Remembering the Palisades

After a Fire

Sunset Boulevard. Palm trees. Endless sun and waves.

The Pacific Palisades of my youth had all of those iconic LA things, and more. It was a sweet little town within the big city of Los Angeles, an enclave of neighborhood eateries and stores, tucked between Malibu and Santa Monica, nestled up against the Santa Monica mountains.

I grew up in the Alphabet Streets, a neighborhood formed in 1921 by Methodist ministers who named the streets after Methodist bishops—Albright, Bashford, Cary, and so on.

From my home in the 1100 block of Embury, I would walk half a block, turn right, go another short block, left, and in a few steps more I would be on Swarthmore, in the village. There was a gift store that sold plants, a clothing store, and a Baskin-Robbins. Across the street was Mort’s Deli, rich with the smells of pastrami and latkes. Mort’s was beloved, and when it disappeared nearly twenty years ago, even those of us who hadn’t been back in years mourned its demise.

On Sunset, another block or two away, was the First Old-Fashioned Food Company, or something like that, a narrow, dark restaurant with juicy burgers, thick fries with the potato skins still on, and sawdust on the floor. I guess the sawdust is what made it old-fashioned. Or maybe it was the potato skins on the fries. Down Sunset a few blocks and across the street there was a popular hot dog place, which I remember as being in a little white clapboard building. Inside the small room where you ate there was a model train going around and around and around, high on the wall. I think the dogs were good, but the train was, at least for me and my brother, the real attraction. The Hot Dog Show, it was called. This was in the days when matchbooks were a popular way of spreading the word about a place:

Matchbook from The Hot Dog Show. Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/53088082222/

If burgers and hot dogs weren’t to your taste, there was always Barreras. The storefront opened on to a tidy brick patio, and they had the most delicious thin crust pizza.

For a time we had an old movie theater, too. The Bay Theater. That’s where my family went to see the first Star Wars movie. And then it closed and Bay Pharmacy and Norris Hardware took over that space.

Or so I remember.

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From kindergarten to third grade I walked the several blocks to my elementary school, crossing Sunset and ending up on Via de la Paz. It had been remodeled since I attended, and revisioned into a Charter school, but in the Summer of 2024 I went back, walking through the old neighborhoods, and taking pictures.

Palisades Elementary Charter School, June 2024

This is now all gone.

Also on Via de la Paz was the hobby shop that would later become a Radio Shack. I think. But when it was still independent it provided hours of intrigue. I would look through the tiny motors, propellors, and parachutes, and imagine what I could make with them. I spent my money on wire, electrical sockets and plugs, and balsa wood, which all came together, along with beautiful papers, into boxes and lamps that I built. I still have two of the lamps, and many of the boxes, their bones built from the goods in a hobby shop long gone, in a neighborhood now burnt to the ground.

Drone shot above the Alphabet Streets, after the Palisades Fire.

The father of one of my friends flipped houses for a living. Maybe they didn’t call it that then; maybe it wasn’t exactly flipping. I only know because every two years or so, her family would move, the latest project done and sold, on to a new property. I don’t really know what the rest of my friends’ parents did. They were professionals. Up-and-coming. There was already considerable wealth in the Palisades when I grew up there, but it wasn’t uniformly wealthy. Lots of people, like my parents, had come from places far to the East, the California dream beckoning. Like so much in Los Angeles—and in California more broadly—this was a place to aspire.

From one window in my parents’ bedroom, if I climbed up on to the back of a loveseat, I could just barely see the ocean. It formed a different kind of thin blue line, a trick of perception, as if the vast Pacific Ocean were just a border between land and sky.

Sometimes, in elementary school, I walked all the way down Temescal to the ocean itself. When I was in middle school, my mother and I got up early every morning for a few months and ran on a path on the beach, training for a 10k. We stopped after a homeless man was found dead there. A few years later a friend and I wandered cluelessly onto the nude beach, marveling for a few moments, then becoming embarrassed, then concerned, before realizing that it was not just a nude beach, but a gay beach as well, and we were quite safe from all the men whom we were now among.

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Will Rogers State Historic Park was too far to walk to, or rather, there were no sidewalks and access was via a part of Sunset where the road was curvy and the cars were fast. But I spent a lot of time there as a child. It was a giant park with endless trails and stables too, and in stark contrast to the rough and tumble nature of the rest of the park, there was a polo field there, the only one I ever saw.

Will Rogers has burned down as well.

When we turned on the tv or went to movies, we Angelenos would tend to see familiar places, even if we didn’t know it. Korea looks like southern California, is one of the less accurate lessons I took from watching hours of M*A*S*H, the deeply funny and dark and raw show about an American Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Three’s Company…all of those strange shows from the 70s and 80s were utterly in and of LA, even when they were pretending that they weren’t.

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Every fall, scorching Santa Ana winds would come in from the east, pummeling our already parched city. If the winds coincided with a spark in the hills, brush fires erupted, sweeping across chaparral and houses with similar abandon. I remember one fire, coming over the mountains towards our house, now four, maybe five blocks away. I stood on the roof with my father, a little girl, with all the neighborhood fathers on their roofs, hoses in hand, wetting down the tinder of our lives. The fire, which we could not yet see, kissed our faces with raw heat. Finally my father ordered me down, back to the room where my mother had put my little brother and our two cats. We were ready to escape to a car packed with family photos, as soon as my father yelled go.

I fell asleep curled on a pile of blankets. The next morning I woke confused, sweating, my sinuses filled with ash. The winds had turned, and the danger was past. My parents were haunted by our closest call yet, while the children and animals clamored for breakfast.

- From Antipode, my first book, published in 2002

Now. The Alphabet Streets are gone, as is the elementary school, and the library. The car wash and both supermarkets burned down. I don’t know if they managed to save the fire station, but I know that they were trying. The fire jumped PCH and destroyed houses and restaurants right down to the sea. So many cherished, historic institutions gone. LA will never be the same.

What happens when tens of thousands of people are suddenly homeless in a city where real estate is already limited and in high demand? This catastrophe will inherently manifest differently from a hurricane in Appalachia, or an earthquake in Ecuador. Many of the people displaced by the LA fires have considerable wealth, but money can’t buy things today which do not yet exist. Money may be able to hasten their existence, but what about right now? What will the ripples be along the whole West coast, the entire country even, as Angelenos decide whether to stay or to go?

Palisades Fire, Jan 8, 2025. Apu Gomes /Getty Images News via Getty Images

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I remember the Fourth of July parade through the Palisades every year, and hanging out outside my Dad’s friend’s Terry’s house on Hartzell, was it, or maybe he lived on Sunset itself. Either way it was close enough to the parade route, and the kids played tag while the adults drank beer in those 1970’s folding lawn chairs made of tubular aluminum and thick woven straps.

After the parade each year we’d go up to the Highlands where my parents’ other friends, the Bryans, had an amazing house with a pool and a balcony high above it, which I was allowed to jump off of into the water below. I am not sure that the other parents approved.

The Highlands were accessible by only one road, Palisades Drive¹, which branched off Sunset and snaked upwards into the hills. It was that road on which people abandoned their cars as the fires roared in last week, unable, presumably, to get onto Sunset, their only escape, as it was already full of other people fleeing. Later, fire trucks couldn’t get through until bulldozers were brought in to clear the cars away.

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I was gone long before Mort’s Deli disappeared. That whole block, where I had worked my first retail job, scooping ice cream across the street from Mort’s, got reimagined with very high-end shops and restaurants in 2018. Before it had just been the village; now it was Palisades Village. The new shopping center was saved by privately hired firefighters. It now stands alone, an island among rubble.

Lightly modified from The New York Times, January 11, 2025: Mapping the Damage in Altadena and Pacific Palisades

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In June of last year I was back in the Palisades for the first time in many years. I introduced my children, now young men of 18 and 20, to the places of my own childhood. I took them through Palisades Park, and just seven months before fires would destroy it all, I wrote this:

The sprawling park where I played tennis, but also engaged in endless, unsupervised games in what was then wilder territory, is still there. It is tamer now. This is not just because it seems smaller to my adult eyes, but also because it has been developed. In one stretch of eucalyptus forest that I remember playing hide and seek in as a child, a place that got dark and brooding even in the white southern California sun, there are now ball fields and manicured paths. But there are still places to play.

I am one of very few people here who do not seem to have a reason to be here. Men and women play tennis, the pro shop is buzzing, and a tennis camp for young children is just getting started. There are middle schoolers gathered for softball. The playground is busy with little ones and their caretakers—mostly nannies, by the look of it. There is bocce too now, and that is where the elders are convening.

A few rangy lawns still exist in this park. One remains a little wild, much as I remember it, steeply sloped, with picnic tables at the bottom, the smell of barbacoa detectable on the slightest of ocean breezes. The other remaining lawn is flat, uninteresting. Once, while in elementary school—the school was just a few blocks away—our class was walking by that flat, uninteresting lawn, and at the far edge, in the shadows, under some bushes, I detected movement. A couple having sex. Only a few of us noticed, and we all kept walking, looking, not looking, looking again. Somehow, this story assures me that those were simpler times. There is no possibility that people could get away with having sex in the middle of the day there now. But in the rest of LA, things are more decrepit, more gritty, more dangerous. It all feels more fraught. I would rather a child see a flash of sexual pleasure between consenting adults than navigate the under-maintained streets among the drug-addled and mentally-confused.

Palisades Park, June 2024

Palisades Park is gone now, too.

These times are not simple, but many of the forces we reckon with now are what people have reckoned with for eons. Fire and flood, hurricane and tsunami. Let us take care of our green Earth, believing not that we can engineer our way out from under all of her forces. Let us replace our hubris with respect, and discard quick fixes in favor of long time horizon thinking.

This is, and will always be, the only Earth that we have.

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1. I am not actually sure that the Bryans’ house was in the Highlands proper, up Palisades Drive, or rather up Paseo Miramar, another one-way-in-one-way-out neighborhood road that is very near Palisades Drive.