In the years leading up to the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, my hometown had a great civil debate about the importance of the mall.
Some residents feared that Palisades Village, a 3-acre archipelago of chic boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, would drive a shiny stake into the heart of where we grew up. That “Old Palisades” was a mythologized upper-middle-class community where people knew each other, raised happy families, and tempered even the old, similar aspiration to status of Malibu and Beverly Hills.
The village, with Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and nouveau McMansion architecture, celebrated our latest victory with over-tanned and fit immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would walk into an Erewhon grocery store and drop $20 on Hailey Bieber’s Strawberry Skin Smoothie?
But many did. They liked the “special, walkable village” the developers touted it as, seeing it as an overdue upgrade to the Mort’s Deli and family stores bulldozed by developer (and later mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso. They seemed happy to pay $27 for a seat at the Bay Theater, a luxury multiplex that pirated its name and iconic facade from the long-shuttered Sunset Boulevard movie theater where my friends and I snuck in to see movies like Billy Jack and Big Wednesday “.
On either side of the mall debate, people rarely stopped to point out that these are rich people’s problems.
Unlike nearby Santa Monica, an incorporated city with a vigorous government, the Palisades did not raise its own taxes or provide its own services. We call it a city, but it’s actually a neighborhood in Los Angeles. However, there is a community council and a couple of local newspapers, and none of them have worried more than occasionally about the threat of catastrophic wildfires sweeping us, as they have in so many other California cities.
We were lucky and we knew it.
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Sarabeth Maney/ProPublica
On New Years, a handful of my old friends from Paul Revere Junior High were texting about it. “We’re doing so well,” wrote my lawyer friend Eric. He looked out over the Pacific Ocean from the deck of his new home, after his triumphant return to the Palisades after years of absence.
Needless to say, our blessings included growing up in a place where we could spend happy days at the beach, attend very good public schools, learn to work miserable after-school jobs, and get into trouble with minimal consequences.
Homes in that bygone Palisade could still be had for less than $100,000. We didn’t want to be Malibu or Brentwood. Even then there were many wealthy gardeners, but our baroque adolescent hierarchies had little to do with who had money and who had less. There were Reagan Republicans and liberal Democrats, but the overwhelming political atmosphere was tolerant and democratic.
The palisade was still very white. There were separate beach clubs for WASPs and Jews; for years some kept blacks out. But about a third of our classmates at Palisades High were bussed from African-American neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. Whatever its flaws, this integration shared arguably the city’s best public high school with thousands of less privileged students. It also taught white children something about living in a more diverse society.
An impressive proportion of my classmates from diverse backgrounds went on to build meaningful lives. There are professors, and social workers, and doctors, and people who make movies. The star quarterback of the football team, who also sang in the choir, was the actor and director Forest Whitaker. There are a couple of millionaires among the businessmen. For some, the main measure of success was affording a house in the neighborhood and sending their children to our old schools.
Palisades has changed a lot since I went to college. Despite the danger, the more affluent built larger, more luxurious homes as they pushed their way through the canyons and higher into the hills. We have long understood that we live our good lives in defiance of some powerful forces. I can still see the look of horror on my mom’s face one afternoon in the fall of 1978 when a wildfire swept toward us from Mandeville Canyon and we frantically packed the car with the most valuables we could muster.
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Even as they leveled quaint old bungalows to build monstrosities, many of the Hollywood people who flocked to the Palisades came for the things we’ve always had in common—10k runs and Fourth of July parades; beaches, parks and schools; great hiking trails that wound into the Santa Monica Mountains from almost every slope of the city.
On New Years, my friend Eric ended our text conversation with a picture of a spectacular evening sunset. The next images in the chat appeared a week later, in a video shot from the other side of his deck. A wall of gray-black smoke billowed behind the ridge, not far from the home where my family had lived for nearly 50 years.
Less than an hour after he took the picture, Eric, his wife and their son fled down Chautauqua Boulevard, named for the High Methodist educational movement that founded the Palisades in the 1920s. Their house, as well as the house of my parents and many friends, quickly burned down.
In photographs, the remains of the palisades now resemble the streets of Aleppo or Homs in Syria. Unlike most of my native friends, I had seen streets like this before. In Mexico City and San Salvador after devastating earthquakes in the 1980s. In Gaza. In the wastelands of Kabul, where American generosity has not bandaged the scars of the Soviet war.
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Sarabeth Maney/ProPublica
Images may be the only valid comparison between our tragedy and one that has killed tens of thousands of people. Many Palisades residents displaced by the fire have enviable resources; They reportedly fill four- and five-star hotels from Montecito to Laguna Beach. Compared to Syrians, Gazans or refugees from Ukraine, Palisade residents have a much better chance of rebuilding their lives.
But the trauma remains strong. The fact that our past is so brutally erased makes me wonder what we can really rebuild. Big developers are more likely to pick up burned people who were uninsured or underinsured. Their place will inevitably be taken by a larger and more general structure, much of it in the nouveaux-McMansion style.
Even my friends who were in their 60s wondered if they would have the time and energy to rebuild their homes. And whose Palisade, they wonder, will be built around them? For now, the only part of downtown standing somewhat intact is the Palisades Village Mall, where Caruso called in private firefighters and water trucks to protect his investment.
As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, a city that was devastated by an earthquake in 1972. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua found itself in need; there was no money for street signs. But Nicaraguans had a powerful collective memory, and I realized this as one of their strengths.
In those days, a typical address in Managua might be “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago” or “From the old tree three blocks to the lake.” The old tree has not been there for many years. But everyone remembered.
