It took a wind-whipped inferno to shrink the famously sprawling geography of Los Angeles — somehow, when everyone knows someone who has lost everything, the place feels smaller.
Phones suddenly blare with false evacuation alarms — and then quietly ding with texts from long-lost classmates and distant cousins checking in. There are “you loot, we shoot” signs outside some homes, but the donation centers are overflowing. Hundreds of residents who live in some of the priciest ZIP codes in the country have been sleeping on cots in Red Cross shelters.
Entire blocks have been reduced to ashy debris while one house stands alone — and it’s hard to know whether it was protected by private firefighters only money can buy, grace or the ruthless whims of the Santa Ana winds. The civic fabric feels both tattered and taut.
Are the fires the great equalizer, the great divider or the great uniter of Los Angeles? Or, like so much else about this catastrophe, are they all of those things at once?
Seated in a wheelchair outside the doors of an evacuation shelter in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood, Jay Solton, 85, embodied this jumble of personal and communal trauma and resilience.
She was beaming, yet mourning, and her life was on hold at a local recreation center. Her career had touched the twin obsessions of Los Angeles: real estate and Hollywood. She told stories of whiling away afternoons with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in the 1960s, and of growing close to her newest neighbors but growing estranged from her sons.
When the fire threatened her small apartment building in the neighborhood of Brentwood, Ms. Solton decided to leave with her neighbor and head to the shelter. It was the first time she’d been forced to evacuate in her more than six decades in Los Angeles. With the power out and winds still howling, Ms. Solton felt safer staying away. It sounds strange, she said, but there was almost something uplifting about the sudden, collective strain.
“When you are being treated as nicely as we are, it leaves very little room for any kind of anguish,” she said of her temporary home at the evacuation center, where the Southern California sunshine was supplying a jarring counterpoint to the devastation in Pacific Palisades, just six miles west. When one man stopped to compliment her, she joked with him that she had already met another suitor inside.
“Knowing that there is friendship and decency among all groups of people who have come together,” she said, “I think this is going to make L.A. stronger.”
Perhaps a kind of numbness has always hovered over Los Angeles. The sort that allows millions of residents to ignore the thousands of people sleeping under freeways in every neighborhood and seemingly around every street corner. The sort that allows you to keep kinship with the constant threat of earthquakes, high winds, mudslides and fires.
More than a week after the wildfires erupted, that numbness looks a lot more like grieving.
“I’m seeing this incredible loss, incredible pain that you just can see in people’s eyes,” said Arielle Chiara Khonsary, 30, a fifth-generation Angeleno whose Palisades home was destroyed. “Like, you meet eyes in the elevator and you just know this is somebody who has lost everything.”
Bobby McDonald, 78, has lived in and around Altadena for nearly three decades. He was stunned when he saw the house he had sold two years ago burning on local television. Swaths of his neighborhood remind him of something he never thought his neighborhood would remind him of — his time fighting in Vietnam.
“It looked like what I saw over there,” he said.
Mr. McDonald, who helps oversee luxury suites at Crypto.com Arena, said his Altadena was a small town in a big city. He saw the same people all the time: at the gas station, at the grocery store, at the McDonald’s he loved at the corner of East Washington Boulevard and North Altadena Drive.
“I don’t know if future generations are going to be able to share what we did,” he added, wiping tears as he stood outside a grocery store just south of the evacuation zone, his first trip outside in days. “It’s going to be a long time to get that feeling back.”
To live in Los Angeles is to marvel, and take for granted, its vastness. What most people refer to casually as a city is actually a county made up of 88 municipal jurisdictions. The local cliché is that it’s the only place where you can ski and surf in the same day. And so the only way to take in the magnitude of the devastation of the wildfires is high up — in the air, or on a hilltop perch.
If you climb to a ridge in the foothills of Altadena on a clear day, you can see from downtown Los Angeles all the way out to the iconic shimmering California coastline. A moonscape of burned out cars, charred tree trunks and piles and piles of debris and ash have replaced the usual suburban hustle there. The distance makes it impossible to see the scene of destruction in the coastal community of the Palisades. Yet, the vantage point makes both the enormousness of the fires and the enormousness of Los Angeles clear, from the mountains to the ocean, and the damage in between.
The fires have burned 38,000 acres in Los Angeles County, taking with them more than 12,000 structures and 25 lives. The Palisades and Eaton fires, on opposite sides of the county, have created a far-reaching footprint, unifying a region that has long contained disparate identities.
Historians search for analogies: Hurricane Katrina, and even Sept. 11 or Pearl Harbor. Victims scramble for long-term housing. Ordinary residents, even those in the urban centers, long considered safe from the dry hills, packed their first go bags.
For years now, Christopher Bailey has been asking his TikTok followers for donations so he can cook and distribute hot dogs from his food truck in Skid Row near downtown Los Angeles. As the fires burned, he told those followers he wanted to provide something similar for victims driven out of their homes.
Within days, the operation had expanded into a massive flea market at the Santa Anita racetrack, a few miles east of Altadena. Rows upon rows of used clothing, shoes, diapers, books, face masks, cosmetics and toiletries all sat free for the taking one evening this week.
Nobody checked whether those who showed up had damaged or destroyed homes. Many families said they were there simply because they could use free food and supplies. Food trucks handed out carne asada and agua frescas while music thumped in the background. It was a festive and frantic free-for-all swap meet for the working class, many of whom still had homes, but still had need.
The city remains deeply divided around race and class and money. Many struggle even if they earn six-figure salaries, a harsh reality in a place where the median rent is nearly $3,000 a month.
As a girl, Iiesha Dent watched as her mother built a solid middle-class life after opening a hair salon in Pasadena in the 1970s. Last week, she began her own small-scale relief operation on the salon’s front lawn. Through social media, she told clients and friends to drop by with supplies. Within hours, her yard along Lake Avenue, which leads to some of the most ravaged parts of Altadena, was bringing in people looking for diapers or bottled water.
Still, like others across the region, she has deep suspicions about what is driving the city’s inequality and how the recovery will unfold. She worried whether longtime middle-class Black and Latino residents would be replaced with wealthier transplants when neighborhoods are rebuilt. And she wondered how much of the tragedy could have been prevented.
“It’s almost like, Did they allow this to happen on purpose?” she said. “You have a lot of Black and brown residents — do they just want them out?”
City and county officials have vowed to investigate the cause of the fires, review the city’s preparedness and devote resources to rebuilding.
When Ms. Khonsary, the fifth-generation Angeleno, returned to her home to survey the wreckage, she was looking for the smallest of things — a pink conch shell that had been passed down through four generations of women in her family.
The shell was one of the only objects that survived a fire that burned down her great-grandmother’s home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in the early 1900s. She never knew her great-grandmother, and her grandmother died when Ms. Khonsary was 3.
She and her wife dug through the ruin and the rubble, looking for the shell and other possessions. The fire left very little standing: the fireplace, a burned-out washing machine, pieces of wrought iron. Ms. Khonsary said she had come to view her losses as a kind of surrender, to “give them away to the fire.”
And there it was — the shell, in the ash. It was broken into pieces, but it had survived. Kind of like her city.
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