It’s not uncommon to live in Los Angeles and still feel like a tourist. The author and seminal California-commentator Carey McWilliams remarked that it took seven years of living in Los Angeles before he no longer felt in exile, and the city has struggled with a history of atomization and segregation in the 60ish years since. There aren’t as many glaring shiny erections or obvious historical landmarks (maps to star homes don’t count) declaring themselves on the landscape, but Los Angeles is dense with urban cultural significance, lying just out of sight. But now, thanks to a new online resource called HistoricPlacesLA, that history is becoming much more accessible.

A joint project from The Getty Conservation Institute and the City of Los Angeles, HistoricPlacesLA is essentially an online database of all the significant physical urban elements in LA – from buildings to bridges, parks to streets, districts to ditches. Everything in the inventory is described in detail, mapped, and accessible to everyone, while perhaps still most precious for those directly invested in specific properties – developers, owners, architects. Most of the data comes by way of SurveyLA, an ambitious citywide review of historic resources (also under the Getty + City of LA umbrella) that began in 2010. Prior to that, only 15% of the city had been combed over – by now, SurveyLA has nearly finished sifting through the remaining majority.

The resources on HistoricPlacesLA are perusable through such handy categories as “Modernism in LA”, "National Register of Historic Places", or “The Entertainment Industry”, in an inventory managed through Arches: an open source, customizable software specifically for inventories of “all types of immovable cultural heritage”. Records are also searchable through a citywide map or specific time frame. In its fully realized form, anyone (visitor or native) in Los Angeles should be able to access the history of their surrounding space, and gain a better understanding of the city’s identify.

It’s a bit mind-boggling that a resource like this didn’t exist until now. The closest thing to HistoricPlacesLA is the Department of City Planning’s Zone Information Map Access System (a spiffy ZIMAS), which lists local/state/federal historic preservation designations to inform planning processes, used mostly on the wonkish end. But on average, ZIMAS doesn’t provide as detailed information as HistoricPlacesLA, and differs in a few key ways: it doesn’t include the info culled from SurveyLA, you can’t search for specific information, nor can you export data. When SurveyLA completes its city-wide study, slated for 2017, HistoricPlacesLA will be the authoritative record of Los Angeles' vast place-based history.