It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby?
I'm in the Central Valley (CA), and I notice that this is a pattern that seems to be repeated up and down the 99 (Downtown parallels the freeway while the rest of the city exists on a normal grid).
It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby?
That would make a cool study.