The Hidden Histories Lost in the Los Angeles Fires

the concept of a city-state implies a core and a periphery, and L.A. has multiple cores and is all periphery.

For the most part, floods were a distant memory. After devastating overflows in 1914 and 1916, the Los Angeles River was paved, reducing its danger.

In the words of locally born Héctor Tobar, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author, Los Angeles seems to appear to the twenty-first century what New York City had been to its forerunner, “the crucible where a new national culture is being molded, where its permutations and contradictions can be seen most clearly.”

excavating an ancient world to burn up in the present one.

It was a flaking three-story house in the ancient part of the city, a century old if it was a day, but like all houses it had been given a thin fireproof plastic sheath many years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be the only thing holding it in the sky.