Close-up : Cartographer to the Pols

If Los Angeles were to have an encyclopedia written about it, the editors would have to look no farther than Scott Rittenhouse. Ask him where the city’s oldest water line is or the number of active oil fields or which neighborhoods are declining in population, and he will respond immediately (7th Street; 20, and Reseda, Hollywood and West Adams, among others).

Rittenhouse, who has worked for the Citywide Planning Division of the city’s Planning Department for nearly six years, has no official title, but “cartographer to the city” or “municipal researcher” or “historian of the Southland” would all be appropriate. Since 1992, Rittenhouse, 36, has produced more than 100 maps on such subjects as Los Angeles’ prehistoric archeological sites, paleontological reserves, landslide areas and ground-water contamination. Many of the maps--which look more like washed-out blueprints than something from National Geographic--are for the City Council, which uses them when it prepares and debates the city’s long-range development plan. Rittenhouse also churns out charts and graphs, but maps are what he loves.

Rittenhouse tends to talk in extended, jargon-filled sentences (frequently separated with the question, “right?”) that nevertheless convey his passion for digging out arcane facts. “My job, essentially, for the last three years, has been to do research, which is to say, to identify where you can find different kinds of environmental information--right?--which the California Environmental Quality Act requires you to report on, and to try to compile it and organize it in a fashion so a person can understand what the environmental impact will be for that particular area.”

He’s currently compiling information on the city’s waste disposal system. He has already toured the Hyperion and Tillman sewage treatment plants and interviewed staff at both facilities. He hopes to determine, among other things, how much waste water is generated in different parts of the city and how much of that is treatable. For another project, he is mapping the location of every school in Los Angeles, the number of students living near the school, the authorized capacity for the school and growth trends. He expects to present both projects to the City Council by the end of June.

Rittenhouse’s office pod is so jammed that you get the impression all of his research can be found there. Dozens of rolled-up blueprints stand in one corner; three-ring binders are crammed into bookcases; file cabinets line an entire divider, and the remaining wall space is covered with maps, graphs, newspaper clippings, union buttons (he was recently elected to the board of governors of the city’s Engineers and Architects Assn.), and political paraphernalia (a bandanna from a Labor Day march, for instance). One corner is devoted to a giant box full of empty diet Coke bottles that he intends to recycle.

Rittenhouse was 3 years old when he first discovered maps, when his parents gave him some so that he and his two brothers would be entertained on long car trips. When he spent two years in the U.S. Army patrolling the Czechoslovakian border, he collected maps of every city he visited. He moved from Virginia to Los Angeles in 1986 to earn his master’s in planning and public administration at USC. Rittenhouse admits he likes to make maps of the city even when he’s not asked to. He says it helps clear his head. “I like information,” he says. “I am--what do you call it?--an information junkie. I like to know how things work, and maps and numbers tell us how.”