A Brief History of Los Angeles Neighborhood Naming

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NEIGHBORHOOD NAMES

A Brief History of Los Angeles Neighborhood Naming

Friday, May 1, 2015, by Adrian Glick Kudler

This weekend, Heyday Books will launch LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas, with 19 "maps" of Los Angeles (some literal, some impressionistic) accompanied by 19 essays on topics ranging from street grids to fish to missiles to radio DJs. We're exploring one map from the book every day this week.

[Image via Laurie Avocado / Curbed LA flickr pool]

Los Angeles has been putting up neighborhood signs since 1963, but officially it has no neighborhoods at all. In his LAtitudes essay "Naming Los Angeles," Rosten Woo asks the reader to imagine they have a set of crime statistics for all of Los Angeles—how would they summarize the findings?

[N]either the city, nor the county, have any official neighborhood boundaries. If your data was for Chicago, your task would be simple. The city publishes a definitive map of all the neighborhoods, so you could tally the number of crimes that happened within the boundaries of a given neighborhood and list the number. … No one has to debate whether or not something happened in Irving Park or Avondale, it's there on the map.
But your data is for Los Angeles. So you're left with a mishmash of geographies that you might be able to organize the information into: zip codes, police precincts, community planning areas, census tracts—none of these mean much to most people. You might know your own zip code, but you probably don't have any idea of how big it is or where the next one begins. If your data was for New York, you could say something definitive about a borough. But even the broadest regions of Los Angeles have trouble finding a firm definition. The Eastside? the Westside? Forget it.

Still, no one ever stops naming neighborhoods in LA (even the most top-level lists of Valley neighborhoods today have double the number of names as the 1940 Thomas Guide). In second person, Woo recounts true-life tales of neighborhood namings and renamings, and how significant those names are to the residents of those places. There's the wealthy Van Nuys neighborhoods that lobbies for years to join tonier Sherman Oaks. The Bangladeshi national who fights to designate a piece of Koreatown (which doesn't technically exist!) as Little Bangladesh, but ends up with just three blocks. Northeast LA's Hermon, which lost its namesake in 1978, when City Councilmember Arthur Snyder managed to have Hermon Avenue renamed Via Marisol, after his daughter.

And Helen Johnson, the Vermont Square resident who in 2003 convinced the LA City Council to pass a motion requesting "that the city discontinue the use of the term 'South Central Los Angeles' on all City documents and replace this phrase with the term 'South Los Angeles' as documents are updated and printed."

Remarkably, this seems to work. In ten years, people will no longer have a convenient way to refer to Black Los Angeles. "South Los Angeles" covers such an enormous swath of territory (roughly fifty-one square miles, much larger than the area that was once called South Central) that it means almost nothing. It fails to describe, and therefore fails to label your community.

And just a few weeks ago, 12 years and a few shiny developments projects into "South LA," City Councilmember Bernard Parks introduced a motion that would rename the area again, to SOLA.

· Finding Yaangna, the Ancestral Village of LA's Native People [Curbed LA]
· Mapping LA's Long Tradition of State-Sanctioned Racial Violence, 1771-Present [Curbed LA]
· From Mammoths to Jefferson: How the Los Angeles Street System Ended Up So Weird [Curbed LA]
· South LA Might Change Its Name to SOLA [Curbed LA]
· LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas [Heyday]

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COMMENTS (9 EXTANT)

Appleseed 89

Link to a static fullsize ver. of that boundary map? Rev. Google Image isn't pulling up anything.

#1. 05/01/15 04:19 PM

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Chewie 244

Los Angeles does have official neighborhood boundaries. The land use element of the General Plan is composed of over thirty community plans, which have boundaries and land use policies that have been adopted by city ordinances. There are also neighborhood councils with official boundaries.

Still, the only neighborhood name I really want to hear the history of is "Voices of 90037."

#2. 05/01/15 07:17 PM

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Thom 16

Exactly where is L.A? That's the question a lot of people ask including some longtime residents. http://www.cityofangelsandangles.com/okay-where-exactly-actually-is-l-a/#more-550

#3. 05/01/15 07:25 PM Follow @LAcityofAandA

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Ham 1996

Community Plan Areas tend to cover a lot more than a single neighborhood.

#4. 05/01/15 07:42 PM

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stst415 18

By far, the best resource for a definitive breakdown of L.A. neighborhoods was published by the Los Angeles Times at http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/ Though still not officially official, it's about as official as one can get (we use it constantly in the film industry to catalog locations and determine permitting jurisdictions).

#5. 05/02/15 03:54 AM Follow @stst415

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StayAwake 95

I don't know anyone who doesn't call it South Central. And everything @chewie said.

#6. 05/02/15 04:50 AM

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Eric Brightwell 19

Sometimes you just have to make your own!

https://ericbrightwell.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/pendersleighsonscartographysmapoflosangelescounty-1.jpg

#7. 05/02/15 01:49 PM

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Gryphonisle 225

Back in the day---sigh----about 30 years ago, when atms were a new idea, and portable phones still had cords attached to them, people wrote checks. It was a stupid idea even then, and some people never got the hang of it. Point is, I lived in Hollywood, and no matter here I wrote the check outside of Hollywood, the clerk would invariably look at it and say "Oh, Hollywierd". More often than not, the dolt would follow up with "Isn't that dangerous?"

Point of fact: It wasn't. While Hollywood then was home to the sort of people San Franciscan's consider normal---punks, tattoo freaks, the pierced and anyone in leather---it was also quite comfortable. Walking past a cop on Hollywood boulevard, at night, was more upsetting as they invariably cast a wide attitude. And that's when they weren't making it impossible for locals to get home, by closing down first Hollywood Bl. Then Sunset and Hollywood, and for a short while Santa Monica Bl as well, all to try to stop people from cruising.

But, to make a long story short: When I left in 1994, the Times printed crime stats for the entire LA Metro: The upshot was that Long Beach, where I was living at the time, was near the top as one of the worst parts of Los Angeles; and Hollywood was near the bottom, as one of the most crime free parts of Los Angeles.

Hollywierd my ass.

#8. 05/02/15 06:35 PM

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LA MapNerd 1819

@Gryphonisle: When I left in 1994, the Times printed crime stats for the entire LA Metro [...] and Hollywood was near the bottom, as one of the most crime free parts of Los Angeles.

Too bad it didn't stay that way.

According the LA Times' Mapping L.A. project's Violent Crime page, Hollywood is #26 among the 272 LA County neighborhoods listed (those served by LAPD or LACoSD), with a rate of 44.6 violent crimes per 100k population.

That's pretty similar to Compton (#22), at 49.3 per 100k, and Historic South Central (#23), at 48.8.

OTOH, some places recently disparaged by Curbed commenters as dangerously gang-ridden are much lower, like Pacoima (#77) at 18.7, Panorama City (#81) at 18.4, Elysian Valley ('Frogtown') (#125) at 11.6, and Atwater Village (#140) at 9.7

And never mind truly low-crime areas of the city, like, say, Brentwood (#183) at 3.5 or Pacific Palisades (#199) at 2.4.

(I'd love to see those 1994 LA Times numbers, because I've visited or worked in Hollywood since 1978, and, personally, I'm really dubious that Hollywood was ever "one of the most crime free parts of Los Angeles" during that period - indeed, probably not unless you go back to say, 1915 or so. )

#9. 05/03/15 01:22 PM

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