Archive: Geography

Before it was a boulevard and a suburban community, Van Nuys was a name from LA's past that people should know.

There is too much wallowing in LA history by local media and blogs, but the regular maps feature from Los Angeles Magazine doesn't count.

In this map, it's the mountains and the relationship of the ranges and rivers that make it special.

Writer Geoff Manaugh has posted at BLDGBLOG his observation that from above, the shapes of blocks, yards and even specific homes reveal the existence of old streets we can't see anymore. And more.

Prepare to be laughed at if you ever refer to Microsoft Square in DTLA.

Sunday is the centennial of, arguably, the most significant public vote in the history of Los Angeles.

Defining the borders of downtown remains an uncertain task, writes KCET's Nathan Masters.

The old Eastside versus Faux Eastside debate is back, this time at the level of neighborhood council. Silver Lake's council advises you not to call them Eastside (not that we would.)

The whereabouts of Glendora, the closest city to where the fire is burning today in the San Gabriel Mountains foothills, is confounding the local media.

The blog LA Creek Freak may be closing in on the location of the natural drainage that used to flow — and maybe still does? — through what became the cities of Pasadena, San Marino and/or Alhambra.

Designer Peter Dunn re-envisioned the Los Angeles area freeways and mounted a Kickstarter campaign that raised enough money to print the map on 36-inch by 24-inch heavy stock. He explains inside.

"It is accompanied by a map that is either totally misleading, or astoundingly visionary," writes Eve Bachrach at Curbed LA. LOL — I choose the former. It's pretty hard to mis-locate the San Fernando Valley, 1.7 million people and all, but I especially like "Waterfront" and "Neighboring Communities."

KCRW plans to devote an hour-long broadcast of "Which Way, LA?" on February 6 to the rivalry (if any) between partisans of east and west in Los Angeles. They want your input on that and also want to hear from the people who are "neither Eastside nor Westside and don’t know what the fuss is all about."

Says the editor at Red Hen Press: "Before we moved to Pasadena from the Valley in 2009, there was a lot of discussion about where we should go. We really wanted to move to a place that celebrates arts and culture."

The real estate industry's name for my old neighborhood in Northridge has gained official status at City Hall. Blue signs marking Sherwood Forest as LA's newest community should be going up shortly. Plus: Part of North Hills jumps to Northridge, officially.

San Fernando is not Pacoima. The first clue for the graphics editor at Fox 11 should have been the sign visible in the background that reads San Fernando City Hall. There are 88 cities in Los Angeles County. San Fernando is one of them. Pacoima is not.

The LA Times architecture critic's expanded essays based on walking the Los Angeles area's "iconic boulevards" took on Sunset this weekend. He previously visited Atlantic Boulevard.

Ask Google Maps to find you Tehrangeles, and it places the community on the upper floor of an apartment building in the 10600 block of Kinnard Avenue, between Westholme and Hilts avenues. That's in Westwood, about eight blocks east of Westwood Boulevard, the shopping street sometimes referred to as Little Tehran. Street view is even more specific.

Fun story in the LA Times: an analysis of 75,000 computerized traffic citations found the street name "mangled beyond all but the most hopeful inference about 20% of the time....The only thing we can say with 90% certainty about data like this is 'Argh!'"

Shooting the Times places "near USC" is actually five miles away in Baldwin Hills. The LA Times building itself is closer to the campus. For whatever reasons, grokking the inner map of Los Angeles is just not an LAT strength.

We've written here quite a bit about the antiquated, or in some cases simply unsubstantiated, names that Google Maps insists on using for some areas of Los Angeles. Two of...

If you love maps like we do, check out the new exhibit of mostly historical Los Angeles maps in the first-floor gallery at the Los Angeles Public Library.

What do you think of the bizarro temps this afternoon?

Before there was Google Maps — and still today, if an Angeleno really wants to know where something is located — there was the Thomas Bros. street atlas, aka the Thomas Guide.

As part of David Kipen's Libros Schmibros pop-up bookstore at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, artist and author J. Michael Walker created a map that spans 23 feet by 5 feet that depicts L.A. literary figures.

Blogger Militant Angeleno explores the four arroyos that used to direct runoff from the Santa Monica Mountains across UCLA and on toward Ballona Creek.

Writing today at The Awl, Eric Spiegelman is amused by the cacophony of Los Angeles place names — some more valid than others.

They had a really good lineup of stories on Saturday's "Off-Ramp" on KPCC, plus a search for Wahoo, Calif.

Janice Min's THR makeover, Farrah Fawcett's death, Sheriff Baca's special recruit, how L.A. County cities fit together plus some quotables.

Jenny Burman excerpts at Chicken Corner a lively online discussion on the identity and history of the term Eastside, as a descriptor of place in Los Angeles. Plus some past posts on the subject.

Scientific American has dug out of its files a 1901 story and photographs about interesting rock features on the Southern California coast, including the arch rock north of Santa Monica.

KTLA's Eric Spillman spotted this Google-mobile at, by the looks of it, Fairfax and Pico.

Let's hope Steve Lopez didn't really mean to say "west of the 10 freeway."

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...

An LAPD tactical alert was in force for about an hour earlier this evening following the police shooting of a suspect in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts.

I haven't seen this book yet, but I'd still bet it will be one of my favorite books of the year. Glen Creason, the ace map librarian in the history...

The Times has been working with the LAPD and sheriff's department to ensure good data and today launches a new feature mapping crime across the city and a substantial part of the county.

More fun with Google Maps and its perplexing take on the geography of Los Angeles. I will say, this one seems more like a technical glitch than a failure of...

Ten friends, including journalists Anthea Raymond (public radio) and Bettina Boxall (Los Angeles Times), paddled down a two-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River between Atwater and Elysian Valley last weekend.

Fun as it has been around here to pick out archaic references and just plain mistakes on Google Maps' Los Angeles pages, there are too many to keep going to that well. But this one is new and strange, affecting Pasadena.

My KCRW column this week talked about the border settlement between Koreatown and Little Bangladesh, and got into the fun we've been having with Google Maps over "Sandford" and other...

Achois was the name that Europeans and, later, Americans thought more or less reflected the pronunciation that the local Tongva used for their settlement at the north end of the...

Google Maps' label on a section of the Wilshire district as Sandford is a typo, but a bigger mystery remains.

The search for Sandford out of the earlier Koreatown post led me to this 1918 map of city of Los Angeles annexations. It's a beauty, with abundant detail.

At a City Council committee gathering today, leaders from Koreatown and the newly nascent Little Bangladesh agreed on official boundaries of their respective communities.

The Times' website refers to a fire on Bronson Avenue in Hollywood as in "the Hancock Park area of the Hollywood Hills."

The LAT website moves Gladstone's up the highway to Malibu.

K, we've written so much about the geography wars in Los Angeles — and especially the bastardization of the traditional Eastside — that we're pretty tired of it. Curbed LA is tired of it too, so the site is asking readers to help.

The lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center downtown stood in for the Rome Hilton, circa early 1960s, on a recent episode of "Mad Men." Spotted by...

Over the weekend, La Crescenta author Bernadette Murphy had a nice opinion piece in the L.A. Times invoking John McPhee and his seminal writing on debris flows out of the...

Curbed's food sites unveiled a chain-wide redesign and a national food blog, with an offer to pay other food blogs $25 to shut down and send traffic Eater's way. The...

Amusing omission on the Daily News website, submitted by a mutual reader who observes "the neighborhood has its faults, but it ain't thaaat bad." Police reportedly suspect a link to...

In honor of Sherman Oaks adding a new precinct of ex-Van Nuysians, here's the latest by Steve Greenberg. For the heck of it, here's my timeline of San Fernando...

Sherman Oaks now extends north of Burbank Boulevard, at least in one neighborhood, in another blow to Van Nuys. Lots of levity during the City Council debate, so to speak...

The L.A. Times says its comparison of LAPD crime stats to the department's online maps that are supposed to show what's going on in neighborhoods found that 40% of serious...

The Forest Lawn cemetery wedged between Griffith Park, Burbank and Toluca Lake calls itself FL Hollywood Hills for marketing purposes, but make no mistake: it's in the San Fernando Valley....

At the Los Angeles Historic Italian Hall Foundation's "Taste Of Italy" on Saturday night at Pico House, Councilman Tom LaBonge brought a prototype district sign for "Little Italy." The start...

It wasn't just the L.A. Times that didn't know where to place Michael Jackson at first. Jonathan Dobrer, a Friendly Fire blogger for the Daily News opinion pages, posts his...

TMZ may have won the breaking news competition, but the Los Angeles Times is happy with the web traffic brought in by Michael Jackson's death. It's a new record for...

The governor (or his ghost tweeter) is pretty busy on Twitter. Ironic, perhaps, that he takes refuge from the Sacramento budget storm at a community college, given how hard they...

Daily News staffer and blogger Steve Rosenberg lives in the latest part of Van Nuys that wants to transfer its real estate karma into Sherman Oaks — and he isn't...

The Times unveiled its Mapping L.A. effort to identify Los Angeles neighborhoods yesterday and has been getting lots of online reaction and suggestions at the paper's website. A story that...

The Times' L.A. Now blog, in reporting Chris Brown's apology, locates the incident with Rihanna in "the Westside neighborhood of Hancock Park." Well, I guess it is west of the...

Los Angeles magazine — which until lately eschewed the terms Westside and Eastside — has expanded the definition of the latter beyond even the Times' recent make-it-up-as-you-go style ethic. In...

Some of them got together at Philippe's and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez of KPCC dropped in wearing his KCET blogger hat. A discussion ensued over where's the Eastside?, and in this group...

Dialogue continues about what and who defines the Los Angeles area's hundreds of neighborhoods. Today in the Times, columnist Hector Tobar revisits his home turf in East Hollywood — he's...

The Los Angeles Times has a thick book of style conventions that seem more and more to be ignored, especially online — same with past work by in-house committees to...

I put together a four-minute video from the weekend's Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at USC on the two documentaries I caught up with — "Chicano Rock" and "The Eastsiders" —...

Zina Klapper, a partner in Pop Twist Entertainment and a former editor of Mother Jones, writes at New Geography about some of the issues presented by family life in the...

NASA satellites view the Southern California fires from space.