The strange existence of the La Brea Tar Pits, Los Angeles, California


The existence of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles has always puzzled me. And no, I don't mean the existence of Ice Age animals who lived there (they lived all over the world then), or the existence of pool of black gooey tar. I'm puzzled as to why such a large area in such a crowded city has been preserved.

I recently listened to Adam Corolla's comical take on the La Brea Tar Pits. And not only is it brilliantly funny, it really makes sense. He wonders why a city would bother to preserve a big open area of grass, mud, and tar. And yes, if you've never been there, that's really all the La Brea Tar Pits is. Sure, there's a little museum, and there are fiberglass statues of Ice Age animals, but the place is really just about tar pits. Yes, pits of tar. That black, gooey stuff that sticks to your feet after you've been on the beach in Southern California. Adam mentions that, and it's true. I always had to scrape tar off of my feet when I came home from from the beach in Santa Barbara. It stained the carpets of my car. It's black, sticky, and messy. And it smells bad.

I've been to the La Brea Tar Pits more times than I can count, and I'm always up for another visit. But I've always considered myself kinda weird. I like open places like that. I like to imagine another time - in this instance, about 10,000 years ago. I go to historic buildings, I visit arboretums.

What Adam suggests is something that I've always wondered about. Why isn't there the type of museum that most people like there? Why just an empty area with pools of tar all over the place? Why not a museum of baseball stuff, or football? Even though that stuff doesn't interest me, I know that it's what most people just absolutely love. And when Adam suggests paving it all over, well, he's absolutely right - because that's exactly what the city of Los Angeles did. Pretty much the whole area of Southern California was just as nasty and unpleasant as the La Brea Tar Pits before it was cleaned up. There was tar, and mud, and ooze, and mosquitos, and lots of reasons why people wouldn't want to ever live there. And it was all cleaned up through some of the most gigantic engineering projects in a modern city. And they did such a perfect job that most people wouldn't guess in a million years that areas like La Brea (which is Spanish for "the tar") and La Cienega (which is just a nice way of saying "the swamp") were pretty unpleasant areas for people until they were drained off and cleaned up. What's the Spanish word for "mosquitos"? Malaria?

But somehow, and for whatever reason, this place of expensive real estate has remained pretty much as it's been since the end of the Ice Age. The tar, the swamp. And I like going to places like that. Apparently other people do, too. If you go there, look out for the tar, the mud, and probably mosquitos, too.
Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) with Brad today on Patreon!

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more