Dude, who even knows.

1st April 2021

Post reblogged from Slate Star Scratchpad with 44 notes

slatestarscratchpad:

kontextmaschine:

Thomas Guide Maps: The Rise And Fall of LA's Directional Holy Grail
There was a time you wouldn't dare leave your house without a Thomas Guide. Here's the history of this beloved tome.
LAist

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’t 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)

  1. dataanalyzer said: We used to use key maps (keymaps.com)
  2. lacquiparle reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    Born in the early 70's. Washington DC had Alexandria Drafting Company book maps that showed all the streets, but weren't...
  3. nightpool said: I’m pretty sure in new york people just used the street grid. in rural areas everyone just gave directions to each other
  4. kontextmaschine reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    I mean, we would have maps in our car but they'd be like, accordion-folded paper maps of the highways of Eastern...
  5. xxxsalklover42069xxx reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    not really, in Ann Arbor I just... knew where everything was, relative to my body, so I just went there. I’ve since...
  6. spacific-sunrise reblogged this from eightyonekilograms
  7. eightyonekilograms reblogged this from shacklesburst and added:
    “What kind of maniac would design a city that even its own residents need a map to— oh, right, Los Angeles.”
  8. dank-mishima said: (Pre-smartphone times Londoner here) From the sound of it, the London A to Z was once similarly used :).
  9. shacklesburst reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    maps were virtually unknown around the world outside of LA -- that’s the reason it’s actually short for Lost Angeles!
  10. slatestarscratchpad reblogged this from kontextmaschine and added:
    Was that unusual? Didn’t everyone everywhere have to do something like this before Mapquest and Google Maps?