Entire towns have vanished from the Southland.
The street grid of Morocco once stretched across the same gilded real estate occupied today by Beverly Hills. The ruins of a town named Minneapolis lie beneath Atwater Village. The independent city of Tropico melded with Glendale.
In an earlier age, geographic names were more ephemeral -- especially during boom years like those of the 1880s. Maps from that period, like this 1888 official county map, read as a catalog of failed real estate developments. Kenilworth. Studebaker. Nadeau. Gallatin. Clearwater.