[ConstructDTLA]

Originally Posted by DouglasUrantia

Does anyone know why Los Angeles was not platted on a strict compass direction? This is very weird. Didn't they have any compasses in those old days?

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct...-maps-20101024

Downtown Los Angeles is cocked about 36 degrees from the north-south grid that was Thomas Jefferson's dream for filling in the empty places on the blank page of the continent. Jefferson imagined his rational geometry penetrating forests, fording rivers and passing across prairies, leaving behind a national design of townships and sections that extended uniformly from the Alleghenies to the Pacific Ocean. The West's conquest (and its conversion into marketable real estate) began in 1785 when Congress adopted Jefferson's scheme to lay over the disorderly wilderness his rigidly right angle grid, where north is always at the top, south always at the bottom.

The streets of downtown Los Angeles have a different dream. They do not lead to the cardinal points of the compass but to the uncertain spaces in between. Ambiguity is written on our landscape.

You wouldn't know it just by driving downtown's streets. We impose Jefferson's imagination on what we see. But stand in front of the Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square and look down at the brass compass rose set in the sidewalk. It shows that the streets downtown point to other destinations, that these streets still resist the city's American occupation in 1847.

Within the triumphant American grid is another, four Spanish leagues square, that conforms as best it can to the 16th century Laws of the Indies. These royal ordinances required that the streets and house lots in the cities of New Spain have a 45-degree disorientation from true north and south to provide, it was said, equal light to every side of a small house throughout the day. Given the way Spanish and then Mexican Los Angeles extended along the bank of its uncertain river, only 36 degrees of compliance was possible.

The 1849 Ord and Hutton survey, which produced the first map of the newly American city, left the puzzle of royal versus republican orientation unresolved. The map pictures a longitudinal city and used facts on the ground — the bed of the Los Angeles River — as an organizing principle. Faint, spidery lines intersecting at the town plaza hint at compass points the map otherwise ignores.

As the city began to sell itself into the future in the 1870s, Ord's map was blended with newer real estate surveys. They too show the city within the grid of its founding. House lots and streets continue to replicate its off-kilter orientation, as they will until the boom times that followed the arrival of the transcontinental railroads at the end of the 19th century.

The break from colonial to American city begins there. New streets and avenues far from the plaza point to where they are supposed to. The original grid looks like an aberration when it's shown in the context of the city's vast expansion. The real city is the one that has been routinely gridded over the plains and foothills of the Los Angeles basin, not the cockeyed one on Ord's map.