This LA Map Has No Freeways

Have you ever heard of Barnes City? From 1920 to 1927, this short-lived municipality near Venice was home to a traveling zoo.

And what about Yellow Cars? During the same time, these now forgotten streetcars drove economic growth in South LA.

Gaze upon cartographer Laura L. Whitlock’s map of a pre-highway LA—believed to be from 1927 and recently digitized by Getty—and you will discover these faded elements of the city. Nearly a century later, the map tells stories about transit changes and their impact.

Discovering the Whitlock map

In March 2023, Matt Barrett, director of the Metro Transportation Research Library and Archive, found the Whitlock map and immediately deemed it a treasure. According to Metro, the map “was gifted to our predecessor, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977–1993) by the City of Los Angeles to commemorate the opening of the A (Blue) Line in 1990.” He had it framed and hoped to scan it into a high-resolution copy for public access. Because Barrett knew Getty had large-scale scanning facilities and world-class conservators, he had Chris Salvano, LA Metro digital resources librarian, send an email to Todd Swanson, Getty digital imaging director.

Swanson remembers the email. It asked for advice, stressing the challenges of the map’s size, which is 51 by 62 inches. His department receives similar inquiries often, but this request was different. “I wanted to empower Metro to tell the stories they were qualified to tell about this map,” he says. “We can do it,” he wrote back enthusiastically.

A cartographer’s legacy

In January 1918, Sunset Magazine described Whitlock as the “official map-maker of Los Angeles county, California, and only woman map publisher in the country.” She was rare in the cartography world—a single woman and former music teacher who had arrived in LA in the 1880s. She became an in-demand cartographer and entrepreneur and set a precedent in intellectual property law.

This fact and other interesting aspects of this object motivated the collaboration between Getty and Metro. In particular, the map illustrates the dense network of the Los Angeles Railway (LARy) Yellow Cars in South LA during the 1920s, which provided an affordable and efficient means of public transit for the residents there.

The map’s red painted lines illustrate the Pacific Electric Railway Company Red Car routes that were running around 1927. These lines connected suburban and outlying areas to the city, similar to the commuter Metrolink trains of today.

Both Red and Yellow Cars thrived in 1927, particularly in and around Watts, as its train station had many connections to the rest of LA. These connections enabled Watts residents, particularly Black residents who faced job discrimination within their own neighborhood, to secure jobs throughout the city.

One can speculate that these connections helped fuel Watts’ vibrant cultural scene, with jazz musicians like Cecil “Big Jay” McNeely and Don Cherry. When Central Avenue, which boomed with jazz culture, called curfew, people flooded into Watts for nightlife venues like Leak’s Lake. Watts also played a significant role in the later Black Arts Movement.

Digitizing a treasure

The map digitization was a team effort across many Getty departments. Before the map arrived, Swanson had to alert the legal office that an outside art object was entering the campus. He also notified and involved Getty registrars, who view such a work as a temporary deposit to be tracked and accounted for. Then, on May 14, 2024, the Metro team delivered the map to the Getty Center’s loading dock, from which it was brought to the imaging studios.

When the frame was removed, Getty’s digital imaging team mounted the map onto a robotic easel—one of only a few in the world (others can be found at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam). They used a high-quality camera to take 30 overlapping photos of the map, crystal clear at 400 pixels per inch. Then they combined the photos on a computer to create one large, seamless image. They also did a 3D scan to capture the map’s shape, accurate to less than a millimeter.

The process took half a day. The final stitched digital file resulted in a two-gigabyte image that was stored on a cloud-based server. The next day, the map was reframed, packaged, and picked up by the Metro team. It now hangs in their hallway in downtown LA.

How freeways impacted Black communities

Claire Kennedy, LA Metro archivist, says many people are familiar with the Red Cars from the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The movie falsely portrayed the idea that oil companies used their power to wipe out the Red Cars. She argues that the decline of streetcars—particularly the Yellow Cars—was driven by public demand and economic factors. When automobiles came along, even buses were perceived as more modern and more comfortable than streetcars.

As a result of the perceived prestige of the automobile in LA at the time, streetcar usage decreased, and streetcar lines disappeared (the Yellow Car service ended in 1963 after 68 years). These shifts made it harder for people to get to their jobs and cut places like Watts off from the rest of the city.

Rita Cofield, associate project specialist for the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) and leader of its African American Historic Places Los Angeles project, is interested in the Whitlock map. She says that records like it can reveal how historical events, such as transit changes, impacted Black neighborhoods. Enacted in 1949, a policy called urban renewal allowed governments to fix urban blight using eminent domain. This displaced many Black residents and the program was criticized for having biased or exaggerated criteria and focusing on poor and ethnic neighborhoods. Cofield predicts that another form of urban renewal could take place in the community where she was born, raised, and now owns her mother’s home.

Cofield emphasizes that infrastructure projects like LA’s freeway system were not random; they cut through primarily Black or poor neighborhoods. She cites the construction of the I-10 freeway, which cut through Sugar Hill—a once segregated neighborhood that became home to some of the most prominent figures of Black Los Angeles in the 1940s—and displaced and devastated its thriving Black community.

Watts and the McCone Commission

The socioeconomic impact of freeways on these communities was vast. Residents near them were newly exposed to air pollution and developed health issues. Compounding this was the fact that residents couldn’t move out because of practices such as redlining, a discriminatory policy that restricted people of color from buying and renting homes in white communities. “The freeways are remnants of structural racism,” says Cofield.

The Watts Rebellion rattled the country in 1965. In its wake, the McCone Commission released its report, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? The report found “inadequate and costly public transportation” throughout LA generally, which “seriously restricts the residents of the disadvantaged areas such as south central Los Angeles.”

“Watts collapsed on itself,” says Cofield. It never fully recovered, and its train station, a crucial junction for LA in the 1920s and beyond, stopped all Red Car service in 1961, cutting off the ability of residents to travel to work outside of Watts, an area fraught with job discrimination, among other challenges.

Looking forward while looking back

What are the goals for the map now that it’s digitized? Cofield stresses that understanding and preserving history can prevent repeating past mistakes. She often thinks of Sankofa, a Ghanaian term meaning “to go back and get it,” symbolized by a bird with its feet forward and head turned back reaching for an egg, reminding us to keep moving forward as we seek to understand the stories and memories of our past. She points to Chicago, whose urban planners are discussing freeway removal. There, highways like the Dan Ryan Expressway reinforced racial divides and limited economic activities in Black neighborhoods.

Kennedy sees many possibilities for the map. The library will soon provide digital access to it and interpretive content to expand and improve storytelling about the history of transportation and cartography in LA. She also envisions data layering, pinning historic photographs or overlaying contemporary maps on the Whitlock one. Metro might even add the sights and sounds of LA in 1927. “Wouldn’t it be cool for children later to experience the map in 3D with sound?” she wonders.

Swanson is also interested in 3D storytelling; his department made a 3D scan of Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, which was later used to create a 3D color-adjusted reconstruction in the PST ART exhibition Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s “Irises.” Using 3D printing could enhance accessibility and broaden audience inclusion in ways that 2D or an original physical form cannot.

The implications of the Whitlock map, and other digitized ones that may follow, are broad. While it’s fun to time-travel back to a pre-highway LA, maps like these can also help us better understand historical injustices and foster more equitable urban planning.