Mapping My Los Angeles by Reconstructing the Thomas Guide

Three years ago, I moved from LA after almost a decade there. Life in LA entailed long, traffic-heavy, and intense drives, but also many opportunities to walk for pleasure or errands. I was fortunate to live in Silverlake, a neighborhood where I could walk to most of the shops: Trader Joe's and Mayfair, a health food store, a post pack and ship, hardware and art supply, Video Journeys, movie theaters, boutiques, restaurants, bars and even a yoga studio. Most weekends I could usually park my car and not drive at all, unless to visit far-flung friends. Most friends were far-flung because we were all driving long distances to get to our school or work or other places where we might have originally met. On average, most people I know in LA drive 40 or 50 miles a day, which was true for me as well. However, it's not uncommon for people to drive much longer distances throughout greater LA County.

In the days before GPS technology was as mainstream as now, everyone I knew found her or his way around the city with the
Thomas Guide, a several hundred page, spiral-bound, street-by-street map of LA. The Thomas Guide opens with a page-size image of LA County with grids and numbers corresponding to the hundreds of close-up maps that follow. I so often used my first 1997 Thomas Guide that the worn and highlighted pages started falling out. I eventually replaced it with a 2002 edition that stayed pretty much intact because, in those 5 years, I'd committed to memory so much of the city that I rarely needed to check for specific streets. When I left LA, I had one very worn and one relatively new book map of Los Angeles.

While living in LA, I began to have the notion of deconstructing and then reconstructing that map of the sprawl. Shortly after leaving, I took apart both Guides and began to stitch them together as a single flat map. My relationship to driving with the Thomas Guide had been page by page, single snapshots of LA streets. I felt curious to see the pages of the book become a single image.

When I stitched together an entire map of LA out of Thomas Guide pages, the end result measured over 8 x 12 feet. Onto that massive map, I began to hand-stitch over roads where I'd walked or driven, using the stitching to represent my footprint and tire-print on the environment. The stitches would record my complicit impact on the landscape. I'd already been stitching walks from memory and knew that I wanted to do something similar with driving, but wasn’t sure exactly what or how. Would I use the sewing machine – trading one machine for another? Hand-embroidery? I wasn't sure.

I paused on the project due to my uncertainty about how to continue, the complications of another move and a new studio with limited wall space. So, I packed the map up in a project box with the intention of picking it up again later when I had sufficient wall space.

Fortunately, that time has arrived! I'll be moving into a new public studio next week (more details later) which will afford me the space and viewing distance to hang the work and complete it. Here's what I have so far:


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
paper map, machine stitching, hand stitching, cotton muslin backing
8' x 12'


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
detail

This (still unfinished) detail is only 2" by 4" and represents just a few miles. I'm hand-stitching each of the walks (as I remember them) in shades of green embroidery floss. The darker the shade, the more frequently I walked that particular route. Similarly, I'm hand-stitching the drives in red with the darker shades representing the streets and free-ways I traveled most frequently. I'll continue with this process over the entire map.

Unsurprisingly, I'm finding this piece quite a memory exercise. In remembering how much of LA I covered, I'm overwhelmed by the realization that I was only one person in over 10 million – the environmental footprint each person makes in that (or any) city is tremendous. The enormity of the impact is staggering... and I've only just begun the project.