\nThomas Guide Maps: The Rise And Fall of LA’s Directional Holy Grail
Remembering pre-smartphone LA, where you were expected to bring a reference book with you everywhere in order to know where anything was
Was that unusual? Didn\u2019t everyone everywhere have to do something like this before Mapquest and Google Maps?
(my parents had Thomas Guides and I fondly remember panicked moments leafing through them at red lights)
I mean, we would have maps in our car but they’d be like, accordion-folded paper maps of the highways of Eastern Pennsylvania and a more detailed one for our county and we’d rarely use them and then mostly for advance planning
Like, for a lot of things you’d go to the nearest freeway exit or major intersection, that you’d get to with a map or previous knowledge, and your contact (or advertising!) would give you last-mile directions from there
But a book? To navigate your own city? That’s the LA “72 suburbs in search of a city” thing, the sense that any given person might have to go to an unknown side street in any of a score of unknown population centers on any given day.
LA even has a pretty good coordinate system in its street numbering (at least on the flatland grids) but people never direct you to like, the intersection at 7200W and 1100N (that’s Santa Monica and Formosa)
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