L.A. Woman

If you visit Los Angeles, or even if you live here, the La Brea Tar Pits, the real dark heart of Los Angeles, seem like a mere tourist attraction, an entertaining stop along the way. Yet the whole history of the city lies buried here, from the late Pleistocene era on. The tar pits are noir, figuratively and literally. They are a wide, gaping, black graveyard, in some places hidden and paved over, in others visible and sticky. The tar pits contain L.A.'s earliest resource, pitch (as in "pitch black"), which is really solidified petroleum, also called asphaltum, a thick layer of goo between the surface and L.A.'s later, deeper resource, oil.

I have a fascination with the tar pits because I live on top of them. That's what my dream house is: a clapboard construction built over a tarry ooze.

The open pits--which are part of a larger geological phenomenon that is now almost entirely covered up and developed--are prominently located at the Page Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. You drive past Ralphs, Rite Aid, a Wells Fargo bank, Smart & Final, IHOP, Variety's offices, EMI, Baja Fresh and Koo Koo Roo to get there. You drive almost all the way to Flynt Publications, an ovoid building that is the headquarters of Larry Flynt's pornography-based publishing kingdom.

A few months after I came to California, I went to the tar pits. They and my neighborhood were once all part of Rancho La Brea, a land parcel of 4,450 square acres right in the middle of what is now L.A. Until the late 1920s, most of the rancho was undeveloped. Gaspar de Portola, the Spanish governor of Baja California, crossed the Los Angeles River in 1769 and--according to information posted in the museum--"proceeded west along what is now Wilshire Boulevard" (that is, he was heading toward my neighborhood, on horseback), and came upon the pits.

"In the afternoon," wrote Juan Crespi, a priest who accompanied the expedition, "we felt new earthquakes, the continuation of which astonishes us. We judge that in the mountains that run to the west in front of us there are some volcanoes, for there are many signs on the road . . . The explorers saw some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch, they were boiling and bubbling . . . and there is such an abundance of it that it would serve to caulk many ships."

The Indians who lived in the area used the tar as an adhesive and for waterproofing.