Like many newly minted L.A. drivers in the Time Before GPS, I once plotted my journeys around town using a hand-me-down Thomas Guide map book that I kept stashed beneath my driver’s seat.
But mastering the metropolis, I soon learned, was no easy feat.
I also had to become fluent in the looping directions I’d hear a gas-station attendant or diner waitress toss out: “Take a right at the bowling alley.” “Slow down when you see the florist.” “Make a soft right after the apricot-colored apartment building.” These locators—the bowling alley, the florist, the apricot apartment building—were the precise details that made my sprawling city feel intimate, threaded together by an insider’s sense of place.
Swapping street names for landmarks is how my family and friends eventually committed our Los Angeles to memory. I knew L.A. through their shorthand: “the old streetcar tracks” (on Jefferson) or “Hungry Harold’s” (on Slauson). Often, they would reference “the University” (USC) and the “good Thrifty” (the orderly and efficient one).
But change is constant in Southern California: The train crossing that choked traffic twice a day or the mom-and-pop burger stand that served dreamy caramel milkshakes were navigational features of my parents’ time behind the wheel—and both spots were long gone before I hit my teens. Consequently, when memorizing landmarks, I knew to locate secondary ones, just in case the others vanished overnight.
Years fly by and entire neighborhoods are remade, even renamed. And while I cleave to my old pathways—my ghost maps—lately, I’ve felt adrift. Lost even.
Last fall, I hopped a cross-city ride with a professor friend (from “the University”) for an onstage panel to speak about the challenges of telling stories about our native place. As we rolled along Wilshire toward the Miracle Mile, we reminisced about buildings that once rose from now wholly unfamiliar intersections. “Remember Cha Cha Cha with its hearty chilaquiles?” I asked her. “I mourn them.” That once-distinctive, tumble-down corner where my favorite diner hangout once stood is now a nondescript mixed-use complex; the skate park I’d drive past on my way downtown has morphed into a wall of blank-eyed condos.
As we unbraided our stories, my friend shared a personal connection: Her family once owned a popular restaurant in Echo Park; it was a touchstone for many new residents who were finding their place in the city. The restaurant is no longer, but the signage still graces the building’s facade. It’s now home to the music venue The Echo, which is part of the lexicon and mapping for a new generation of Angelenos. In this way, the evolving facade is a means to talk about the present in the same sentence as the past.
With an eye to this, I’ve been noticing other creative, place-sensitive redevelopments. Take the recent glow-up of the relatively new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Once a May Company department store, the recently renamed Saban Building still features the old Streamline Moderne perfume-bottle silhouette.
Instead of razing structures, and the memories within, let’s make their histories legible—part of an ongoing narrative of place. It’s not just about clinging to brick-and-mortar; it’s about holding on to a shared visual language. It’s not just the burger stand or the train crossing, but what we know about the territory we inhabit, and our place within it.
