United by Disaster, L.A. Mourns,and Hopes, Together

It took a wind-whipped inferno to shrink the famously sprawling geography of Los Angeles — somehow, when everyone knows someone who has lost everything, the place feels smaller.Phones suddenly blare with false evacuation alarms — and then quietly ding with texts from long-lost classmates and distant cousins checking in.There are “you loot, we shoot” signs outside some homes, but the donation centers are overflowing.

Hundreds of residents who live in some of the priciest ZIP codes in the country have been sleeping on cots in Red Cross shelters.Entire blocks have been reduced to ashy debris while one house stands alone — and it’s hard to know whether it was protected by private firefighters only money can buy, grace or the ruthless whims of the Santa Ana winds.The civic fabric feels both tattered and taut.Are the fires the great equalizer, the great divider or the great uniter of Los Angeles? Or, like so much else about this catastrophe, are they all of those things at once?Seated in a wheelchair outside the doors of an evacuation shelter in the West Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood, Jay Solton, 85, embodied this jumble of personal and communal trauma and resilience.She was beaming, yet mourning, and her life was on hold at a local recreation center.

Her career had touched the twin obsessions of Los Angeles: real estate and Hollywood.She told stories of whiling away afternoons with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day in the 1960s, and of growing close to her newest neighbors but growing estranged from her sons.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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