Southern California may have lost some of its sparkle in recent decades but in the early to mid-20th Century it was largely seen as the perfect American dream location. A slew of pictorial maps were created to entice people to come and live the dream. A typical example is this “Roads to Romance” map covered in a previous blog post. I took a photo of the map at the La Jolla Map Museum on a visit in 2019.
The map is full of oranges, lemons and happy people fishing, swimming and cruising around in boats. Even the fish seem to be enjoying the place. The full title is "Ride the Roads to Romance along the Golden Coast thru the Sunshine Empire of Southern California".Another example promotes the city of Pomona highlighting its central location to “the nation’s all season playground”. The bottom right corner lists the distances from Pomona to other nearby destinations.
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-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc. |
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-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc. |
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-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc. |
Another very yellow example by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce invites you to make their city your vacation headquarters.
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-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc. |
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-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc. |
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-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc. |
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-via New Yorker |
By 1977 Life in Los Angeles had become quite a bit less ideal. Eugene Turner mapped areas of the city using Chernoff faces. The west side is the only truly contented looking area, the rest of the city showing signs of stress. I like this map so much I highlighted it in one of my earliest blog posts.Since the 1970’s the image of Southern California has taken further hits as exemplified by this postcard.
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-via Flicker - I once had this postcard but mailed it away. |