Every incorporated city in LA County gets a room of its own for the two years leading up to the summer of 2028. A team from that city fills it. One standard decides what stays, held at Hyakutake, applied the same way in Bell Gardens as in Beverly Hills. The date is the clock. The record is the point.
Hyakutake is a comet. It came close in 1996 and won't again for seventy thousand years.
That one question is what separates this from a content quota. A team isn't filing to hit a number. They're deciding, week after week, what in their own city is worth carrying forward, then making the case for it in footage, photographs, oral history, or writing. Nobody upstream tells them what qualifies.
Four format studies, so the standard reads as a set of judgments rather than a promise. Three kept, one not, with the reason each way.
A twenty-block walk east from the Blue Line stop, filed as photograph + oral history over eleven visits. Kept for the way the record refuses to editorialize a place that has been editorialized about for decades.
Four minutes of video at 6:47 AM every Tuesday for a season. Kept because it is what the city actually sounds like at the hour it hands itself over.
Three oral histories about the same 130-year-old vine, filed independently by the team. Kept as one accession because the redundancy is the point.
Not kept. The Mission has a permanent archive of its own. The 88 exists for what isn't already being kept somewhere.
Mid-Depression, thirty-seven nations came anyway. LA built the first athletes' village on a bean field in Baldwin Hills, then tore it down.
Privately financed, existing venues, a $232.5M surplus that has funded Southern California youth sport for four decades through the LA84 Foundation.
Six weeks, forty-plus venues, no new permanent construction. Nearly ten million people live inside the map. Almost none of them will be in a stadium.
Five to twelve people per roster, choosing the neighborhood, corridor, or place they'll cover, with nothing assigned from above. Two teams can choose the same place. When they do, their accounts link as two records of the same ground, and a handful of contested places are named at launch on purpose, offered as the most sought-after work in the league.
The room is held by filling it. No case-by-case judgment, no appeal to taste. The line is the same for all 88.
Contributors grant the archive a license and keep everything else. Stated once, before anyone signs, because a two-year commitment is only worth making if the terms are settled at the start.
The city nominates what matters. Hyakutake decides what's kept permanently. Said to every keeper before they sign.
Rank is accession rate. Pieces kept, over pieces filed.
One photograph every year from the same corner of Silva Street since 1954, when the trees were still shorter than the roofs. Kept because the shape of a postwar tract sixty-eight years in is what its architects imagined but never got to stand under.
The Season is the door most people walk through first: a free draft board across the six weeks of summer sport, played by team, by block, by bar. Nobody signs up to build an archive on a Tuesday. They sign up because their neighbor said the draft is Thursday.
A snake draft across sports and events, held live in the weeks before the summer. Points for podiums, records, and upsets. Standings update through all six weeks, then close. Free to enter, no wagering, no official affiliation.
Bragging rights, a perk tier, and one credit line in the film per participating team, carrying that team's name and its city. Eighty-eight lines, not eighty-eight thousand. Individual players are named in their own team's standing, which is public and permanent.
Each team seals The Promise of 2028 at recruitment: what this place is, and what would be missed if it disappeared. Nobody sees it again until the summer. During those six weeks they file The Record of 2028: what actually changed here, and what didn't. Hyakutake unlocks the Promise the same week the Record lands, so the before-and-after happens on its own with nobody staging the reveal.
One room per city, built by that city's own team over two years with the museum-builder that already exists. Each team titles its own room rather than filing it under the city's name plainly, in the register of naming something you intend to keep. Compton's team might call theirs Everything Still Standing on Alondra. That's the register.
A known name from that specific city: an athlete, an artist, a public figure. Their job is attention. A city's room gets press because someone who came up there put their name on it, and Hyakutake's plan to bring athletes and public figures into PROVENANCE lands somewhere already built.
A longtime resident with standing in the community. Their job is access. They are who gets a door opened, a family to sit for an oral history, a shop owner to talk on camera. In the harder-to-cover cities this is the more valuable of the two seats, and it is filled first.
The highest-kept work from each room goes to whichever LA institution's actual collecting mission matches it: JANM, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, the Chinese American Museum, ONE Archives, the Wende, the Autry, the Petersen, CAAM, and others. Each holds a piece of the whole. Los Angeles holds the archive, dispersed across every institution built to keep a part of its history.
Every incorporated city in LA County has a room. Open rooms are looking for their team. Held rooms have theirs. Contested rooms have two. Click any tile to enter its room.
Anyone can file. Outside the 88, individuals and block clubs and organizations. Nothing is filtered before it's read; every submission gets a written decision.
Six weeks, and almost none of us will be in a stadium. What the city decides is worth keeping runs longer than that, to the same standard everywhere in the county, independent of who drafted the best roster. Everything that mattered is still somewhere.