I have a rather bittersweet relationship with Los Angeles. On the one had, having lived there for most of my life, I feel like I know what the city has to offer culturally/historically, and I have always felt the town comes up wanting. To me, LA is a one industry town: TV/Film and if you are only mildly interested in these two things…or haven’t dedicated your lief to them…then you might not find LA the most inspiring place. That’s how I feel. But then again, living here in New York, I’m always hearing people bash the city, and more often than not this comes from people who either haven’t visited it, or have gone, but only saw Hollywood Boulevard, Disneyland (not even in LA!) and other tourist hot spots. To these people, I vigorously defend LA and protest that there’s much there to see and experience. See, I’m kinda mixed up?
All this is to direct you for the moment to an interesting resource I stumbled upon that shows lovely old historical maps of the City of Angels. I spent some time gazing at these beauties and found that they reveal much about how the city has developed and matured. Maps are often a great way to understand a place: how it was settled, how it developed, how people might have thought differently about it. these maps, if even in a small way, accomplish that. Kinda cool to check out if you’re from there (like Neil and myself) or not.