Gentle reader,
As we struggle to write this newsletter, vast swaths of Los Angeles are still smoldering, where the Palisades and Eaton fires erased in moments much of the communities of Pacific Palisades on the west side by the sea and Altadena in the foothills of the San Gabriels.
The wildfires are not contained, and the danger remains high.
The scale of the destruction is too great to take in. We are in shock, numb and scared and heartbroken, and desperately worried for all the people and animals who have been displaced or hurt and all the treasures destroyed.
But as preservationists and storytellers of Southern California, it’s pretty much business as usual, just a whole hell of a lot more of it all at once.
We began the week at Vroman’s (established 1894) picking up a print copy of the Los Angeles Times, with our efforts to save the scorched-but-not-burned-down Morrison Hotel (1914) on the front page above the fold. We were actually at the Morrison as the Palisades fire broke out, shooting video of an historic building two doors up that also burned—but more on what we saw and did there later. It seems unseemly right now.
For almost twenty years, it has been our role to assess what’s at risk and what’s been lost, to explain why these places matter—why they mattered—and to advocate for how important it is to preserve what we can, restore what we can’t. We are all made up of the places we love, especially the public places where we come together, and we need them just like we need air and water and food and shelter and hope.
So now we all have to look at what we’ve lost, no matter how much it hurts, and think about what can be restored.
What have we lost? So much! Landmarks and landscapes, family homes and apartment buildings, small businesses and community spaces, libraries, museums, schools, churches, hardware stores, coffee shops, art studios, supermarkets, fish shacks and horse barns, books and photographs and paintings and objets d’art, things ordinary and irreplaceable, memories of lost loves, relics throbbing with personal significance and others that are world famous, collections formed over multiple lifetimes, massive trees and bonsai pots, vintage cars and Bakelite radios, ostrich eggs and crystal balls and lucky pennies, embroidery and fishing poles, things mourned on television and losses unknown, much of it now ash lofted up into the atmosphere and carried for miles on the uncaring Santa Ana winds.
And we’ve lost people—nobody yet knows how many. But when the deaths are counted and the circumstances known, we believe we’ll learn that Angelenos risked their lives and died fighting to save a family home because if that building was lost, they and the people they love could not afford to live in this city, and would be displaced to live among strangers far away or end up homeless on the streets. We have already heard one heartbreaking anecdote of a patriarch who would not leave the burning Altadena compound where a dozen family members lived, and had to be dragged away by neighbors, his heels torn up from the fight.
This fear, and the risky behavior that is the calculus of this fear, is the human cost of the land use corruption that has been running wild in City Hall since Antonio Villaraigosa packed the Planning Department with real estate industry shills and every subsequent Mayor has let the land use rackets run amok within their administrations. (The City is the nexus of public corruption, though some seeps into the County, too, and what happens in Los Angeles City effects the whole of California.)
Because contrary to the broad brush characterizations from people who do not know Los Angeles, not everyone who lives in a “million dollar home” is rich, and many of these properties would be worth much less if corporate landlords and Silicon Valley apps didn’t collude to fix rents, and if municipalities enforced their home share ordinances and set policy to discourage hoarding vacant housing units. All of these rackets increase land use value and make cities unaffordable for citizens.
But individual stories of human loss are yet to come, and each one deserves the attention of the brave journalists who are presently out in the field documenting the fire. We want to pull back and take a wide view—wider than the swaths of devastation that are still smoking—and advocate for a path to move ahead as a community, with optimism, courage and innovation, all eyes on the gilded past and a golden future.
The Next Los Angeles Starts Now—With You!
This is the hard reset we hoped never to see in our lifetimes, but which anyone who has read Mike Davis’ warnings about fire prone Malibu or watched in horror as Paradise, Santa Rosa and Lahaina burned, knew could happen here.
Suddenly, much of the landscape of Pacific Palisades and Altadena is as bare and unformed as it was more than a century ago, when pioneers from the East and other countries chose to build their homes and make their lives in two uniquely Southern California places.
Pacific Palisades (established 1922) was an intentional community of privately owned homes and public gathering spaces, formed by members of the Methodist faith seeking to live among like-minded Chautauquans who loved nature, improving their minds and bodies, sobriety and striving to make a better world.
Altadena evolved in a more happenstance manner, as a middling successful Victorian subdivision attracting gentleman farmers and wintering millionaires, then in the 20th century a diverse blend of bohemians, nature lovers and individualists who were fiercely proud of their funky town, and in many cases were refugees from racist land use policies. The Pacific Electric streetcar system let working class people enjoy country living with easy access to jobs in town.
To us, Altadena’s most iconic figure is native son “Zeke the Sheik” (Tim Dundon), who over decades turned his little corner of town into a mountain of manure, a jungle paradise with free range chickens, the soil inclined to spontaneously combust. Tim was a wild man, selling dope and showing up in court slanging rhymes in his Zeke character, but he was also a divinely inspired alchemist, who truly believed that the transmogrification of stinking manure into the rich black hummus he gave away to gardeners all over the southland could save, and feed, us all.
Tim’s mountain was bulldozed years ago, and he is gone now, but his Altadena born message has never been more important: we have to live with the land, respect the seasons and the landscape, take crap and turn it into gold, nurture life and help one another.
Up on Altadena’s Millionaire’s Row, Frank Mayer, who with his wife Huan Gu has been restoring the National Register Andrew McNally House (Frederick L. Roehrig, 1887) for the past few years, completed his work by documenting flames taking the landmark, and spoke at length with ABC National News, including the fact that 9 of 10 board members of Altadena Heritage have lost their homes. This is terrible, but also an opportunity for the preservation community to partner with the County to rebuild their beautiful town.
This crisis hasn’t just hit Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The cumulative impact of the fires and the destroyed housing, business and infrastructure, the air pollution and the mudslide threat, will affect the entire region for years to come.
Los Angeles cannot go on, business as usual. With tens of thousands of people suddenly homeless, there must be serious discussions about banning Airbnb and other home share sites, about implementing eviction moratoriums and caps on rent increases, about imposing a speculator’s vacancy tax sufficiently high to release tens of thousands of desperately needed residential units back onto the market. The fire department and water system need millions that are not in their budgets. Our urban tree canopy and shrubbery must be replaced as soon as possible, with the right plants for a changing west.
The priorities of Los Angeles City Hall have veered far from those of the people who vote. We as a city never said yeah, let’s court the 2028 Olympics, that was Eric Garcetti’s call. And looking out over the city in January 2025, perhaps the costs of welcoming that event are more than the community can afford.
It may be that Los Angeles needs a Works Progress Administration style restoration, rebuilding and regreening project, both to accomplish the vast amount of building and planting required to return Pacific Palisades and Altadena to habitability, and to bring citizens together to move beyond our grief and write our next chapters.
Meanwhile, the con artists, opportunists and hot take “YIMBY” “urbanist” commercial real estate “experts” are already swarming on social media and on the ground, trying to take advantage of a crisis to advance their own agendas and pocketbooks. These hustlers have a long history in Southern California, and they’ve made great fortunes through these sleazy campaigns. Don’t be a rube and don’t get fleeced!
The loudest voices, and the quickest to speak, are not necessarily worth listening to. We’ll be tuning in to Angelenos who have long proven themselves by doing good work in areas of historic preservation, tenants’ rights, vacant building documentation, tree canopy protection, clean air, cultural advocacy, land trusts for housing and wild lands, City Hall transparency, etc.
We must heed the most progressive, transformative ideas moving forward.
And we must move forward. The world needs Los Angeles and Angelenos, and it looks to us to lead the way, just as we have for more than a century. This place is where all the outsiders, the visionaries, the dreamers and the transformers land to stretch their wings, find their people and promote ideas that change the culture.
And the world itself is changing, fast. It is against this backdrop that Los Angeles has to reinvent and rebuild herself, as she has so many times, with the whole world watching to see the path we blaze, for others to follow.
We believe that path will include creating opportunities for our most valuable natural resource—Angelenos who know what’s needed to make things better—to take a leading role in solving problems and cutting through stodgy civic log jams. Nobody knows what doesn’t work better than people who have given freely of their time and energies to work around the system and solve problems.
The New Los Angeles can be a new golden age for civic advocacy, and letting the competent, dedicated army of volunteer Los Angeles lovers do the work that we all have been watching go neglected by those with greater resources and power.
We are Angelenos, dammit!
In every disaster, the Mr. (Fred) Rogers aphorism to “look for the helpers” gets shared around, a reminder that when things get tough, you can count on your fellow citizens to jump in and do what they can, as long as they can. This is true, it’s real, and the digital apps and cynical influencers that want us to distrust and fear and hate one another so they can profit cannot make it false.
As Mr. (Will) Rogers’ home still smolders, we say let’s not just look for the helpers, let us elevate and empower them to make Los Angeles a safer, better and more equitable city all the time, not just in crisis.
About the video at the top of this post: when we heard about the loss of Will Rogers’ ranch and house museum, we felt as if we’d been stabbed, and went to our digital archives to see what views we’d captured on our last visit. There were no photos inside the house, which has been so well documented by others, but Kim was compelled to capture a 360° panorama of son Jim Rogers’ round horse barn.
At the time, she assumed the barn was part of the historic ranch property. And it was, in a way, but a structure that had been torn down and repurposed decades ago. The beautiful and now destroyed space she filmed that day was a recreation, build about 20 years ago by community volunteers. What a testament to how lost places that matter can be brought back, with love and care and traditional craftsmanship!
And so, dear friends, we send you all good wishes for staying safe and finding comfort in the small things and the human connections that sustain us in hard times and always, until we meet again. Please share in the comments below how you are doing and what you think the Next Los Angeles needs. And if you’d like to mourn a landmark lost, we’d like to see it through your eyes and memories.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles' past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city's soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 1/18) • Broadway (Sat. 1/25) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sat. 2/1) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 2/15) • The Real Black Dahlia (Sat. 3/1) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Downtown L.A. (Sat. 3/8) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (Sat. 3/15) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 3/22) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (Sun. 3/30) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (Sat. 4/5) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 4/12) • Leo Politi Loves Los Angeles (Sat. 4/19) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (Sat. 4/26)
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