Move Over, Thomas Guide : Central Library to Display Rare Collection of Pictorial Maps

Cartographer Jo Mora could have drawn a great map to the place.

He probably would have shown a line of overheated cars stuck on a jammed Hollywood Freeway. And a blizzard of dirt being shoveled out of that big hole causing the detour at 1st and Grand.

Maybe he would have even pictured wisps of smoke and firefighters with spurting hoses encircling a pointy-topped building at 5th and Flower.

That’s the Los Angeles Central Library, where an unusual collection of work by Mora and other map-drawing artists is being removed from a corner of the basement so it can be showcased for the first time.

Mora was a pictorial map maker who created colorful and whimsically illustrated guides to Los Angeles and the West between the 1920s and ‘40s.

There were no lines for streets and dots for cities for him.

He depicted Hermosa Beach by sketching swimmers splashing one another in the face and surfers toppling from their boards into the surf in a 1942 map.

A smiling lion wearing bib overalls and a straw hat and clutching a hoe in its paws showed the location of Alhambra and its nearby Lion Farm. A hobo marching down the railroad tracks with his belongings tied to a stick symbolized Santa Fe Springs. An old-timer whittling a piece of wood indicated the National Military Home next to Westwood.

In fact, colorful faces and factoids cover every inch of the “Historical and Recreational Map of Los Angeles” that chronicles the region’s growth over 400 years.

The poster-size piece is one of the 41 pictorial maps drawn by more than 30 artists/cartographers that will be put on display in the library gallery starting Wednesday.

The exhibit will include a 1933 guide commissioned by the Automobile Club of Southern California that showed “Fifty Famous Landmarks of Southern California” and defined--for perhaps the first time--Southern California’s boundaries.

A 1940 map showing an extremely exaggerated outline of California that dominates the other 47 states will be shown. With it, East Coast map maker Ernest Dudley Chase uncannily predated the 1976 New Yorker “California” magazine cover by Saul Steinberg.

Rare, 60-year-old pictorial maps of Hawaii, France, Africa, Mexico, China and Japan and even older depictions of the Los Angeles area will also be on display through Sept. 3.

“Topographical maps and road maps can be so dry. But these aren’t--these are fun,” said Glen Creason, map librarian for the city library system for seven years. “They’re like magnets when we pull them out: People are really drawn to them.”

Experts say illustrated maps date back to the Aztecs, who used drawings as reference points on their maps. In the last 100 years, they have been used in the United States as advertising gimmicks, travel brochures and tourist souvenirs.

But most pictorial maps are nonetheless “graphically correct, very accurate,” according to Creason, a 47-year-old Silver Lake resident who has worked at the library for 16 years. “True map snobs may consider them lowbrow. But I don’t.”

The library has about 300 pictorial maps in its collection. Officials credit the disastrous 1986 library fire for bringing them to light.

Library workers learned the scope of their pictorial map holdings when they relocated the 80,000-map collection from World War I-era steel cabinets into new storage units after the blaze. Because of the sturdy containers, only 100 or so maps were lost.

“Some of these have been in drawers for 50 years,” Creason said, pulling out a 1913 panorama of the New York Zoological Park detailed enough to depict zoo visitors looking at individual animals.

The fire, set by an arsonist in the fiction area next to the map room, destroyed 400,000 books and caused water damage to 700,000 others. Creason had arrived to start his shift shortly after it began; like many others, he initially figured it would be a minor blaze.

“I remember standing outside when white smoke started coming out and making the worst joke of my life,” Creason recalls. “I said, ‘Well, it looks like they’ve picked a new Pope.’ And people around me said no, it meant that paper was starting to burn.”

The library fire is the kind of pivotal moment in a community that Mora liked to highlight in his maps. His drawings and text took note of things such as the 1853 death of famed bandit Joaquin Murrieta, the installation of the 100-inch telescope atop Mt. Wilson in 1918, the 1933 Long Beach earthquake and the 1938 Los Angeles floods.

The Uruguay-born artist--who died in 1947 at age 71--used cartoon-like illustrations. “I render my message in the humorous manner as I’d rather find you with a smile of understanding than a frown of research,” he wrote at the top of one map.

These days, the library watches for new pictorial maps--especially ones offered for free by local chambers of commerce or other groups. Those don’t tax its sparse acquisition budget.

Recent ones that will be included in the exhibit include the “Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Los Angeles,” produced in 1985 by Alice Klarke, and a brand-new map of Route 66, the famed cross-country highway that played a major role in Los Angeles’ growth.

Creason sent his own $5 check for a copy of it after Santa Barbara map company representative Will Tefft raved about the detailed pictorial map--completed last year by artist Bob Waldmire of Hackberry, Ariz.

Waldmire, 50, spent 4 1/2 years researching and drawing his 6-foot, 3-inch Route 66 guide. “I just hit the road and talked to a lot of people when I decided to do Route 66,” he said.

The trek was so enjoyable that Waldmire decided to put down stakes in Hackberry and turn an abandoned Route 66 gas station into a do-it-yourself museum.

Creason, meantime, keeps on the lookout for maps to decorate his Silver Lake home. His favorite find is a Jo Mora pictorial map that he purchased for $25 at a Venice junk shop. It’s on his living room wall--opposite the topographical map of his hometown of South Gate.

Mora is special, Creason said.

“To me, he’s the Rembrandt of pictorial mapping.”