I grew up in Hollywood in the 1970s. Later my old stomping grounds got renamed East Hollywood. In recent years it's been carved up, at least on city signs, into even smaller chunks known as Little Armenia and Thai Town.
These days, I drive across the city and find more and more little blue rectangles -- announcing the existence of officially designated neighborhoods. Some, like Brookside and Mount Angelus, are small enough to run across without breaking a sweat.
I love Los Angeles. All of it. From San Pedro to Sylmar. And in the mania to divide our city into ever smaller units, I see a dark force at work.
Fewer people take pride in claiming as their home that larger, messier and more complicated place called Los Angeles.
We want to shrink our city and its sprawl. So we subdivide the communities we live in, and call these ever-tinier places home.
The term Angeleno was coined in the 19th century, when Los Angeles was still a burg clinging to its namesake river and a few nearby hillsides. But you don't hear it said with the same verve and chutzpah with which people on that other coast proclaim, "I'm a New Yorker."
We don't call ourselves Angelenos, but we argue about which streets and landmarks divide the Westside from the Eastside. We call Eagle Rock or West Adams home and are offended when told we really live in Highland Park or Mid-City.
My colleagues in The Times' Mapping L.A. project brought a lot of angst to the surface when they decided to carve Los Angeles into 113 manageable neighborhoods.
"Windsor Square is part of Hancock Park for all intents and purposes," a reader called "Lefty" wrote on the Mapping L.A. website, in response to their decision to make the former a separate neighborhood. "The only people who don't think so are people in Windsor Square who want to be above and beyond Hancock Park."
Yes, pride and property values are among the things at stake in these neighborhood boundaries. Generally speaking, the more ethnically and economically diverse a neighborhood is, the more people will argue about its borders.
Mid-Wilshire was the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the Mapping L.A. project. My colleagues defined it as the stretch of city bordered, roughly, by Crenshaw Boulevard, Fairfax Avenue, Pico Boulevard and 3rd Street.
This definition left some readers unhappy.
"I live in Park LaBrea and hardly ever go south of Wilshire," wrote Nancy Impastato. "We are more related to the Farmer's Market and the Grove."
