Given a point $s$ and a set of $h$ pairwise disjoint polygonal obstacles of totally $n$ vertices in the plane, we present a new algorithm for building an $L_1$ shortest path map of size O(n) in $O(T)$ time and O(n) space such that for any query point $t$, the length of the $L_1$ shortest obstacle-avoiding path from $s$ to $t$ can be reported in $O(\log n)$ time and the actual shortest path can be found in additional time proportional to the number of edges of the path, where $T$ is the time for triangulating the free space. It is currently known that $T=O(n+h\log^{1+ε}h)$ for an arbitrarily small constant $ε>0$. If the triangulation can be done optimally (i.e., $T=O(n+h\log h)$), then our algorithm is optimal. Previously, the best algorithm computes such an $L_1$ shortest path map in $O(n\log n)$ time and O(n) space. Our techniques can be extended to obtain improved results for other related problems, e.g., computing the $L_1$ geodesic Voronoi diagram for a set of point sites in a polygonal domain, finding shortest paths with fixed orientations, finding approximate Euclidean shortest paths, etc.