Thomas Guide SigAlert : After 76 Years, Every Page, Grid Has Been Renumbered

Cabdriver Yahya Said could have used a map to help navigate through his confusion Saturday outside Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

The 28-year-old taxi driver was thumbing through the latest edition of the Thomas Guide, considered the bible of street directories in a town that worships automobile travel. And a strange feeling was coming over him.

The Biltmore Hotel wasn’t where it should have been. Neither was Los Angeles International Airport or West Hollywood or anything else.

For the first time in their 76 years, map makers at Thomas Bros. Co. have renumbered every page and every grid for every street in Los Angeles County for their popular street map book.

They have done the same thing in Orange County and will soon unveil reorganized 1992 maps for Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Cartographers say the map redesign is a onetime change that was needed so they could correct past mapping errors, make room for new street listings in fast-growing Southern California and begin using a new computerized map-drawing process.

They promise that they will never again have to switch page and grid numbers--which allow motorists to look up 53,000 Los Angeles County street names and 356,000 block numbers in an index and then find them on map pages.

But even once is too much for tens of thousands of deliverymen, firefighters and others who routinely rely on Thomas Guide map coordinates when they are dispatched each day across the Los Angeles Basin.

Individuals who look up occasional addresses in the street guide probably will not be as affected by the change as businesses that rely heavily on the maps. Workers such as messengers or plumbers could become lost if they are carrying a 1991 map book but their dispatcher is using a 1992 edition.

For example, the Criminal Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles is found on Page 44, Grid D-2 in old map books. But it’s on Page 594, Grid G-3 in the new one, which starts with page 480.

A pizza deliveryman taking a pepperoni special to a house off McBean Parkway in Valencia could wind up in east Winnemucca, Nev., if he diligently relies on the new grid system when his pizzeria order-taker is using the old numbers.

That’s because Valencia’s old map page number--127--has been assigned to the remote Nevada desert town by Thomas Bros. cartographers.

“ ‘Oh my God!’ were the first words out of my mouth when I saw the new book,” said Christine Wegeles, an executive with SuperShuttle, an airport transportation company based near Los Angeles International Airport. Her 500 van drivers are dispatched by computers that use the old grid coordinates.

Los Angeles County firefighters often use Thomas Guide grid numbers to help find addresses in emergencies. “It’s going to cost us money. We’ll probably have to buy 300 or so new books,” said Capt. William Blackburn, a Fire Department dispatch supervisor.

The retail cost for the Los Angeles book is $15.95.

Newspapers and television stations likewise rely on the maps when calamities such as fires occur. Grid numbers are used to pinpoint locations when City News Service notifies news outlets of breaking news stories.

“We’re dreading it, honestly,” said Pat Teague, editor of City News Service.

Taxi driver Said thumbed past pages for North Hollywood, Northridge and Glendale on Saturday before he found the West Hollywood street he was searching for. He was examining one of the new books for the first time as his well-worn 1990 directory sat on his dashboard.

One of his bosses at L.A. Taxi, company training director Walter Snipes, said the new maps have bigger print, which is easier to read. But the cab company’s dispatching system uses the old map book coordinates and his firm’s 1,000 drivers “are a little apprehensive about it,” Snipes said.

Vicki Whiteford, manager of Executive Express courier service in West Los Angeles, said she has memorized many of the old book’s page and grid numbers after spending years using them to direct her company’s 60 messengers around town.

“This is going to be a pain,” she said.

Comments like that pain Thomas Bros. officials. But they contend that they didn’t make a wrong turn when they drew up new maps and the new numbering system. The new book is 30% larger and includes more color keys, they say.

Map makers say they had run out of page numbers for the Los Angeles area. Their new numbering system assigns numerical designations to the entire United States, something that could eventually allow such things as personalized wide-range tracking by satellite.

“The changes are a shock to a lot of people,” said Glen Jansma, cartography manager for the Irvine-based company.

Tom Lennon, who for 35 years drew new streets for Thomas Guide map pages by hand, said the switch to computerized drawing means all pages are the same scale. And for the first time, all streets and neighborhoods are proportionally sized.

In the past, Lennon said, he sometimes had to squeeze in new housing tracts at the edge of hand-drawn base maps that company founder George Coupland Thomas created in 1935.

“The rule always was: ‘Thou shalt not change Mr. Thomas’ page numbers,’ ” Lennon said. “But it had to be done.”

Company public relations director Terri M. Hayes said map makers tried to give their biggest customers--those using hundreds of street guides--an early warning about the changes.

She said special tables at the back of the new street guides can be used to convert the new grids to the old numbers. Officials are helping firms add the new grid designations to computer programs that had been set up to use the old map numbers, Hayes said.

But it will take time to change data banks such as the one used by the 9,000-member San Fernando Valley Board of Realtors, said James L. Link, executive vice president of the Van Nuys-based group. The computer uses Thomas Guide grid coordinates to keep track of houses that are for sale.

“Brokers live and die with those books,” he said. “Thomas Guides are a lot more than ‘How do I get there? Do I turn left or right?’ ”