The LA I Knew Is Gone
Time and cities wait for no one.
This is not the piece I want to be writing. I’d rather be discussing cars or clothes, food or travel, films or books, all or any of the above really. This is not the piece I want to be writing, but over the past couple of days it’s become clear that I need to, because without LA I likely wouldn’t be writing about anything at all.
Like so many people before me, I moved to Los Angeles with dreams of fortune and fame in my head, and like most, I got a huge dose of reality within weeks of living in the megalopolis. The student housing my small film school offered through a partnership with Cal State Northridge was nothing like what it appeared to be online. It was 105 degrees the day I moved in, I can vividly remember the smell of the dry hot air thick with eucalyptus. My car got broken into in those first couple weeks, I got threatened by a homeless guy I’d come to recognize at ARCO because if I had money for gas then I should have money to buy him lunch and a case of beer. I nearly became a statistic when the person in the lane next to me decided to swerve into mine in “the curves” on Sunset pushing my front passenger wheel into a curb and popping that side of the car up into the air.
It was a hot, dusty, lonely, wild-ass place for which I was ill equipped as someone who had spent most of their life living in the mountains. Eventually I began to adjust, but even as I did I anticipated only staying until I graduated and then I’d move to Brooklyn, because that was the place to be. I thought about moving back east a lot those first couple of years, before I’d even begun to scratch the surface of life in LA. I ended up calling it home for 16 years and I’m still not sure I ever really did. That’s one of the many wonderful things about LA though, you can never know it fully, the pursuit is the point.
Los Angeles does not avail itself to anyone. No matter how rich or famous you are the city is truly what you make of it and I was very fortunate to learn that in my first year living there. If I hadn’t started hanging out on the Westside, sleeping on a friend’s couch in Marina Del Rey most weekends instead of back at my sad room in The Valley, I seriously doubt I would have stayed in LA after school. I suppose it’s also possible that I would have focused more and ended up with a career in the entertainment industry had I embraced life on that side of the hill. Impossible to know, but I certainly have no regrets.
Once I moved to Venice in the spring of 2009, I knew I was where I was supposed to be. I continued to feel that way up until around 2016, which co-incidentally is when I turned 30. Where had the last 8 years gone? What did I have to show for my time in LA? Lots of life experience, incredible friendships, a steadily growing professional network, knowledge and skills I couldn’t possibly have acquired in Vermont. LA had given me so much in a relatively short amount of time and honestly asked little in return, other than every dime that came my way of course.
It was that year that I started to think about the cost-benefit ratio of living in LA. When Trump won and subsequently took office I started thinking about the cost-benefit ratio of living in the United States. I started traveling internationally for work a-lot in 2017, my world expanded exponentially, I embodied the millennial meme of visiting a place once and thinking “you know, I think I could live here”. I often talked to friends about moving abroad to Stockholm or Milan, London or Barcelona, Munich or Lisbon, but I didn’t. How could I leave early morning drives to Malibu on the PCH and sunsets at The Bluffs overlook in the Palisades? Besides, dropping in on my past life in snowboarding was as easy as driving to Tahoe or Mammoth. My career in automotive media was being fast tracked by living at the epicenter of car culture in the western world. My friends, my amazing, wonderful, life affirming friends. The mountains, the desert, the forests, the ocean. How could I leave all of it behind?
Look, if you had told me at the beginning of 2019 that in 6 years I’d be married, living in Nashville with a dog and a kid on the way, I would have laughed in your face. Sure, even then I could recognize that I was getting burnt out after 2 years of constant travel and being on “the apps”, but I thought I had a handle on it. One very short, very intense relationship was all it took to push me into a period of sobriety and self reflection, without which I’m sure(because she’s said as much) I would not have been remotely appealing to my wife. That was 2019, ya’ll know what came next.
For as much bitching as there was about mask mandates, and lockdowns, and everything else that came with Covid, those of us who went through the pandemic in LA(and weren’t “essential workers”) know we got off relatively easy in the grand scheme of things. As anyone who was there will recall, those early months when the city was shut down gave Angelenos a look at what life could be like if we drove and flew less. It was a blip of clean air and clear roads that LA is likely never to see again. When the city started to come back online in the summer of 2020 I remember the nervous energy everywhere you went. Covid had reached out and pierced the veil, the narrative that LA was “worth it” was faltering, the Bobcat Fire in September of that year only exacerbated that feeling.
People had seen how pleasant things could be in LA if only it wasn’t for all those other people. A global pandemic had hit the pause button for a few months and the big takeaway for Angelenos was “everyone else is the problem, otherwise the roads would still be empty and the air would still be clean.” There is no question that the pandemic dramatically changed the vibe in LA and the culture became more coarse with bitterness and apathy leading the way. If that hasn’t been your experience I’d like to know what bubble you’re living in and if I can join you in there.
A lot of people I knew pulled the ripcord and left LA in 2020 or not long after. Some for other parts of California, most to other parts of the country. I couldn’t blame them, the shine was wearing off and wearing off quick. I could no longer rationalize the many inconveniences that come with living in LA and it felt like the city was getting more out of me than I was getting out of it. My wife felt the same way and over the next couple of years as the city got noticeably worse, we got more and more motivated to make a change.
There wasn’t some specific tipping point that acted as the catalyst for us moving, it was, as it typically is, a combination of things. There have been a number of times in the past year where we’ve questioned our decision to leave, less of them since finding out we were going to be parents. I never wanted to raise a kid in LA(or anywhere in Southern California for that matter) neither did my wife despite being from San Diego. I respect my friends who’ve been able to do so without a giant pot of gold at their disposal, but as much as we value education, neither of us could see the value in staying unless we absolutely had to.
We felt, as I suspect many are feeling now, that LA was pushing us out. There are just too many people competing for resources in an ecosystem that much more fragile than they care to admit. I often wonder how many Angelenos are clinging for dear life to the identity they’ve manufactured there rather than simply doing what humans have been doing since the dawn of time, picking up, walking away and starting over in greener pastures.
If this isn’t quite the piece you expected it to be, I confess it’s not quite the piece I thought I was going to write when I started. That’s on top of it being the piece I didn’t want to write. I don’t mind talking about my personal life, but does Substack need the backstory of my life in LA? Probably not. Still, I’m glad I let the title of this piece guide me through processing what I’ve been feeling this past week. The LA I knew is gone, because of course it is. It was my experience, I took it with me when I left, the city of course didn’t notice. Cities never do, especially particularly large transient ones like LA. When we visited this past September things were as we’d left them, felt like we could have dropped right back into our old life if we’d wanted to.
No longer.
The Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire have so fundamentally altered the physical and emotional landscape in LA that I can’t imagine the city recovering for a generation or two. If you’ve never lived in LA you cannot possibly begin to understand the scope of the damage(no, that summer you sub-let a friend’s apartment in Silver Lake doesn’t count) and you also don’t get to talk shit on the city, or the state for that matter. Although I lived most of my adult life there, I never thought of myself as a Californian or an Angeleno, but I do feel like I earned the right to talk shit. I’ve done so often over the years and it comes from a place of love, like when you tease your family or friends. There will be a time for that, there may even be a time for some righteous anger on behalf of friends who’ve lost everything this week, but this ain’t it.
Now is not the time to place blame or dive into figuring out what could have been done to prevent these catastrophes. It’s sure as shit not the time to push your political agenda. It’s a time for empathy, a time to be of service, a time to embrace our humanity. If, as a nation, we cannot do that now(so far it’s not looking promising) then we’ll have squandered yet another opportunity to come together at a moment of communal suffering. The LA I knew is gone, but so is the LA that every resident knew up until Tuesday, whether they lived in the Palisades, Altadena or not.
So who stays in LA now?
Well, the ultra-wealthy can afford to rebuild, I imagine many of them will while living in one of their other houses elsewhere in the country. The loss of irreplaceable things is a shame no matter who you are, but as most of these people will tell you, they are just things. Contrary to how a lot of the media coverage makes it seem, these people are few and far between too. I know it’s hard to imagine but there’s more to LA than Hollywood and more to California than LA, but that’s another story. The city is predominantly working class, people get by on razor thin margins, especially when it comes to housing.
The Pacific Palisades and Altadena are both pretty tight knit family oriented neighborhoods. The former is full of many people who either inherited homes they certainly couldn’t afford to buy now or got in the housing market before it went sky high. Of all the neighborhoods in LA I fantasized about living in, the Palisades, specifically the neighborhood behind Bluffs Park, was the one I thought about the most. As such, I spent more time shooting photos of cars, people and sunsets in the Palisades than anywhere else in LA. It was, and eventually will be again, a magical place. The latter is one of the last blue collar enclaves in LA, physically adjacent to Pasadena, but a world apart in lifestyle. A number of amazing independently owned shops and restaurants gave it incredible character, many acquaintances and their have called it home for many years, some for only just a few.
Will these people stay in LA even if their homes are somehow still there or if their insurance claims go through? Nobody can say for sure at the moment, certainly not yours truly. It’s remarkable as well as heartening to see the community come together while the fires continue to wreak havoc, I hope the bonding continues when they’re finally extinguished. There is the opportunity to set an example in the recovery from these fires, we’re seeing that in real time. The LA I knew is gone, but the community is showing us all that maybe something better can take its place.
-AM
Relief Fund Donation Websites-
https://supportlafd.kindful.com - Provides direct support to LAFD firefighters.
https://www.cafirefoundation.org - Provides needed support to California’s firefighters, their families and the communities they’re currently protecting.
https://www.calfund.org/funds/wildfire-recovery-fund/ - Provides safe housing, mental health care, medical aid and infrastructure rebuilding support to those affected by the wildfires.
https://baby2baby.org - Provides critical items to families including diapers, baby food, formula and hygiene products.