I encourage you to check out an interesting article by Geoff Nicholson from the Los Angeles Review of Books, in which he seeks out the actual locations where a number of books take place, including I Am Legend.
I, and others, have made attempts to find the number of the house where Matheson lived on Cimarron Street, and it seems he simply doesn’t remember. Cimarron is a long street, stretching from above the 10 to well below the 105, and there’s also a Cimarron Avenue and a Cimarron Way in Gardena, which actually fit better with the geography of the novel, and although I enjoy an aimless drift more than most, a dozen-mile expedition to an unspecified address in Gardena was too nebulous even for me.
That said, Nicholson was able to retrace the steps of Charlton Heston from a number of locations used in the filming of The Omega Man. You can read the whole article here.
3 comments:
I had a very cool introduction to this book. When I was 13 in 1962, my family moved to Gardena from Compton just before I started at Junipero Serra High School. I had a strong interest in science fiction by then and picked up a copy of I Am Legend. Imagine how I felt when I read the passage where he turns off of Compton Blvd (now Marine Ave) onto Cimarron, sees the vampires at his house, drives through them and continues around the corner a short block to Haas and then right again on 152nd to Cimarron. Our house was right at the corner of Haas and 152nd. Now, this was 8 years after he wrote it, so I don't know if he was still there, but there's no question that his house must have been just a block over, Cimarron between 152nd and 154th. It was a real kick at the time.
That's a great story, daddyoyo. Thanks for sharing. I'm going to have to finally make a pilgrimage down to those few blocks of Cimarron.
The linked article has moved to this URL: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-walk-of-the-worlds/
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