Screen shot from www.kcet.org
A popular post last week featured a hand-drawn, bluntly worded map sent to KCET as part of a “Map Your L.A.” contest that illustrated Los Angeles as divided along racial, ethnic and class lines.
The map resonated for readers, with people posting comments like “Someone forgot about Koreatown” and “I’m one o’ dem scary white people in the hills” (yes, the map labeled one area as “scary white people in the hills”). Other areas were labeled simply as “black,” “brownish,” “hipsters” or “homeless.”
The map contest has continued, and while the entries since haven’t packed quite the same punch, one stood out for depicting what is undoubtedly the tiniest of the city’s officially recognized ethnic neighborhoods, Little Bangladesh.
The neighborhood, part of the larger Koreatown area, received its official designation in recent months after protracted wrangling among different ethnic groups in the area. It is a short strip along 3rd Street between New Hampshire and Alexandria avenues, named for the Bangladeshi immigrants who began settling in Koreatown about two decades ago.
From the KCET Departures contest entry page:
Nate’s personal map, “Behold, Little Bangladesh” focuses on a small area in Los Angeles, illustrated in the familiar digital format used commonly on sites like Google Maps. About a ten block radius near the Normandie & 3rd Street intersection are mapped with numbered icons explained in a legend below to highlight places of interest.
The deadline for contest entries is August 1. KCET Departures will include the first 25 submissions in a mapping compilation book to be released next fall.
