Sam Sweet’s 'All Night Menu' Chronicles LA Through Street Addresses

Writer and publisher Sam Sweet has completed his five-volume series 'All Night Menu,' a fragmentary history of Los Angeles organized by street addresses. Each booklet, produced over ten years with the final volume appearing in 2025, takes a single address as a starting point to explore the city's layered past. Sweet's project includes a website with interviews of local figures such as artist Senga Nengudi, late publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, and Raymond Neutra (son of architect Richard Neutra), using a preset grid of 24 questions to retrieve sense memories of specific spaces. The booklets close with time-lapse sequences of a single address's transformation over decades, reminiscent of Ed Ruscha's photographic documentation. Sweet's work draws attention to the invisible and the ephemeral, highlighting long-demolished buildings and marginalized figures. The final volume's release event in November 2025 at the Philosophical Research Society featured a recording of Big Jay McNeely's 'There Is Something on Your Mind' and a reading about the defaced monument at Dominguez Field, where aviator Arch Hoxsey set a flight record in 1910.