Ghost Streets of Los Angeles
[Image: Via Google Maps].
In a short story called "Reports of Certain Events in London" by China Miéville?a text often cited here on BLDGBLOG?we read about a spectral network of streets that appear and disappear around London like the static of a radio tuned between stations, old roadways that are neither here nor there, flickering on and off in the dead hours of the night.
For reasons mostly related to a bank heist described in my book, A Burglar's Guide to the City, I found myself looking at a lot of aerial shots of Los Angeles?specifically the area between West Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard?when I noticed this weird diagonal line cutting through the neighborhood. [Image: Via Google Maps].
It is not a street?although it obviously started off as a street. In fact, parts of it today are still called Marshfield Way. At times, however, it's just an alleyway behind other buildings, or even just a narrow parking lot tucked in at the edge of someone else's property line.
[Image: Via Google Maps].
Other times, it actually takes on solidity and mass in the form of oddly skewed, diagonal slashes of houses.
The buildings that fill it look more like scar tissue, bubbling up to cover a void left behind by something else's absence.
[Image: Via Google Maps].
First of all, I love the idea that the buildings seen here take their form from a lost street?that an old throughway since scrubbed from the surface of Los Angeles has reappeared in the form of contemporary...
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