Vernacular geography
Before Los Angeles began, there was a map - a sketch really - of house lots and a plaza adjacent to an unreliable river. The angle of that river and the high ground next to it prevented the proper orientation of the lots and plaza, which should have been 45 degrees askew from north and south as required by the Laws of the Indies for all the settlements of Nueva España. The non-existent streets of the not-yet-city in 1781, as drawn by Governor Felipe de Neve, were cocked an imprecise 36 degrees.
Even after almost 230 years, the streets in the city's core still point in directions not quite true. Such is the shaping power of a map.
The city imagined into existence by de Neve drew its future on larger and larger sheets of paper after 1850, platting a newly American city, the boomtown of 1888, the city of middle-class leisure at the turn of the 20th century, and the suburban immensity that working-class Los Angeles became - and still is - in the years after World War II. Maps of Los Angeles - even those designed to evoke a nostalgic past - always seem to project the city somewhere else: into a topography of longing, into the fiction that tomorrow's city will finally assuage desire, or into a place that might be called home.
Homes are this city's cultural monument. Maps sold them by tens of thousands, each tract of houses a dream of health and happiness in the sunshine, their gridded streets efficiently subdividing a presumed paradise.
But Angeleños are apt to be disoriented. They have come to a place so new, so free of associations. Los Angeles needed maps to orient buyers on the anonymity of the plain that descends from the plaza south to the ocean and within the bowl of the San Fernando Valley, empty of landmarks.
Until the advent of GPS, just about every driver in Los Angeles owned a copy of The Thomas Guide street atlas, its page references half-memorized.
Maps of rail lines, streetcar lines, boulevards, and finally of freeways deny the legend of this city's unplanned sprawl. Those networks preceded the stages of the city's growth, and accelerated it. Los Angeles has many centers of power as a result, and they are located at sites summoned from the movement of people and goods along routes that advance planning made possible.
The imagination of Los Angeles is still in its maps, in their reach and aspiration. It is an imagination that appalls some, whose disorientation is not resolved by reference to tourist guides and maps to the homes of the stars.
Los Angeles, whose streets are familiar to every moviegoer in the world, still baffles. The uniform urban grid of the city, which can be seen as a spectacle of democracy, isn't enough to overcome the sunshine and noir iconography that is the concealing screen that hides the real Los Angeles.
Maps assure me (even as I doubt it) that "here" on the Los Angeles Plain is connected to "there" across the many divides of the city. Because a map links my neighborhood to the vast grid of Los Angeles, my place is more real to me, if not more comprehensible.
All maps are fictions, but maps of Los Angeles are more fictive than most. They seem to lead us into the future with the conviction that mere lines on paper can make a city.
They did once, to our wonder and sorrow.
Having finally reached all its limits, that city of the imagination waits to be remapped as the geography of home.
Image taken by Flickr user Maria Gilbert.It was used under a Creative Commons license.
