There have been times in my life when I knew my surroundings so well that I could travel through them in my sleep.
At 19, I knew exactly how to walk from Philadelphia’s Suburban Station to Steve’s Prince of Steaks and back again while also catching two Christmas light shows.
In 2017, I knew the London Underground so well as to ride from Bloomsbury to Big Ben after consuming a half gallon of Tesco hard cidre.
My boyhood was spent memorizing the exact combination of dirt paths necessary to traverse the woods in Glen Mills, PA, without losing my beloved flat-coated retriever, Ali, in the midst of fur-catching thorns.
In the years since, the knots of Glen Mills brush have doubtless formed new paths, never to be walked by that boy and his dog again. I no longer know what the wait time is at Goodge Street Station in London, or how much a cheesesteak goes for at Steve’s in 2022.
My local knowledge of those places, so seminal in developing me, has long been replaced by new knowledge of new places. The best bar crawl patterns in St. Pete, for example. Or which bridge surmounts the Tampa Bay the fastest during rush hour, or how to kayak to the dock of the Mad Beach McDonald’s.
It’s with a heavy heart that I acknowledge that even this knowledge will be replaced by the patterns of new streets in new cities. After seven comfortable years in one spot due to college, COVID, and everything in between, I’d forgotten how much fun it is to be in a new city, learning its quirks, and experiencing the blissful agita of getting lost between its foreign streets.
I got a taste of this back when I visited Los Angeles in February. Maddee and I decided to take a detour to a random Starbucks while driving to Malibu Creek State Park. I have no idea how to get to Malibu from South Central LA, or what mysterious coffee shops lie in between. So we entered our pitstop into my phone, and the Google Maps Gods recalculated our route.
Driving the backroads of a city as expansive as Los Angeles is like flipping a coin with every mile. At any given stoplight we might have spotted Jack Black, or had our wheels stolen, à la Chevy Chase in Vacation.
At one such red light, a taco shop caught my eye. Next door was a row of neat homes, and I couldn’t help but feel captivated by the cozy space.
“Well, this looks like a lovely neighborhood,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Maddee asked.
“Of course I’m sure. We just passed a school! With children!”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
Eager to prove a point, I zoomed out of Google Maps and identified the neighborhood. I have no recollection of its name. Let’s call it Mikesville.
“Hey Google,” I whispered to my phone. “Is Mikesville a safe neighborhood?”
A second passed, then the robot responded.
“According to Traveler’s Digest, Mikesville was rated the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in California in 2020.”
“Oh!” I said. “How quaint!”
My foot round housed the gas pedal as soon as the light changed. We briefly entered hyperspace speeding out of Mikesville.
Why not share Elephant Graveyard with an estranged family member?
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I’m certain that there’s a cliche about people like me — the white tourist in the scary city, hyper vigilant about entering the wrong neighborhoods.
But, as I wrote last week, cliches exist for a reason. Clueless adventurers abide, becoming gradually less clueless with every new step.
That line of thinking, combined with my desire to acquire Glen Mills-London-St. Pete level knowledge of the city, is what drove me to find the Gangs of Los Angeles Google Map overlay. Technology’s response to the skittish traveler, I downloaded it when Maddee first moved to Los Angeles, figuring it would help me avoid potential “Mikesville” moments.
Spoiler alert: It did not.
The Gangs Google Map is a variegated disaster of open-source cartography. Upon launching, the entire city is wiped away in a vibrant flush of criminal activity, delineating the Earth into a color-coded grid of gang territory.
Not only does it identify which blocks belong to which gangs, it also lists which gangs are at war in each location, whose leaders have been arrested, and which rappers, if any, hail from those neighborhoods.
Downloading the map prompted several questions:
Why would anyone not currently employed by LAPD need to know all of this?
Why was this map only available through German Google (google.de)?
How do I get this thing off my phone forever?
Those questions came speeding back to me during our trip to Malibu. With our coffees in hand and Mikesville long behind us, we pulled out of Starbucks and onto the road. Just as we made the swerving left turn into traffic, my mobile data froze and our connection to the Google Maps Gods was severed.
The directions disappeared. We were lost in LA.
I opened my phone in a huff at the first red light.
“Oh, for f*ck’s sake, it’s the gangs map.”
The offline download, which had laid in wait within the files of my map for months, had come to our rescue.
The route to Malibu had been wiped clean. Every block shined with color. The smattering of landmarks were replaced with the names of gangs — Crips, Bloods, Villains. We were in gang territory all along!
“f*ck!” I shouted. “We’re f*cked!”
I shook my phone a few times, smashing the touchscreen as the light changed. Just as I needed to drive again, my satellite connection restored. The Gangs Map relented and our location blipped back to life, miles away from where the Gangs Map had claimed we were.
We were in Culver City — an artsy district. The closest gang territory was several miles east of us, on the gentrified outskirts of an Amazon Fresh and a prep school.
We had been safe all along.
And so another geographical detail entered the web of my mind:
Culver City Starbucks = safe, idiot.
Navigating city streets reminds me of writing poetry. Much like the words in a dictionary, there are only so many roads to construct into a route from Point A and Point B. It’s an exhausting art, sorting out the intricacies and deciding on a way to travel.
Do we choose efficiency? Timeliness?
What scenes on the scenic route are worthy of seeing?
Can I get a coffee on the way?
Am I in Crips territory, or Bloods?
I may have St. Pete down to a science, as I once did Bloomsbury, Center City Philadelphia, and the backwoods of Pennsylvania, but the polluted maze of Southern California is entirely new to me.
And, for some strange reason, I kinda like that.
Trying to choose which roads to take is a journey within itself.
To paraphrase from the immortal Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one not listed as gang turf online.
Shouts out to…
Maddee, for publishing a sensational article on religious architecture in Los Angeles in the online magazine Pentagon. Give it a read here.
Bill, who longtime readers will remember for last December’s Brain Warranties newsletter, for co-founding Pentagon.
The Gangs of Los Angeles Map, which can be found here. (Just kidding. It’s useless.)
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