The high curbs remain, stamped with the year of their creation: 1927. A walk up the path behind my former apartment is actually a concrete hike along this four-score-old street, and on a lark I sometimes go back to the old 'hood just for nostalgic aerobic exercise.

Although from all the lights and mailboxes you might not know it, the peaks of the Santa Monica mountains--three or four miles west of where the range ends--still hover above the city. When Rudolf Schindler built his home in the beanfields west of Hollywood, one could trek up those cliffs without having to sidestep hip-hop Hummers or even ah-ooga Model T's. 85 years later, homes fill in the canyon like a flock of resting pigeons. Besides the vertiginous weedy cliffs (sometimes reinforced and covered in a Dada/Christo fusion of plastic and wire to lessen mudslides), nothing remains to resemble pre-development history except the precipitous angle at which these fault-induced hills give a northern boundary to the L.A. basin. At the La Brea Tar Pits, a museum's mural shows the very same outline unmarred, without stilts to prop up stars' balconies and the ruthlessly eclectic architecture. The silent film era captured the last images of wild (and early 20th century) Los Angeles before the city crawled into every nook and cranny. Though the residents change, and the land may shift and move an inch or two every millennium, the iconic horizon remains the same.