Earthquake: The Long Road Back : As Walls Topple, Bridges Are Built

When the earth shifted, the walls built to keep out, keep in and keep peace crumbled.

Across the San Fernando Valley, the walls, gates and fences that define this suburban sprawl and divide community from community and neighbor from neighbor collapsed under their own weight.

Before Monday morning’s quake, the barriers had kept neighbors strangers, made neighborhoods into prisons and turned private homes into fortresses. But on Tuesday, security gates clanged uselessly in the breeze and once-massive walls had become dusty piles of bricks and mortar.

As they picked up the rubble that once separated them, some neighbors actually said hello for the first time and asked one another what they could do to help. Residents of gated communities were forced to leave their drawbridges down for the night, yet no looters stormed their luxury bunkers.

For a little while anyway, a city obsessed with security let its guard down. And survived. Their faith in nature betrayed, people were forced to turn to one another for support. And with the walls of distrust in pieces, many started building bridges of trust.

“The walls came tumbling down and people learned they could help one another,” said Ed Blakely, a professor of urban planning at UC Berkeley. “Maybe there is some potential here. Maybe we might start learning to live together.”

If so, it would buck the recent history of Southern California development: building more and more secure offices, residences and housing tracts. Planners and architects talk about “defensible space.” Developers advertise their housing projects as offering “gate-guarded prestige.” Urban historian Mike Davis has compared Los Angeles to an “armored honeycomb.”

Driving down many major boulevards in the Valley often suggests a trip through one of the concrete flood-control channels that crisscross the region. Both sides of the street are the same uniform tan or gray or occasionally red brick, dotted with scraggly trees and luminescent patches of grass.

Their message, sent in a structural shorthand, is clear: Keep out.

But after the electricity went out, many walls kept residents in, stuck behind security gates that refused to swing open. Some residents of secure apartment buildings were unable to use their cars because garage gates were stuck.

Many more simply abandoned the notion of a secure garage and forced the doors open, holding them in place with electrical cord or rope. One Sherman Oaks apartment manager left a radio on all night to discourage looters from ransacking his complex’s unsecured garage.

In Granada Hills, all three cinder-block walls around Art and Dorothy Roberto’s modest home crumbled in the quake, leaving their back yard exposed for the first time in 42 years. The same thing happened to most of their neighbors, some of whom the Robertos had never met.

“If there is an upside, this is it,” Art Roberto said. Across the alley, crumbled walls exposed the neighbors’ swimming pool and a lawn in need of mowing. Roberto met them for the first time Monday.

“Real nice people,” he said, clearing a small pile of bricks from the flower bed. Walking across another brick stack, Roberto reminded a visitor to “make sure you close the gate.”

Despite his humor and the newfound friends across the alley, the Robertos plan to rebuild the wall--or better, a wooden fence--as quickly as possible. “It just takes everything away from you,” Dorothy Roberto said. “It’s like you don’t own anything anymore. Now it’s not my yard--it’s everybody’s. We’re unprotected now.”

Blakely, who has studied the phenomenon of gated communities, speculated that many more people will respond as the Robertos did and rebuild their walls once the urgency of the moment fades. Property will regain its prominence over community.

“I wish we could be more optimistic,” he said. “But I think the first things re-erected will be those walls. As time goes by, personal property becomes more important than people’s neighbors. Your neighbor might be a nice guy, but what about everyone else?”

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That was the question that ran through Blake Clark’s mind as he camped in the back yard of his home in Ridgegate, a gated community in Northridge. The community normally is surrounded by a six-foot brick wall topped with decorative metal spikes. Large portions of the barrier crumbled Monday morning, leaving a wall just high enough for Clark to sit on as he puffed a cigar.

Clark, armed with a gun, slept outside not just because he was afraid to stay inside but because he wanted to scare off looters. But he insisted that his neighborhood is as safe as it ever was.

“There is no such thing as a secured area,” he said. “A gate-guarded community only makes it more of an inconvenience to rob someone. It’s like the old saying goes: ‘A lock only keeps out an honest man.’

“Security is a state of mind,” he said.