'The Inland Empire'

On the great world map in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, California hangs upside down, close to Cipango. Geographical intelligence was, of course, a foundation of Venetian wealth, so unlike other contemporary maps in European courts, the ducal map correctly depicts the exotic land of Califa as a peninsula, not an island. There is an elegantly inscribed notation in the part that is today Southern California. It reads "Antropofaggi--Eaters of Men." Perhaps the cartographer was predicting realtors.

A month after admiring the Doges' map rooms, I was buying mangos from an illegal street vendor on Base Line Street in San Bernardino. West San Bernardino is an older Mexican and black neighborhood at the foot of Cajon Pass. It sits uncomfortably on the San Jacinto Fault, which is almost as dangerous as its nearby big brother, the San Andreas. Coyotes still prowl in the washes, and the Santa Ana winds periodically blow out of the pass like dry hurricanes. Hard times have reigned here since the railroad repair shops closed a decade ago. On most upscale mental maps of Southern California, this is still antropofaggi territory: the wild void that lies east of ethnic cuisine.

In fact, Base Line Street is the Euclidean progenitor, the Ur-line, from which all the glamorous movieland boulevards and drives--Wilshire, Rodeo, Sunset and so on--were originally derived. It was plotted in November 1852 by Col. Henry Washington, working under contract to Samuel King, the Surveyor General of California. The summer before, a survey point had been established on the top of Mt. Diablo, incorporating the Bay Area into the conquering Jeffersonian grid. Now it was Southern California's turn to submit to the geometry of Manifest Destiny. The colonel and his party of a dozen men first established a cadastral Initial Point on 10,000-foot-high Mt. San Bernardino, then laid down the Base and Principal Meridian lines. They are the absolute coordinates from which Southern California has been subsequently subdivided.

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