Berlin Wall pieces in California

Thirteen of the atlas's 91 American sites are in California, and Los Angeles holds more documented sites than any city outside Berlin. The reason is largely one institution. The Wende Museum in Culver City collects the everyday material of the GDR, and for the twentieth anniversary in 2009 it installed ten segments on Wilshire Boulevard: close to forty feet, the longest stretch of the Wall standing anywhere outside Berlin, half of it repainted by invited artists and, in 2011, painted on the east-facing backs that nobody could reach while the Wall stood. The museum's own segment, painted by Thierry Noir, stands at its door in Culver City.

The rest of the state divides between Reagan and the universities. The Reagan Presidential Library at Simi Valley received its 6,338 lb panel in April 1991 and Reagan welcomed it himself; the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara uses its section to argue his part in ending communist rule in Eastern Europe, and at Ronald Reagan Park in San Bernardino, dedicated during his centenary, the park's name does the work a museum label would do elsewhere. The Nixon library at Yorba Linda reads its section through détente instead. On the campuses, a professor at Loyola Marymount asked the mayor of Berlin for a piece to mark the twinning of the two cities, Chapman got one in 1998 when Berlin had one left to give away, the Hoover Institution bought a fragment as a document for its archive, and the army's language school at the Presidio of Monterey keeps three segments. At Rosenthal's winery in Malibu, visitors to the vineyard can see pieces that the owner bought at a private auction. Two segments outside the Mountain View library were identified in 2015 by the Berliner who had painted one of them in 1990 as a farewell to a friend. And the segment at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes carries a letter addressed to President Trump: refused by the White House, photographed against the Mexican border fence, and given to a Mexican-American museum in 2020.