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In the years before the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, there was a major public debate in my hometown about the meaning of shopping malls.
Some residents fear that Palisades Village, a three-acre archipelago of upscale boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, is driving a shiny stake into the heart of the place we grew up. was. The “Old Palisades” were mythical upper-middle-class communities where people got to know each other, built happy families, and assuaged the old analog status-seeking of Malibu and Beverly Hills.
The village, with its Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and Nouveau McMansion architecture, marked the final conquest of overly tanned, overly toned immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would just pop into an Erewhon grocery store and shell out $20 for Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie?
But many did. They liked the “custom walkable village” that developers touted, moving away from Moe’s Deli and other mom-and-pop stores that developer (and future mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso had bulldozed. It was considered an expired upgrade. They seemed willing to pay $27 for a seat at the Bay Theater. The Bay Theater owes its name and iconic facade to the long-closed movie theater on Sunset Boulevard where my friends and I secretly watched movies like “Billy Jack” and “Big.” It is a luxury complex that was plagiarized from. Wednesday. “
On either side of the shopping mall debate, people rarely stopped to note that this was a rich people’s problem.
Unlike neighboring Santa Monica, an incorporated city with an active government, the Palisades did not raise its own taxes or operate its own services. Although we call it the Town, it is actually a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles. Still, some community councils and local newspapers worry more than once about the threat that devastating wildfires could hit us, as they have in many other California towns. There was no place where it was done.
We were lucky and we knew it.
A wildfire destroyed a building on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
On New Year’s Day, several old friends from Paul Revere Junior High School sent me an email to that effect. “We get along very well,” my lawyer friend Eric wrote. He had returned triumphantly to the Palisades after years away, looking out at the Pacific Ocean from the deck of his new home.
Needless to say, our blessings include blissful days at the beach, attending a very good public school, learning how to work a horrible after-school job, and getting into trouble with minimal consequences. This includes growing up in
Former Palisades homes are still available for less than $100,000. We didn’t want to be Malibu or Brentwood. There were plenty of wealthy Parisadians even back then, but our baroque teenage hierarchy had little to do with who had money and who didn’t. Although there were some Reagan Republicans and liberal Democrats, the general political atmosphere was tolerant and democratic.
The Palisades was still white. There were separate beach clubs for WASPs and Jews. For years, some people didn’t recognize black people. But about a third of his classmates at Palisades High School were bused from areas with large African-American populations like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. Whatever its failures, the merger shared what is arguably the city’s best public high school with thousands of underprivileged students. It also taught white children something about living in a more diverse society.
A significant percentage of my classmates from these diverse backgrounds went on to build meaningful lives. There are professors, social workers, doctors, and people in the film industry. Forest Whitaker, the star football team player and defensive tackle who sang in the chorus, is now an actor and director. Some of the businessmen are billionaires. For some, the ultimate indicator of success was being able to afford a house in their neighborhood and sending their children to old school.
The Palisades has changed a lot since I went to university. Despite the dangers, wealthy people pushed beyond the canyon and further up the hill to build larger, more luxurious homes. We have long understood that we live a comfortable life resisting some powerful force. I can still see the look of horror on my mother’s face one afternoon in the fall of 1978 as wildfires swept toward us from Mandeville Canyon and we frantically packed our most precious possessions into the car. It floats.
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Even when we were flattening out those weird old bungalows and building huge buildings on site after site, many of the Hollywood people who flocked to the Palisades were drawn to the kind of things that had always united us: 10 km. They came for the run and the Fourth of July parade. beaches, parks, schools. Great hiking trails lead from nearly every hillside in town to the Santa Monica Mountains.
On New Year’s Day, my friend Eric ended our text conversation with a photo of the stunning evening sunset. The next image from our chat came a week later on video taken from the other side of the deck. A wall of gray-black smoke billowed behind a ridge not far from the house where my family had lived for almost 50 years.
Less than an hour after the photo was taken, Eric, his wife and son fled down Chautauqua Boulevard, named for the noble Methodist education movement that founded the Palisades in the 1920s. Their house soon burned down, along with the houses of my parents and many friends.
In photos, the ruins of Palisades remind us of the streets of Aleppo and Homs in Syria. Unlike many of my local friends, I have never seen such a streetscape before. Mexico City and San Salvador after devastating earthquakes in the 1980s. In Gaza. In the wilds of Kabul, American might could not completely cover the scars of the Soviet war.
The ruins of a Sunset Boulevard building are reflected in the windows of a Saint Laurent store, part of the largely undamaged Palisades Village mall. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
Images may be the only valid comparison between our tragedy and the tragedy in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Many of the Palisades residents forced to evacuate by the fires have enviable resources. Four- and five-star hotels from Montecito to Laguna Beach are reportedly fully booked. Compared to Syrians, Gazans, or refugees from Ukraine, Parisadians are far better able to rebuild their lives.
But the trauma remains overwhelming. When our past is so violently erased, it makes us wonder what we can really reconstruct. Big developers are likely to bring back many uninsured or underinsured and burnt-out people. Their replacements will inevitably be larger and more conventional buildings, often in the Nouveau McMansion style.
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Even my friends who are in their early 60s are considering whether they have the time and fortitude to rebuild their homes. And they wonder whose Palisades will be rebuilt around them. So far, the only part of the town center that remains largely intact is Palisades Village Mall, and Caruso has called in private firefighters and water tankers to protect the investment.
As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, which was devastated by the 1972 earthquake. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua was extremely poor. There was no money to build road signs. However, I have come to understand that Nicaraguans have a strong collective memory, which is one of their great strengths.
At the time, a typical address in Managua was something like “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago,” or “3 blocks from the old tree toward the lake.” The old tree had not existed for many years. But everyone remembered.
