What the images of Los Angeles's fires don’t show
Unlike roads and utility lines, memories are not as easy to recover after disaster strikes.
The Los Angeles fires are a soul-crushing and city-defining disaster. Callous voices have called it a city-destroying event, but they don’t know Los Angeles very well.
I have friends who lost houses. I have family who were burned out of their home. Los Angeles has lost churches, synagogues, and architecture that are part of our collective history—not just architectural gems, but civic hubs and touchstones for communal memory.
In the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, gone is the Will Rogers Western Ranch in the state park that carries the actor's name, where I used to picnic on the lawn with friends. Gone is Moonshadows, a restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway known for celebrity spotting, but also where I drank beer one afternoon with my wife after a lovely beach day, and sat by the windows, perched above the ocean, thinking how lucky we were to simply be there. Gone are architectural benchmarks like the Keeler House, a post and beam home that Southern California architect Ray Kappe remodeled in the 1990s, and Richard Neutra’s Benedict and Nancy Freedman House, a masterpiece of mid-century residential architecture.
In Altadena, one of my favorite, sleepier L.A. towns—also, after 1968’s Fair Housing Act, an enclave for Los Angeles’s Black community—the losses may be unknown to outsiders, but they were precious to us. Gregory Ain’s Park Planned Homes, a radical post-war experiment in building affordable prefab homes, are gone. Restaurants like Side Pie, a backyard pizza operation—later, a full-blown storefront—that soothed many during Covid, including me. Or the Bunny Museum, which was just as quirky as the name suggests, almost quintessentially L.A.-weird: a world-record accumulation of more than 45,000 pieces of rabbit memorabilia, all reportedly mostly lost to the flames. In multiple cases, rebuilding funds are being raised—my social media is one GoFundMe appeal after another—but there’s no guarantee for return.
These places are more than just buildings. The language of architecture, stresses, loads, shear forces, suggests how we emotionally experience spaces we inhabit, and are transformed by them. Octavia Butler, the great science fiction author, wrote in the opening of 1993’s Parable of the Sower, a postapocalyptic novel about a Los Angeles engulfed by fire, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.” I know my own evolution through places—the suburbs where I grew up in Connecticut, a studio in Greenwich Village where I lived on my own for the first time. Houses become homes; rooms contain memories. The meanings we create and take from our corner coffeeshops or the restaurants that feed us, are suffused with sensory impressions, suggesting that when those places are destroyed, a part of us departs, too. I recently met a friend for coffee who grew up in the Palisades. “I haven’t even begun to process that my entire childhood is gone,” he said.
The scale of the fires in Los Angeles has been difficult to comprehend, even for those of us who live here. The city is a singular American experiment in communal living. It is varied, diverse, and vast—simultaneously urban, suburban, and rural (not to mention the only major metropolis in the United States cleaved by a mountain range). Greater Los Angeles, what’s meant by “L.A.,” is nearly 20 million people—going by land, it’s the largest metro region in the United States. One of the few moments that I’ve laughed in the past two weeks was when I saw a post on social media suggesting that confused New Yorkers, to grasp the conflagration, might imagine Central Park on fire. With around 40,000 acres burned and 12,000 structures destroyed, make it more like 47 Central Parks.
This moment will be a defining one for Los Angeles. Not only in how we move forward, but also for how we preserve what’s been lost—something that L.A. isn’t particularly good at with our predilection for boom and bust, living in constant flux, knocking things down to build anew. Amanda Barnes, the amateur historian behind the popular Instagram account CahuengaPast, named for the street that runs through the Hollywood Hills, agreed. “We have a short attention span and love to plant a new flag,” she said. “Los Angeles loves new ideas, trendsetting. It's the most consistent thing about L.A.”
Barnes started her project in 2020, to document untold stories of homes in the neighborhood where she lives. “I describe this project as an intersection of architectural history, the metaphysical, and old celebrity scandal over the last 100 years,” she said. “There's a certain energy in this particular part of the Hollywood Hills, and the houses act as gatekeepers.”
As a gatekeeper herself, Barnes digs through archives and old newspapers to surface all the gossip and swindles that can define a property—for example, making the connections between Neutra, author Aldous Huxley, and Krotona, the former home of Beachwood Canyon’s Theosophical Society, an esoteric, early 20th century religious movement. (Incidentally, the Theosophical Library Center in Altadena is now also gone.) It’s all done in a spirit of celebration, though the project’s beginnings have a poignant source. Barnes lost her husband to leukemia in 2014. They met nine years earlier, and used to walk the Hills together, gathering information about homes just for fun. “Once CahuengaPast became an actual growing project, I realized I was more content and happy than I had been since before he was sick,” she told me. “That in talking about the ghosts of the Hills, by discovering and championing their forgotten accomplishments and trials, I had inadvertently helped me find a deeper peace with my own.”
“It's such a great pleasure showing people how beautiful Los Angeles is—the nature, the scope, the quirky details, the architectural patterns and trends per era,” she added. “It's an incredible community.”
Memories are as much the raw material of cities as concrete and steel. Thanks to oral history efforts like Barnes’, and the work of L.A.’s architectural and historical societies, our collective memory is reinforced—the physical and tangible, but also the abstract and illusory—even as fire continues to loom.
Six years ago, in the fall of 2018, when the Woolsey Fire burned down nearly a hundred thousand acres, I was reporting my most recent book, an investigation into what it means to live in L.A., and I heard about a guy named Robert Spangle. Spangle graduated from Malibu High School in the mid-aughts and enlisted in the Marines Corps, completing tours in Afghanistan. During Woolsey, he put his training to use, sneaking behind police lines to join a crew of young surfers who were driving around the hills in pick-up trucks, putting fires out by hand. As a Marine, Spangle had been a radio telephone operator, managing his unit’s communications. During Woolsey, he dragged a camp table and sleeping bag up to the top of Point Dume, a prominent overlook above the Pacific, and kept watch for days, radioing down to the surfers whenever he spotted new fires breaking out.
“I’ve been losing a lot of sleep the past few days,” Spangle said when I reached him last week. Today, he works as a photojournalist and designer, and he was in Italy when we spoke, preparing a small collection for Florence’s fashion week. “Part of [my fatigue] is dreams recalling Woolsey, and the other part is just anxiety over not being there, seeing friends lose homes and businesses.”
Like all Angelenos, fire is familiar to Spangle. He remembered watching his parents prep the house and pack essentials while knowing that if the mountains did catch fire, his father would stay behind, despite evacuation orders, to defend their property. Spangle called it “the Malibu way.” In fact, when he was older and a fire rolled through, he thought of it as a rite of passage: his father allowing him to stay behind and help, while his mother and little brother evacuated. Now, years later, watching the news from thousands of miles away, he felt powerless. “I miss Malibu every single day, strangely even more during fires,” he said. “Community really is the irreplaceable thing.”
Last week I passed a man playing ukelele in his sedan, with every inch of his car stuffed with belongings. Was he homeless before the fires? Was he a victim of these past two weeks? In present-day Los Angeles, it’s impossible to tell. It’s now day ten that I’ve had a go-bag in hand when I leave my apartment—a backpack stuffed with toiletries, backup batteries, important documents. As someone lucky enough to not live in an area that burned, I’m grappling with survivor’s guilt in different ways. I refresh fire- and air-monitoring apps constantly and pray for rain. While writing this piece, two fires started near me, though they were quickly (luckily) put out. I volunteer, I donate, I’ve made it mandatory to read the obituaries trickling in, as the dead are identified and described. But several times I’ve hit a wall. Running around for days, suddenly I’m barely able to get out of bed, staring at the ceiling, exhausted like I’ve rarely felt.
The skylines east and west of my apartment are no longer filled with smoke. I look forward to getting back into the mountains, hiking the trails, saying good morning to people I pass. To borrow from Spangle, what is the “Los Angeles way” in this scenario? For all the losses, the past weeks have seen inspiring examples of resilience and humanity: neighbors helping neighbors, strangers becoming friends. Los Angeles will rebuild, we always do. New buildings will go up where old ones stood, and they’ll be different—we may not be able to replace icons of mid-century architecture, but we can design structures to better withstand future burns. And hopefully, when the fires return, all the linking arms and memory-making of this moment will leave us stronger and better prepared.
L.A.’s potential remains immense.
Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author most recently of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the California Book Award.
