the dimly lit office corridor, a small sign confirms that Skeletons in the Closet is not an urban legend.
Little Shop Around The Coroner
Stupidity is immediately apparent. A warning to thieves was taped to the door: "Next of kin will be notified." The note below advises check writers to use dental records instead of common forms of identification. In the 15-by-20-foot room, small items are displayed on tables: fridge magnets, badges, finger pads and notepads with the store's trademark body outline or the words "L.A. County Coroner."
Beach towels, T-shirts and weatherproof windbreakers, all drawn in chalk, fill the wall shelves. (One windbreaker design was discontinued; too many customers were using it to access real crime scenes.) Computer mousepads carry a notice: "We'll die for your business." I have the shop to myself, but I'm told about a dozen customers a day find their way here.
Some came to the morgue on official business - detectives, paramedics, doctors - but most were civilians. On the day I was there, recent ones came from as far away as Des Moines, Boston, Toronto, Alvin, Texas, and Chelsea, Alabama. "Last week someone was here from Italy," says the store's senior clerk, Salene Limon, who hands out business cards from the jaws of a small spring-loaded plastic skull on her corner table.
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Summer is at its peak, and many shoppers visit celebrity death sites in Los Angeles, such as the Ambassador Hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Chateau Marmont where John Belushi overdosed, and the Sunset Strip nightclub where the Phoenix River flowed. its passage, pavement.
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The store's concept took off in the early 1990s, when coroner's staff began selling L.A. County Coroner coffee mugs and T-shirts at industry conferences, then for employees and their families. "Once the public started seeing the shirts, the calls started," says James Hazlett, the store's marketing analyst.
In 1993, the wardrobe expanded into a renovated office. Former chief medical officer Thomas Noguchi, known as Coroner to the Stars, built the department into a celebrity morgue with autopsies on Kennedy, Belushi, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin and Natalie Wood, among others. His headline-grabbing style made Noguchi the country's most famous coroner and inspired the outspoken character played by Jack Klugman in the 1970s TV series "Quincy."
Noguchi's 1983 memoir The Coroner became a bestseller. Not surprisingly, Christmas is the busiest time of the year, with a spike around Halloween. In 1996, a Japanese retailer spent $30,000 on the store. The web is the next frontier. The site at www.lacoroner.com has an animated skeleton that looks more suited to Saturday morning TV cartoons than a morgue.
Apply on Boo-verly Hills Drive or Pacific Ghost Highway. "People who come here either love it or hate it," Hazlett says. Using the Internet and targeting the teenage market ("a bunch of skaters," as he puts it), he predicts $1 million in sales by 2006.
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