Why Los Angeles leans to the right

We're talking cartographically, not politically. D.J. Waldie, who wrote the foreword to Glen Creason's new book, Los Angeles in Maps, explains in a Times Op-Ed piece how Downtown Los Angeles streets came to be turned 36 degrees clockwise from a true north-south and east-west grid. It's about the light. "Ambiguity is written on our landscape," he writes.

Within the triumphant American grid is another, four Spanish leagues square, that conforms as best it can to the 16th century Laws of the Indies. These royal ordinances required that the streets and house lots in the cities of New Spain have a 45-degree disorientation from true north and south to provide, it was said, equal light to every side of a small house throughout the day. Given the way Spanish and then Mexican Los Angeles extended along the bank of its uncertain river, only 36 degrees of compliance was possible.

The four square leagues formed the original pueblo. Beyond those limits the streets typically turn back to follow a more N-S and E-W route.

Edited post