In a city that loves to sell itself, Wilshire Boulevard might have been the most heavily promoted street. Matt Roth says, "Promotion is designed to kind of soothe anger and worry and to minimize conflict. And I think artists are attracted to promotion as something to negate."

Roth, who is historian for the Automobile Club of Southern California, says the same artists who flocked to Los Angeles didn't take long to fashion a dark, dystopian vision of the place.

"It starts out with the noir fiction of Raymond Chandler; he has all kinds of real cutting put-downs of Wilshire Boulevard. He calls it a neon lighted slum. The art of David Hockney, he has a painting called Wilshire Boulevard which is this blank wall with bright sun hitting it and a stringy palm tree, and these alienated stick figures kind of lost in this sun-struck landscape."

It wasn't the sun that struck Wilshire Boulevard in a 1974 disaster film starring Charlton Heston. It was a 9.9 magnitude earthquake. In "Earthquake," a massive aftershock destroyed the graceful Wilshire Colonnade – then known as the Ahmanson Center, near Western Avenue.

Roth says, "There was this great underground film called 'Miracle Mile', which was this post nuclear fantasy which, through rather crude effects, shows this blown up Wilshire Boulevard."

Earthquakes and nuclear war, Roth says, were only the beginning.

"There's the Tommy Lee Jones movie "Volcano," which treats moviegoers to lava flows destroying the Wilshire streetscape."

So why have so many artists portrayed a catastrophe-prone Wilshire Boulevard? One prone to massive destruction on a regular basis?

Roth thinks, "It's precisely a reaction to the promotion of the kind of sunny environment where we can travel and shop in safety and freedom."

Of course, people with a long view of history might say Wilshire's connection with death and disaster dates way back. Wilshire, after all, is home to the La Brea tar pits, where prehistoric wooly mammoths and sabertooth cats met a sticky and untimely end. And 9,000 years ago, someone murdered a young woman and dumped her body in those same tar pits on what's now Wilshire Boulevard.

(Airdate for this story: 12/25/07)