Simone WilsonWhenever out-of-towners complain about how hard it is to get anywhere in Los Angeles, we try to tell them: It's no more difficult than trying to traverse the entire Bay Area in a single shot. Because this city is HUGE. Like, half the size of Rhode Island. And because of that, we've got a whole series of mini-centers, all with such strong and differing identities as to be worthy of their own cityhood: Hollywood. Venice Beach. Silver Lake. The San Fernando Valley.
But we pay for this incredible diversity with the miles and miles of sprawl between.
This map, which first hit the Internet in 2010 but resurfaced this month on Reddit, is the best we've seen to capture the immensity of our turf:
Credit: buzz.edfunders.org
We knew we were huge and superior, but DAMN!
The Foothills just threw on Milwaukee like a neck scarf. San Pedro, that snake, just swallowed Manhattan like a doormouse. And we're pretty sure West L.A. just wiped its ass with San Francisco.
So next time you take your out-of-towner to the beach and she asks to go check out a Jonathan Gold-vetted restaurant in the Valley, present to her this visual proof that she just asked you to road-trip her highness across the entirety of Cleveland.
On a completely unrelated note, this city-displacement game reminds us a lot of the recent redistricting battle in Los Angeles (in which we dubbed District 13 an evil squirrel, District 10 a fat turkey, etc.). The way Cleveland drapes over the Hollywood Hills like that, joining two L.A. lands that have less in common than Israel and Palestine? Sooo District 4. Which probably explains why our 15 city councilmembers keep tabs on their sprawled-out constituents/potholes from their City Hall palace with all the bumbling ineptitude of a 15-fingered dictator in a third-world country.
[@simone_electra / swilson@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]
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