Los Angeles is the most misunderstood major city in America—probably because it isn’t really a city. It’s a sprawling amalgamation of neighborhoods, each with its own character, its own history, its own feel. You can have lunch in Chinatown, drive a few blocks and find yourself in a teeming downtown jewelry district or skid row. People who have never been here love to hate on the place, branding it as merely a haven for rich movie stars. That was not true in the 1930s and it isn’t true now. Less than 5% of L.A. residents work in the entertainment industry, and most of the ones who do are dedicated craftspeople and laborers.

Yet it’s been impossible to shake the stereotype. Watch any national sporting event that takes place here and at a commercial break you’ll either see a shot of the Hollywood sign, the Beverly Hills sign, or roller skaters and body builders on Venice Beach. One of the more sickening aspects of the current wildfires are the social media posts that focus on the lost Palisades homes of celebrities. Why not show the lost homes of working class residents of Altadena, who lack the finances and likely the insurance to ever rebuild anywhere? 

I won’t even lower myself to mention the hateful comments by MAGA asshats who glory in others’ misery and have tried to blame the fires on everything from DEI hires to socialism. Climate change—specifically a fire hurricane with 98 mph wind gusts—caused the events and made them nearly impossible to combat.

Thankfully, I live down in Culver City, a good half hour drive from the Palisades, so smoky air has been our main concern. Seemingly though, everyone we know has a friend or family member who lost a home this week. An all-encompassing shared sadness has permeated the region, and put everyone on edge with evacuation bags ready by the door.

My sadness has more to do with the loss of so many L.A. landmarks and neighborhoods we took for granted. Pacific Palisades was perhaps the most precious area of the city, beautiful homes and a charming village sloping toward the ocean. It now looks like Dresden, and the damage didn’t stop there. On the Pacific Coast Highway, every Malibu home perched on the water is now rubble, as are eating institutions like the Reel Inn, Moonshadows, and Gladstone’s. For God’s sake, the Will Rogers house in Will Rogers Park, where we first taught our boy to walk, is history.

Natural calamities have always been part of the landscape here. Months after I arrived in late 1982, a number of those same Malibu homes fell into the sea during a winter storm. The 1994 Northridge earthquake took months to psychologically recover from. I distinctly remember one late summer when Santa Monica residents gathered on the cliffs to watch fires up the coast, like Washingtonians did with the Battle of Manassas. 

A few years ago I published a trilogy of creepy Los Angeles stories called Red Jacarandas, but the horror of these fires vastly outweighs those scares. L.A. tends to recover from every disaster it experiences, but for the thousands of unfortunate souls who lost their possessions this time, it may be a long time coming. All I know is that this disaster has made me love and care about Los Angeles even more.