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| Billie Silvey |
| All Around the Town |
| June 2007 |
| And when I first came here several decades ago, I thought I’d never learn my way around. The freeways flowed either fast and furious, or clogged and tedious. Neighborhoods were spread and confusing, a patchwork of ethnic enclaves often miles across. And the local streets. . . . I only managed to learn the major ones in my immediate area. At that time, that area was neither Eastside nor Westside but South Los Angeles. Then it had a predominantly African-American population, while the Eastside was predominantly Hispanic and the Westside was mostly white. After about a decade, we moved further south, to Lawndale in the South Bay, which at that time was heavily Hispanic. After another decade there, we moved to our present home in Palms, on the Westside of Los Angeles. I work in Westchester, which is about as far west as you can get, down near the airport. Now, the Westside is quite mixed racially, though my high school is predominantly African-American and serves many students from South Los Angeles, the first part of the city I lived in.. Each new section of residence in the city has added a section to the street map in my mind. That street map is clearer in the parts I've lived in, and the fact that those parts intersect, if not overlap, sharpens my concept of almost half the city, from Malibu south through the South Bay and east to downtown and the Harbor freeway. But my concept of other sections of Los Angeles--the Eastside, for instance, or the San Fernando Valley--is still quite hazy. I doubt that I'll ever grasp the whole of this complex and sprawling city. Thus, I've spent much of my time here in profound gratitude for the Thomas Guide--that voluminous spiral-bound book of maps of all the streets and freeways in Los Angeles county. |
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| East Side, West Side, all around the town The kids sang "ring around rosie," "London Bridge is falling down" Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O'Rourke We tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York The song was written about New York, but we have our Eastside and Westside in Los Angeles as well. |
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| Thomas Bros. Maps was started in 1915 in Oakland, California, by cartographer George Coupland Thomas and his two brothers. The company, which moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s, remained privately owned until it was purchased by Rand McNally in 1999. The first page of the Guide is a checkerboard of Los Angeles County. Each square has a number that corresponds with the number of a page after it. That page is a map of every street in that section of the city, and each indicates the pages that surround it. |
| The Thomas Guide is a great help when I'm driving along and suddenly realize that nothing looks familiar. I must have made a wrong turn. I pull over and pull out the book, and soon I'm heading the right direction again. Of course, when I know before I start that I've never driven to a particular address before, I generally check it out in Yahoo Maps on the computer. I enter my address and the address of my destination. Then I can print out, not just a map, but detailed driving directions. Thanks to the Thomas Bros. and Yahoo Maps, I can drive all over Los Angeles--not just the Westside, but the Eastside and even the Valley, with confidence. |