This curious map expresses the dominant conventions of urban planning in a time in Los Angeles history when few could have predicted that the city would develop a sprawling footprint.
The Los Angeles depicted here is not too different from the medieval city. It has a distinct center encompassing elite art institutions, commerce and government.
The map radiates outward from a geographic epicenter that coincides with the city’s oldest neighborhood—the original Pueblo. Though Ernest Burgess’ idea of a city as a tree like organism comprised of concentric rings stretching out past retail and manufacturing to prosperous bedroom communities wouldn’t be coined until 1925, this map eerily predicts it.
Roads stretch toward budding rival cities in Pasadena and Long Beach while prosperous local suburbs such as Angeleno Heights, Westlake Park and West Adams hover on the map’s visible perimeter.
In the days when Los Angeles remained a compact city brimming with the optimism of residential housing in thousand unit tracts of redwood built craftsmen, few could have predicted that cities like Santa Monica and Hollywood would stretch the city almost irreparably off of its central frame.