United by disaster, Los Angeles grieves, and hopes, together

It took a wind-filled inferno to shrink the famously sprawling geography of Los Angeles — somehow, when everyone knows someone who’s lost everything, the place seems smaller.

Phones suddenly go off with false evacuation alarms — and then text messages quietly ring out from long-lost classmates and distant cousins ​​checking in. There are signs saying “You Loot, We Shoot” outside some homes, but the donation centers are crowded. Hundreds of residents living in some of the country’s most expensive zip codes were sleeping on cots in Red Cross shelters.

Entire buildings were reduced to ash while one house stood alone — and it’s hard to tell if it was protected by private firefighters that only money, grace, or the whims of Santa Ana’s harsh winds could buy. The civilian fabric appears torn and stretched.

Are the fires the great equalizer, the great divider, or the great unifier in Los Angeles? Or, like so many other things about this disaster, is it all of these things at once?

Sitting in a wheelchair outside the doors of an evacuation shelter in the Westwood neighborhood of West Los Angeles, Jay Sulton, 85, embodied this combination of personal and community trauma and resilience.

She was cheerful, but in mourning, and her life was on hold at a local recreation center. Her career has touched Los Angeles’ dual passions: real estate and Hollywood. She told stories of spending afternoons with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in the 1960s, and of growing closer to her new neighbors but increasingly distant from her children.

When fire threatened her small apartment building in the Brentwood neighborhood, Ms. Sulton decided to leave with her neighbor and head to the shelter. It was the first time Los Angeles had been forced to evacuate in more than six decades. With the power out and the wind still blowing, Ms. Sulton felt safer staying away. It seemed strange, she said, but there was something almost comforting about this sudden collective pressure.

“When you’re treated as kindly as we are, it doesn’t leave much room for any kind of pain,” she said of her temporary home in the evacuation center, where the Southern California sunshine stood in stark contrast to the devastation of the Pacific Ocean. Palisades, just six miles west. When one of the men stopped to congratulate her, she joked that she had already met another suitor inside.

“Knowing that there is camaraderie and decency between all the groups of people coming together, I think that will make Los Angeles stronger,” she said.

Maybe there has always been a kind of numbness hovering over Los Angeles. The kind that allows millions of residents to ignore the thousands of people sleeping under the highways in every neighborhood and on seemingly every street corner. The kind that allows you to maintain kinship with the constant threat of earthquakes, high winds, mudslides, and fires.

More than a week after the wildfires broke out, this numbness seems more like sadness.

“I see this tremendous loss, and the incredible pain that you can see in people’s eyes,” said Ariel Chiara Khonsari, 30, a fifth-generation Angeleno, whose home in Palisades was destroyed. “Like when you meet eyes in the elevator and know that person has lost everything.”

Bobby McDonald, 78, has lived in and around Altadena for nearly three decades. He was distraught when he saw the house he sold two years ago burning on local television. Large swaths of his neighborhood remind him of something he never thought his neighborhood would remind him of — his time fighting in Vietnam.

“It looks like what I saw there,” he said.

Altadena was a small town in a big city, said Mr. McDonald, who helps oversee the luxury suites at Crypto.com Arena. 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 will be able to share what we did,” he added, wiping away tears as he stood outside a grocery store south of the evacuation zone on his first trip abroad in days. “It will take a long time to get that feeling back.”

Living in Los Angeles means admiring its vastness and taking it for granted. What most people casually refer to as a city is actually a county made up of 88 municipal jurisdictions. The local saying is that it is the only place where you can ski and surf in the same day. So the only way to comprehend the extent of the devastation caused by wildfires is at high altitudes – in the air, or on top of a hill.

If you hike up one of the hills in the foothills of the Altadena Mountains on a clear day, you can see from downtown Los Angeles all the way to California’s famous sparkling coastline. A moonscape of burned-out cars, charred tree trunks, and piles and piles of debris and ash has replaced the usual suburban bustle there. The distance makes it impossible to see the scene of devastation in the coastal community of Palisades. However, the view captures the enormity of the fires and the immensity of Los Angeles, from the mountains to the ocean, and the damage in between.

The fires destroyed 38,000 acres in Los Angeles County, killing more than 12,000 buildings and killing 25 people. The Palisades and Eaton fires, on opposite sides of the county, created a far-reaching imprint, uniting a region that had long contained disparate identities.

Historians look for parallels: Hurricane Katrina, and even 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. Victims scramble for long-term housing. Ordinary residents, even those living in urban centres, long considered safe from the dry hills, are packing their first bags.

For years, Christopher Bailey has been asking his TikTok followers for donations so he can cook and distribute hot dogs from his food truck on Skid Row near downtown Los Angeles. As the fire burned, he told his followers that he wanted to offer something similar to the victims who were driven from their homes.

Within days, the operation had expanded to include a huge flea market at Santa Anita Race Course, a few miles east of Altadena. Rows upon rows of used clothes, shoes, diapers, books, face masks, cosmetics and toiletries were all available for free one evening this week.

No one checked whether those who attended had damaged or destroyed their homes. Many families said they came there simply because they could take advantage of free food and supplies. Food trucks handed out bacon and agua fresca while music blared in the background. It was a celebratory and feverish meeting of a free-for-all for the working class, many of whom still had homes, but still needed them.

The city remains deeply divided over race, class and money. Many struggle even if they earn six-figure salaries, a harsh reality in a place where the average rent is about $3,000 a month.

As a girl, Isha Dent watched her mother build a solid middle-class life after opening a hair salon in Pasadena in the 1970s. And last week, she started her own small-scale relief operation on the salon’s front lawn. Through social media, she asked customers and friends to bring supplies. Within hours, her yard along Lake Avenue, which leads to some of the most devastated parts of Altadena, was bringing in people looking for diapers or bottled water.

However, she, like others across the region, has deep doubts about what drives inequality in the city and how the recovery will unfold. She expressed concern about whether long-time black and Latino middle-class residents would be replaced by more affluent people when neighborhoods were rebuilt. She wondered how much of the tragedy could have been prevented.

“It’s almost like: Did they let this happen on purpose?” She said. “You have a lot of black and colored residents — do they just want them out?”

City and county officials pledged to investigate the cause of the fires, review the city’s preparedness and allocate resources to rebuild.

When Ms. Khonsari, a fifth-generation Angeleno, returned home to inspect the wreckage, she was looking for the tiniest of items — a pink conch shell that had been passed down through four generations of women in her family.

The shell was one of the only things that survived the fire that burned down her great-grandmother’s house in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in the early 1900s. She never knew her great-grandmother, and her grandmother died when Ms. Khonsari was three years old.

She and his wife dug through the rubble and rubble, searching for the shell and other possessions. The fire left very little behind: the fireplace, a burned-out washing machine, and pieces of wrought iron. Ms. Khonsari said she had come to view her losses as a kind of surrender, “to consign them to hell.”

And there it is—the shell, in the ashes. It was broken into pieces, but it survived. Kind of like her city.

Mimi Dwyer, Vic Julie and Eli Tan Contributed to reports.