What L.A. Has Lost

L os Angeles is the American city most associated with the future. But contrary to popular belief, it also possesses a rich past. And major parts of it are going up in flames along with homes in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Pasadena, as the L.A. wildfires, already among the most devastating natural events in American history, finally edge toward containment. Losses run to the hundreds of billions. But not every loss can be measured in dollars and cents. Along with their property and, yet more tragically, their lives, the people of Los Angeles have lost some of the best parts of their history and culture.

The Will Rogers Ranch House in Pacific Palisades is gone, burned in the wildfire. Like so many other Angelenos and their descendants, the Oklahoma Territory–bred Rogers went west during the first decades of the 20th century to find his fortune — in his case, in the movies. Rogers brought his brand of homespun, plainspoken humor with him from the Plains and made it a part of the culture of his new city. He represented the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Midwest and South who poured into Los Angeles, some fleeing the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, others seeking job opportunities in the defense industries that made Los Angeles one of America’s “arsenals of democracy” during World War II. “The Folks” — that’s what one observer called them —were Will Rogers’s people. Rogers died in a plane crash in 1935, but his ranch house overlooking the Pacific, complete with stables and corrals, was where Oklahoma met L.A. It was The Folks’ house, too, symbolizing one of the greatest and most successful internal migrations in our nation’s history. Now it no longer exists.

Then there is — or was — the Zane Grey Estate in Altadena. It’s gone, too. Grey grew up in Ohio but had the West in his blood. He abandoned a career in dentistry to write novels, heavy on the mythology of the “Old West.” In 1918, after selling his Riders of the Purple Sage to Hollywood, he moved to Los Angeles to market his books to the movie industry. For the next 20 years, Grey and his family lived in a mansion on manicured grounds on East Mariposa Street in Altadena, as he churned out dozens of novels glorifying the virtues of rugged individualism and masculine virtues in the West of his imagination, many of them brought to life by the mythmaking movie-production machine nearby. After Grey’s death in 1939, the estate’s grounds were sold off, but the house remained as a reminder of the Old West come to Hollywood, until it burned in the early days of the Eaton fire. In a sad example of another fleeting myth, the house had been advertised as fireproof.

A house does not require a celebrity occupant to possess enduring value. The Benedict and Nancy Freedman House in Pacific Palisades was designed in 1949 by Richard Neutra, an Austrian-born architect who brought modernist styles to Los Angeles. The Freedman House exemplified Neutra’s work, which closely complemented L.A.’s natural environment. Open and airy, with tall windows, glass sidings, and high ceilings, it offered a spacious “feel” that belied its relatively modest size. While a second floor was eventually added, changing its look somewhat, the house remained an example of mid-century modernist architecture, which was as much a part of “L.A. style” as shorts and sunglasses. Now it is a pile of rubble and ashes.

L.A.’s losses extend beyond the buildings themselves, to what was contained within them. An archive of some 100,000 scores and pieces by the experimentalist composer Arnold Schoenberg, pioneer of anharmonic dissonance and inventor of the twelve-tone compositional method, was housed in a building on the property of his son, Lawrence Schoenberg, in Pacific Palisades. All of it was lost when the building burned on January 7. Born in Austria, Arnold Schoenberg came to Los Angeles as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, moving to a house in Brentwood. While it is as yet unharmed, his son’s home, along with music, letters, and arrangements related to his father, is gone. Schoenberg belonged to Los Angeles, where he spent the last two decades of his life, as much as he did to Europe. Now yet another piece of the city’s artistic soul is lost to the flames.

Will Rogers, Zane Grey, Richard Neutra, and Arnold Schoenberg, like so many Angelenos, were born somewhere else. They all came to Los Angeles seeking freedom. L.A. offered it. This open, spacious city, built on experimentation and innovation, gave them the freedom to write, act, build, and compose in novel and unique ways. L.A. took them in and gave them what other places — Austria, Germany, Ohio, Oklahoma — could not. An insurance company will not be able to put a dollar value on that kind of gift.

And this is just the beginning of the reckoning. It will take time to inventory the number of artworks lost from private collections, storage facilities, artists’ studios, and exhibition spaces, but the final tally, in both quantity and quality, will be enormous. Angelenos are resilient. Living in the shadow of earthquakes, mudslides, floods, and, yes, fires, they have to be. Even with parts of the city still blaze, rebuilding efforts are underway. But nothing will ever fully replace what has been lost. L.A. will return a stiller town.