Had the Chicago History Museum known what was about to befall America’s second largest city, it might not have scheduled its current exhibition, “City on Fire: Chicago 1871.” Or, at least, it would have modified its dramatic promotional language: “A rapidly growing city built of wood. A summer-long heat wave. An exhausted and misdirected team of firefighters. Racial, social, and economic tensions bubbling just below the surface. All Chicago needed was a spark.”
But the museum could not, of course, know that America would be shocked beyond all measure as the new year dawned to see the massive destruction in Los Angeles: entire neighborhoods, many of them aspirational oceanfront and forest locales where many of us would dearly love to live, wiped out by brutal flames that spared moisture-laden trees but not the walls of family homes.
Those made homeless by the fire included all income groups and were hardly confined to bold-face names. Nonetheless, the sight of much-loved celebrities announcing the total loss of the homes where they raised their children and played with their grandchildren certainly emphasized the extent of a tragedy that wiped out not just personal memories but plenty of cultural history.
We can only imagine what irreplaceable mementoes must have been inside Billy Crystal’s burned-out house, to cite just one example.
Beloved, long-standing restaurants like the seafood spot the Reel Inn, once located at Topanga State Park in Malibu and now burned to a crisp, became ruins. Moonshadows Malibu had hung over the ocean since 1966; it hangs no more. Such losses of entire downtowns and communities are profoundly dislocating; we mark our personal histories by such signposts.
As a point of perspective, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 covered a little over 2,000 acres. In the past few days, the Palisades fire in LA has spread over 17,000 acres. Granted much of that California acreage is uninhabited forest as distinct from a dense, mostly wooden city filled with new immigrants, but that’s still eight times the size, a bigger area than than occupied by Manhattan. And the Palisades fire is one of many afflicting Southern California.
Although it was similarly fueled by high winds, conventional wisdom has it that the Great Chicago Fire could never happen now, thanks to a much larger and better prepared Fire Department, new building materials and codes ensuring fire resistance, and the end of sidewalks made of timber. We trust that is the case. The underlying message of the museum exhibit is: Look how far we have come. Visitors can immerse themselves in a 40-foot oil painting depicting a 360-degree view of our city on fire; maybe not something you would care to do if you worried about it happening again.
But if you’d told us on New Year’s Day that we’d be seeing some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Los Angeles burn to the ground in a matter of hours, we’d have thought you ridiculous. And if you had added that some firefighters would open fire hydrants to find no water supply within, we’d have been shocked by that, too. But all of that has happened in the last few days.
This is no time for politicized recriminations (not that it stopped some people) and natural disasters of this scope require a focus on helping those in immediate need; inquiries as to the natural and human causes can come later. Clearly, Los Angeles is going to need the help of the entire nation to rebuild and we applaud President Joe Biden’s early moves to cover firefighting costs and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to deploy California’s National Guard to help an overwhelmed city.
Aside from passing our sympathies onto our friends in Los Angeles, we’d just add these thoughts. Fire always is a clear and present danger to our lives; this is a good moment to check your fire extinguishers, dust off your family escape plan and support your local firefighters. These fires also are a jolting reminder that however stable we think our lives to be, they always can be upended with no notice.
Luckily, most possessions can be replaced. And when you consider the number of homes burned in this crisis, the death toll (at least as far as we currently know) is less than one might have expected. Angelenos can at least be grateful for that.
Here in Chicago, historians see a fire in which one-third of people in this city lost their homes and at least 300 died as a unique catalyst for growth and reinvention, although it it is often forgotten that the city got a lot of help from people outside its borders. Within little more than year, a visitor to Chicago could not see many visible signs of the prior destruction, and the roaring city had gained a fierce and lasting reputation for resilience and new opportunity.
Once the fires are out and losses mourned, LA will have a similar chance to look hard at the changing environment in which it lives, improve its services with the benefit of bitter experience and build back better.
For now, though, we stand with its people through the painful slog of recovery.
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