The Hidden Histories Lost in the Los Angeles Fires

The most tenacious of all clichés about Los Angeles is that it is a place with no past. Bernard-Henri Lévy, in his 2006 travelogue, “American Vertigo,” called L.A. a “city without a history . . . whose historicity is nothing more than an ageless remorse.” A decade earlier, the urban geographer Michael Dear spoke of a “city without a past,” one that... See more