I visited the "center" of LA
A while ago, I read this Los Angeles Explorers Guild blog post by Tom Fassbender about the "center" of Los Angeles, which is located in the woods just outside a parking lot in Franklin Canyon, a park in the mountains above Beverly Hills.
I've wanted to go for a while, so I got a bunch of my friends to come. We spent a day hanging out and eating lunch and photographing ourselves at the plaque marking the city's "center". It looks like this:
That plaque seems to have been made with individually stamped letters, and maybe a needle drawn through the ceramic for the finer lines. I imagine the thicker lines were made with a pencil tip or something. I love the parentheses:
EXACT CENTER
(POINT OF BALANCE OF THE PLANE OF THE)
CITY OF LOS ANGELES
What this refers to is that Allan E Edwards, the plaque's creator, calculated this horrifically-gerrymandered city's center by balancing a stencil of it on, like, a pin or something. From the blog post above:
As the story goes, Edwards took a 4-foot by 6-foot AAA map of Los Angeles and cut out the city along its edges. Then he glued the excised shape to a sheet of foam core, trimmed it to match the city’s border, and placed it on top of a vertical pin in different spots until the contraption balanced. Once that was done, he transferred that balance point to its corresponding location a USGS topographic map.
However, the blog post also remarks that before discovering the center of Los Angeles in Franklin Canyon, Edwards was also previously a guide at Franklin Canyon Park. So I'm left wondering in what order these discoveries actually occurred, and whether the center of Los Angeles (the plane of the, etc) is really in Franklin Canyon after all.
Because here's another thing: the coordinates on the plaque are for a different location than the plaque's actual coordinates. The actual coordinates point to the back yard of a house on Talus Place, half a mile to the east.
The funniest thing about the "center of Los Angeles" is that the center of this city is a stupid thing to want to find. It's a hugely tall city north to south - there's a gerrymandered strip of land sticking out of the bottom of the city called the "harbor gateway". This strip of land connects to a portion of the port region down by Long Beach - half of the port island called Terminal Island belongs to LB, the other half to LA. Anyway, the result looks like this:
This image from Wikipedia places the city within the context of the county. You can see that the city is pockmarked with voids - smaller municipalities almost completely contained by Los Angeles, but boasting their own municipal governments. Beverly Hills is one of these. (So is Culver City, the place where I normally live.) The coordinates on Edwards's plaque point to a home with a Beverly Hills mailing address. I was fascinated - did Edwards's "center" for Los Angeles lie inside a region which is not, actually, in the city of Los Angeles?
Well, the crazier twist is that the coordinates ARE in Los Angeles - they just have a Beverly Hills mailing address. The spot is in a wealthy neighborhood called Beverly Crest - Franklin Canyon is in Beverly Crest as well.
Anyway, we found the plaque. It's in the woods off the side of a narrow, heavily-forested trail. While we were there, it was extremely damp. The trail maps of the area differ on several different services - the best trail to get there is the Berman trail, which is not the one depicted on Google Maps. Open Street Maps has it, though.
It's somewhere around here. The actual coordinates where you can find it were calculated by Tom Fassbender, the writer of the post above - it's at 34.12448, -118.40778. If you walk along the Berman Trail northeast starting at the parking lot, it'll be in a small clearing on your left, under a tree, in the woods below the hillside, before it gets steep.
Here's a great picture that a friend of mine took of me at the dubiously-calculated, silly-to-even-want, technically-incorrect "center" of Los Angeles:
I was very glad I went. The park is nice, and it's a very silly geographical feature - worth wondering over. If you went with me, I'm glad you came!