There's a lot of ah and hmmm in L.A. Noire, but ambiguity's not the game's only strength. Another is the environment: miles of beautiful Angeleno real estate enjoying the quiet years before the Bonaventure landed. One of the reasons why dad and I spent an entire afternoon playing the game without even cracking the spine on Cole Phelps' notebook, in fact, was because dad was in a nostalgic mood. We had a sweet car - a brand new '47 Ford with a V8 sound effect incorrectly applied to a six cylinder engine - and he really wanted to tool around for a bit, griping about the the wrong gear ratio noises, and hopefully finding the Richfield Tower.
Built by the Richfield Oil company in 1929, the tower was a glorious, gaudy, and yet somehow serious thing. Its black marble and gold leaf exterior hinted at the nature of the geysering fortune that built it, while a weird flattened spire stuck on top served as a reminder that, even as America lurched into the depression, it was willing to spend considerable amounts of cash on follies, just so long as they looked cool enough in the publicity pictures.
In the publicity pictures, the Richfield Tower looks like a cross between Liberace's refrigerator and an over-engineered art deco tombstone, in fact. It was torn down in 1969, and my dad hadn't seen it since 1961 when he left L.A. to become a priest. I wasn't expecting to see it in the game, because I'd never heard anyone but him ever talking about it. I told dad we'd look for it, but I wasn't optimistic.
I'll never forget the moment we found it. Dad could just about remember the cross-streets - 6th and Flower - and I had a little trouble fiddling round in the game's map to set a waypoint. Then we were off. On the drive, dad kept up a low-level muttering trail of recollections and fiercely specific critiques: the lamps on this bridge were right, but the large dumpsters in alleyways weren't like anything he remembered seeing; a gas station's Coke machine was just perfect, but little skirtings of exposed brickwork around the low walls of vacant lots 'didn't seem very Californian'; this was meant to be 1947? Why was that a 1950 Chevy, then? When we finally turned onto 6th, though, he suddenly stopped talking.
Like any son with a father in his late 60s, I assumed his sudden silence meant he was having a minor cardiac event. He wasn't, however: he was simply back in the presence of a building he hadn't seen in half a century.
We got out of the car and circled the mass of black marble. Dad didn't say much for a minute or so, but I was astonished that this forgotten edifice had made the cut in Rockstar's highly compressed take on Los Angeles. As landmarks go, it was long gone in real life, and in California, long gone generally means it's also forgotten. It was never a world-famous edifice, like the bleached white sepulchre of City Hall that dwarfs the surrounding area in the game (in 2012, however, it looks quaint, cruelly hemmed in by glass and steel megastructures), and it wasn't particularly chic, like the Public Library, the pyramid spire of which you can see briefly in the game's opening credits. It's the kind of building that wouldn't really be missed, and yet here it was, and dad was visibly shaken.
