About the Laguna Memory Atlas

A field guide to a layered city, in time for its centennial.

I moved to Laguna Beach during a transition in my life. At first I saw what everyone sees: the coves, the light, the cliffs, the galleries. The longer I walked, the more the city began to speak in layers.

A surf break was also a youth archive. A bar was also a music history. A canyon was also a political struggle. A storefront was also a vanished café. A beach was also an Indigenous landscape.

The Laguna Memory Atlas grew out of that listening. It is a multimedia map of the city's cultural history, built to make those layers visible to anyone willing to walk and pay attention.

An atlas is usually a book of maps. This project treats Laguna Beach itself as the book. The coastline, the canyon roads, the studios, the bars, the trails, the schools, the storefronts, the vanished cafés all become its pages. The map becomes a way to move through time.

The Atlas holds Indigenous Acjachemen history alongside the early plein air painters; the Festival of Arts beside the Beat-era coffeehouses; queer nightlife beside surf breaks; canyon environmental fights beside the vanished houseparty scenes. Some entries rest on documented archives. Others live in oral history, rumor, and the memories of people who were there. The project is built to hold both certainty and curiosity.

In June 2027, Laguna Beach will mark one hundred years as a city. The centennial is the right moment to ask what the place has been, what it is becoming, and what it should refuse to forget. The Atlas is one answer.

The mobile experience is built for people on the sidewalk. Compass-led, audio-first, with archival photographs unlocking as you reach the places they were taken. A visitor begins at a coffeehouse, walks toward the beach, and hears a story about the surf scene as they pass the break it shaped. The phone disappears. The town does the talking.

The Atlas is the work of David Leonard, a media artist and educator behind BeHere/1942, the permanent augmented reality installation at the Japanese American National Museum. Laguna Beach is the second city he has tried to make visible to itself. Every entry in the Atlas began as a walk.

Help build the archive.

This is a project in progress, and it depends on the people who were there. If you have a photograph of a place that no longer exists, a story about a bar or a gallery or a coffeehouse or a beach, a correction to something the Atlas has gotten wrong, or a memory you would like to record before it slips further away, the Atlas is built to receive it.

The intake form lets you type a story or record up to three minutes of audio. You can attach a photograph or a scan. You can pin the contribution to its address, search for a landmark, or pick from the places already on the map. You decide how you want to be credited, from your full name down to fully anonymous. You decide how the contribution can be reused, from open licensing for any use with credit, to non-commercial only, to display-only for family material you want preserved but not redistributed. Every contribution is read by an editor before anything goes public. A private link in your receipt lets you withdraw the story at any time, for any reason.

It takes about five minutes. The Atlas grows by these contributions. Without them, the city writes its history through real estate listings and chamber-of-commerce brochures, and the parts that mattered most are usually the parts that disappear first.