The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : ESSAY : Talking Over the Fence : Living In a Land Given to Cataclysm

If there was a moment when it became clear that Los Angeles had departed one era in its history and entered another, it was hour of 4:31 on Jan. 17. The earthquake’s arrival at that precise moment, of course, was the product of mere geological coincidence. Coming at another time, it would have meant little beyond the random mayhem of a major tectonic shift. But in choosing that hour and day, and in its power to shut down the city, the earthquake punctuated a truth that has become increasingly evident: We have seen the closing of a wild and wooly epoch in Los Angeles, and we will not see its like for some time to come.

You could argue with my selection of the earthquake as the historical marker. History is messy and rarely respects clean borders. So the riots of April, 1992, might also serve. Or, if you want to stretch it, you could make a case for Congress’ decision to gut the defense budget, setting into motion Southern California’s economic nose-dive. No matter, really. They all signify the end of a heady, 20-year epoch, one in which many of us grew up here and others of us grew old.

What that period represented was Los Angeles’ coming-of-age as a city. I came here in 1972, several years before it began. In 1972 the typical house in Los Angeles sold for a price somewhat below the national average. Below . No one had yet conceived of the notion that Southern California real estate contained a preciousness far beyond that of Chicago’s or Atlanta’s. Back then, a classy meal in a Los Angeles restaurant meant the steak and the green beans were delivered floating in little pools of butter. The butter signified the French touch. Melrose Avenue remained a depresssed strip of abandoned plumbing stores. Los Angeles was a hard-edged, overgrown town where everyone and everything seemed to have hit the dead spot of middle age. How did the next two decades manage to so change the city? It remains a partial mystery. Other cities grew in the 1970s and ‘80s, but not like Los Angeles. At times it seemed as if an endless line of trucks was arriving at the mountain passes and rolling bags of money down into the city. Was the money coming from the feds for all those Stealth bombers? Was it drugs? Was it Barry Diller? Who knows. Probably it was all of them. Los Angeles went from a bored cowtown to a city that was nervous, original, dangerous and fun all at once.

During the beginning of that period I left the city for three years. When I returned I could sense the change. Sometimes you have to leave a place to understand its transformation. The city had taken on a style of its own, a sense nf occasional grandeur. I had a friend who bought a house early in the period and then traded up to a place on Mulholland. She tripled her net worth and became insufferable, the first of many like her. Public architecture grew brash or whimsical. Disney put up a headquarters whose giant support columns were carved in the shape of Sleepy and Sneezy. The grandeur could extend even to the city’s unique set of natural disasters. Novelist Gore Vidal described the style thus:

“Los Angeles had been on fire for three days. As I took a taxi from the studio I asked the driver, “How’s the fire doing?” “You mean,” said the Hollywoodian, “the holocaust.” The style, you see, must come as easily and naturally as that.”

That’s right. Los Angeles was a comer. Whole streets in the city were reborn and the core of Los Angeles began to do what all great cities do: draw crowds. You could walk down the major streets of West Hollywood or Santa Monica and actually mingle. The phrase “Pacific Rim” emerged and we began to think of Los Angeles as its “Capitol.”

And then, almost as suddenly as it began, the coming-of-age shut down. Try to remember the last time you heard someone refer to the “Pacific Rim.” It seems to have disappeared sometime around 1990. I am not sure why. Perhaps it went underground for the same reason that the city now seems quieter. Or the same reason that conversations about real estate stopped providing dinnertime entertainment.

The truth is, I like the city better now than in the ‘80s. Easy for me to say, I suppose, since I still have a job. Restaurants seem grateful to take my business. And perhaps it is my imagination, but the entire city seems to operate at a slower pace. The city does not appear to have regressed so much as it has paused, stopped in place, as if waiting.

We should have known that every coming-of-age must end, although they don’t have to end with an earthquake or the most destructive riot of the latter 20th Century. It’sjust that they appear to end that way in Los Angeles. Will we learn from our cataclysms and strive to do better as result? I doubt it. We may gain some modesty, and in some neighborhoods people actually get to know each other after wandering around in the dark streets wearing slippers and bathrobes.

But Los Angeles will be Los Angeles. It has never been a city to provide the kind of security offered by other places. The very landscape, the fact that we live in a land given to cataclysms, dictates that. And for those who understand and accept the risks of Los Angeles, there can be some peace. After the earthquake, television and the newspapers talked continuously of the “terror” felt by citizens. But that word does not describe what happened in my neighborhood or, I would guess, in many others.

After the shaking stopped, we emerged from our houses and talked to each other across the hedges. Are you OK? Yes. Are you OK? Yes. We were unsettled, spooked, maybe. Not terrified. This was Los Angeles, after all. We knew the ground could move underneath us. We knew this thing was coming. We knew. We live here.