LOS ANGELES – Pedestrians shuffled by the famed Chateau Marmont hotel, customers queued up at Starbucks on Sunset Boulevard and car horns bleated at gridlocked intersections. But overhead, shadowing the usual bustling Los Angeles scene, a blackish dome of wildfire smoke turned daybreak into an eerie twilight.
Even beyond the reach of the flames from five wildfires, Los Angeles residents accustomed to radiant sunshine and balmy weather are living with disquiet and even fear. Across the city are reminders of nearby danger: Thumping helicopters overhead. Wildfire ash tumbling like snowflakes. A lingering whiff of smoke just about everywhere. The familiar crystalline sky turned ashen gray.
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“It is otherworldly,” said Lydia Thelwell, a bartender visiting a hair salon where wildfire smoke could be seen from the front window. “You know it’s happening, but we just go on with our day."
The sprawling, congested city of nearly 4 million has always been disjointed, what's been called dozens of separate cities in search of a unified whole. It's not uncommon for temperatures in different neighborhoods to vary by as much as 30 degrees, with cooler days at the beach and desert-like communities in the San Fernando Valley.
But nearly everywhere now is the sense of nearby danger from the fires, with smoke coiling for miles across the sky. L.A. hasn't seen fires like these, especially in winter months, any time in recent memory.
For coffee shop manager Pascal Loza, it was business as usual, with long lines of customers waiting for lattes and paninis in the Studio City business.
“It's hard to feel scared when it's so far” in a distant neighborhood, he said. “It's something you learn to live with.”
Indeed, wildfires have long been part of living in L.A., where residents enjoy arguably the nation’s finest climate but accept the tradeoff of wildfires, earthquakes, and drought — and the uncertainty that comes with them.
“You’re in this disaster, and it’s nature. There’s no controlling what’s happening,” said Teddy Leonard, who with her husband Andy owns the landmark Reel Inn in Malibu, which was destroyed in the Pacific Palisades fire. Actor Billy Crystal and his wife Janice lost their home of 45 years in the same blaze.
Thousands of homes and a long list of iconic sites were destroyed. Will Rogers’ ranch house, which the movie star owned until his death in 1935, was destroyed, park officials said. Also lost, the historic Topanga Ranch Motel, built in 1929 and once owned by William Randolph Hearst. Another loss: popular film spot Palisades Charter High School, where the list of credits includes Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of “Carrie.”
In the hazy morning light at Runyon Canyon Park, scorched hillsides could be seen through the steel gates that mark the trailhead of the popular hiking spot. A red and yellow fire truck inched slowly up the denuded grade as sprinkles of wildfire ash floated to the ground.
This once-serene corner of Los Angeles is a playground for John Klay, a broad-shouldered local who works in private security and walks here daily. But like many, his sense of place has been badly shaken by days of wildfire that indiscriminately gutted neighborhoods of the wealthy and not, this time nearly at his doorstep.
“You watch disasters on TV — hurricanes, tsunamis, tornados,” he said. “You never consider that it will ever happen to you.”
“Yesterday was that wake-up call,” he said, referring to the Sunset Fire that burned across the park and the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday evening. “All the sudden, instantly, it happened.”
Klay didn’t think the fire could reach his apartment, but the traffic, panic and congestion of evacuating residents in his neighborhood “stressed me more.”
“There was so much chaos,” he said. “We didn’t know where to go.”