A New Yorker mourns the conflagrations engulfing Los Angeles.
As fires across Los Angeles engulf an area triple the size of Manhattan, the extent of loss remains unknown. But we know the city will never be the same. Just as 9/11 forever changed the collective psyche of New York, the mortal, material and mental toll of these colossal urban fires will permanently transform the City of Angels.
New Yorkers and Angelenos have always shared a healthy competition, with the two coastal juggernauts at loggerheads over who rules whom in terms of culture, sports, cuisine, celebrity and diversity. In recent decades, Los Angeles has advanced dense urban living, with apartment buildings sprouting near new subways at a pace New Yorkers should at least respect. And while L.A. will always be a city about cars and stars, the mall and the sprawl, it represents a magnificent and unique urbanity, a magical, mystical grid where America’s manifest destiny thrusts into the mighty Pacific so forcefully that mountains ring the city as if to celebrate the collision.
I first visited California as a prospective student, ready to loathe it like any good, closed-minded East Coaster, and yet to my surprise, I was instantly enamored by the West Coast’s culture of freedom. I chose to study architecture at Berkeley, and returned there with my family during the pandemic, in part to inhale landscape in a way that is impossible “back east.” Those respites from New York‘s canyons of steel instilled in me a lifelong desire to cherish nature and imbue it in my work, which for most California architects is the inviolable North Star. The Case Study Houses embody L.A.’s particular radical environmental ethos, among them the famed Eames House, to which the Palisades fire came perilously close. The vertiginous Bridges and Keeler Houses have been destroyed among other experimental landmarks. More recent affordable apartments designed by trailblazers Michael Maltzan and Brooks and Scarpa stand strong as contemporary manifestations of this luminous housing tradition — rejoinders to the East Coast’s tendency to treat light as luxury and landscape as lucrative. By contrast, in the Palisades, even the mobile homes enjoyed stunning ocean views, at least until the fires came.
Los Angeles has always been about a certain suspended disbelief that nature can be shared by most everyone, despite that egalitarian fantasy’s dark underbelly. The water wars portrayed in “Chinatown.” The racial and social segregation in “Crash.” The road rage in “Falling Down.” The earthquakes and tsunamis in countless disaster movies. To live in L.A. is to intentionally numb oneself to painful truths, to imagine that we can will ourselves upon nature in order to revel in it. In this sense, it is the most American of cities.
The darkest danger of L.A. — given our ability to design most modern structures to withstand all but the worst earthquakes — is the annihilating force of fire, particularly for individuals, their possessions and their houses. The immutable disintegrates instantly into ash and smoke. I have some experience: Fire killed my maternal grandmother and devoured her family’s home when my mother was a child. It destroyed my car in college, along with most of my earthly belongings. And it threatened our family in 2020, when we were evacuated from the beginnings of the Glass Fire, the conflagration that swept across Napa Valley, in the same pandemic year a fiery red sky above San Francisco unleashed a soot storm reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter. Nothing we experienced, of course, approaches what Angelenos now suffer — but just the taste was terrifying.
To live in L.A. is to intentionally numb oneself to painful truths, to imagine that we can will ourselves upon nature in order to revel in it. In this sense, it is the most American of cities.
A friend said to me recently “fire is worse than water.” This is in part correct, though it depends on who you are and where you sit. Hurricane and flood damage is arguably as devastating as fire, especially for the vulnerable. Poor people residing in urban public housing, trailer parks and often inexpensive low-lying flood zones are all particularly at risk. These are the places and people for whom hurricanes represent outsized danger, at least for now. As global warming worsens, however, so will the impact on everyone, rich or poor, urban or rural.
Big cities are of course no strangers to floods or fire, but not like this. Fires once caricatured the Bronx and consumed London. But unlike the Great Chicago Fire, we don’t have Mrs. O’Leary’s cow to scapegoat. L.A. has no Rodney King to center this story upon. Its current inferno isn’t fueled by riots downtown or tinderboxes at its core, but rather the kindling at its limits.
That’s why these Los Angeles fires are not only different for California, they are a harbinger for us all. Fires have always been part of the American West, long before people settled there, and now they run rampant as temperatures rise and winds race, though questions must also be answered about the possible causes and catalysts beyond the global warming humans have wrought. California’s blazes have typically decimated low-density communities like Paradise during the hellacious Camp Fire, but with the distance steadily shrinking between the metropolis and its surrounding wilderness, the costs of bringing nature to multitudes or, more accurately, multitudes to nature, are burning ever brighter.
Consequently and consequentially, the fire this time is far deeper into the city than in the past, swallowing streets, sidewalks, and the homes they bind. If hurricanes disproportionately harm the poor, fire out west — and increasingly back east given the droughts and fires we recently encountered — now can indiscriminately devastate everyone. Perhaps in that horrifying reality, there is one ember of hope: That the leaders of our world and the wealthy who support them will take climate change more seriously when it rages after them with equal abandon.
For now though, we grieve for our sister city, for our dear friends and for their all too human disbelief falling out of suspension.
Perhaps the leaders of our world and the wealthy who support them will take climate change more seriously when it rages after them with equal abandon.
Great cities are alloys of narrative and artifact — of the stories we believe and the places we build — that together anchor our otherwise untethered, digital epoch. But as Richard Berman long ago observed, bricks and mortar too can liquify, but only when we become complacent. Like New York did after 9/11, Los Angeles will no doubt rebuild, but how? Perhaps progressive residents could choose to replace 10,000 increasingly uninsurable single-family home sites, now reduced to deeply felt scars amidst trees and highways, with 100 new fire-resilient apartment buildings amidst parks and subways, all in the hopes of creating tougher, taller communities with smaller carbon footprints.
But regardless of how the great city of L.A. rebuilds, the ugly forces that fueled this calamity remain. Our fact-free politics serves only as an accelerant. So the hope we have lies with the citizenry itself, with the ability of those of us in cities to cement our compact, with our conviction to always project empathy towards our fellow urbanites in harm’s way. As dangers to us all grow, as threats mount to the lives we in cities have forged around common purpose and pleasure, so must our love of one another, a sorority of urbanity that stands united against the fires this time, and next.