Some Maps of Los Angeles

As we try to understand the enormous disaster unfolding in Los Angeles, writer Michael Oates Palmer provides a lay of the land.

Words by Michael Oates Palmer

January 15, 2025

When your flight begins its descent into Los Angeles, you can’t always tell from a window seat where exactly above the city you are.

I look for the hills. But then, the hills of Los Angeles have always been key to knowing where I am.

A native Angeleno, most of my childhood was spent in a pink stucco Spanish villa on a street called Foothill – in Hollywood, the neighborhood, in the shadow of the Hollywood Sign. We were a half mile walk to Hollywood Blvd, and a short hike up into Bronson Canyon, where old Western serials were once filmed in its caves.

But I had no sense of the geography of this city until I turned 16.

In those days, when you received your driver’s license, some family member would hand you a mammoth spiral-bound book, sold all across town: the Thomas Guide.

Inside its pages were a grid of maps, revealing the secret interconnected syntax of the city – and a helpful index that listed every single street in Los Angeles County. You would turn to the back, look up where you were going, find it on the grid, and then work your way back through the pages to plan your route.

Along the way, you learned how the city was laid out, neighborhood by neighborhood. You understood how Koreatown intersected with West Adams, how gigantic Culver City was. (The Thomas Guide was much more accurate than the Maps to Stars Homes sold to tourists along Sunset Blvd.) Suddenly, an enormous city in an even more enormous county started to make some sense.

Learning how to drive also meant learning where you most loved to drive. There was no drive I loved more than Mulholland Drive, at the top of the Santa Monica Mountains that extend from Malibu to downtown, separating most of the city from the San Fernando Valley.

The vistas from that height offered their own panoramic map of Los Angeles, as clusters of skyscrapers helped you to situate yourself: there’s Downtown, over there’s Century City, so that must be Westwood. And the views of the San Fernando Valley? The charms of its strip malls and tract homes could be elusive at ground level, but from above, it was stunning, especially when electrified at dusk. 

This last week, I examined a new map, one most of us had never seen a few days ago, but now reload a dozen times an hour: Watch Duty, a non-profit app tracking wildfires.

There, on my smartphone’s screen, was enormous Los Angeles County, bookended on either side by the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire, a visceral mirror of how our firefighters were pulled in all directions.

In just the last day, I saw aerial shots taken of both Pacific Palisades and Altadena. I read those as maps, too, charting just what the fires coming from the hills had done.

The Palisades is very affluent, but its casual oceanside vibe – kids on bikes, a good hardware store, hiking up the trails and canyons – sets it apart from the more ostentatious Bel Air or Beverly Hills.

Altadena, historically diverse – it was once seen as the Black Pasadena - has been a huge magnet for designers and creatives drawn to its rich architectural character and the romance of living in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and its proximity to nature.

These are not two communities with a great deal in common. They are both near the hills. And they are both neighborhoods with prodigious local pride: my friends who live there love living there. I have heard residents in each say the exact same praise: it feels like a small town.

In the aerial photos, these neighborhoods are unrecognizable: the blocks laid waste felt like they could have been Dresden or Fallujah.

When I stared at one photograph of a few square blocks of the Palisades, where every single home was leveled to the ground, leaving only debris, burnt trees, and the grid of the streets, I felt a sick recognition: it was like a post-Apocalyptic page from the Thomas Guide.

Just a few months ago, I had been to dinner at my friends’ Palisades home, the house where they raised their three sons.

It was now ash. 

• • •

 When I first moved back to LA in my twenties, I lived in the Fairfax District. Then, for over a decade, Venice Beach.

But I missed the hills. So I moved to Laurel Canyon, renting a yellow house – not unlike the one drawn into Joni Mitchell’s dress on the Ladies of the Canyon cover – surrounded by Jacaranda trees. Two years ago, I moved to the same ZIP Code where I grew up, in a neighborhood called the Knolls, a short walk to the Lake Hollywood reservoir.

Living in the hills offers the best of both worlds: you can be surrounded by nature, with a five minute drive into the heart of the city. You wake up to birds! Sometimes they’re competing with leaf-blowers, but still.

That’s where I was Wednesday when I checked Watch Duty on my phone and saw that there was a new fire, one almost directly between the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire.

Two miles from me.

• • •

A favorite college professor, a retired urban historian, once confided that he had a hard time understanding how Los Angeles was laid out.

I asked for a sheet of paper and a pen. I started to draw a map, placing the Santa Monica Mountains a third of the way down the page, and explained how all along those mountains heading west to east – the hills – were a series of neighborhoods and cities.

Under the mountains, I wrote names like Malibu and Brentwood, drew the 405 freeway, then Westwood and Beverly Hills, all down to Echo Park and Downtown.

I filled in what was below: the South Bay beach towns, South Central cities like Compton and Gardena. Then what was above the mountains: here’s Tarzana and Sherman Oaks, and there’s Glendale and Eagle Rock. I was soon reaching for a second sheet of paper, making addendums to accommodate more communities.

My old professor’s eyes had glazed over. I understood: it was a lot. Again, the city is enormous.

But that enormity makes it that much scarier when a fire is so close to you.

On Wednesday, I had not yet received any alert or order to evacuate. I had the luxury of time. So I collected my valuables, and drove to a friend in the flats, leaving them in his dining room.

I drove back home, threw clothes in my car, and drove on an empty 101 to the home of a friend in Studio City. I fell asleep in a guest room reloading that map, seeing if there were any signs that the Sunset Fire was growing.

The next morning arrived with good news. Thanks to the Santa Anas weakening from their 80 mph peak, and the proximity of Lake Hollywood as a water supply, the firefighters had kept the fire at bay. My house no longer under immediate threat, I drove home that afternoon.

I first sat with relief at what did not unfold. And then felt a deep pain, taking in all that had.

Sometimes in Los Angeles, the smog gives sunsets beautiful colors not usually seen in nature.

Thursday night, there was no red or purple to the sunset: just a thick haze of brown. 

• • •

Los Angeles is sometimes painted as a soulless sprawl of freeway overpasses and parking lots. I always find that a lazy take, neither fresh nor accurate.

When I take visiting friends on a tour across the city, I describe it as  a constellation of distinctive neighborhoods and municipalities, often pedestrian communities to which you may have to drive, but each with their own style and character.

Part of the strange magic of this city is that it can host both Hancock Park and Glassell Park; San Fernando and Mar Vista; North Hollywood and South Pasadena. 

And yes, both Pacific Palisades and Altadena.

I have already heard the inevitable, if offensive, question asked. It’s the same one friends in New Orleans heard after the city’s broken levees destroyed much of their city after Hurricane Katrina.

Should the Palisades or Altadena rebuild, if the high chance of fire could lead to their destruction once again?

The answer is yes: they should. And my hope is they will. For a simple reason: people love living there.

Los Angeles is a city where we tacitly make a deal, consciously or otherwise, that we want to live here, despite the fact that it could all be leveled in seconds. We grew up with earthquake drills almost as frequent as fire drills in our schools. We watched as every year local news hyped the imminent arrival of The Big One. We live here anyway.

If we do despite the threat of earthquakes, will we under the threat of fire?

Some won’t. But many will. Because something keeps us here.

For some, it’s work or family. Or the weather and ocean. Or the restaurants, art and music scenes, and distinctive neighborhoods constantly evolving. Or the sense of possibility – that rather than styles or hierarchies being so entrenched here, someone can find their role.

And some will stay because of a strong feeling of community.

That might be unexpected. In a city where so many of us drive, most of us don’t find community on our commutes. In the absence of the personal interaction that pedestrian culture and public transit so provide, we turn elsewhere: our street festivals, farmer’s markets, outdoor concerts. And our sports teams.

These last few days, I thought about one other map, an aerial view from last July, and how just as maps can show us where to go, they often remind us where we are.

A friend in from Nashville had never seen a game at Chavez Ravine. I found us last-minute tickets that sat us in my favorite seats, the front row of the highest deck, behind home plate.

We had a bird’s eye view, not just of Dodger Stadium, but the hills and palm trees as dusk gave way to night.

I looked around at the crowd, wonderfully diverse in every way. Families, groups of friends, people on dates, all enjoying the summer night. I smiled to see little kids, and a few bigger kids, too, of all backgrounds wearing Otani jerseys.

The Dodger first baseman, Freddie Freeman, was back after missing a week of games, his three-year old son hospitalized for a neurological condition.

When the stadium announcer called his name, and Freeman walked to his first at-bat, everyone in the entire stadium – everyone – stood up to give Freeman a standing ovation. It lasted for more than a minute.

I felt my city support one of its own – a major league all-star, but still, a stadium of 50,000 plus people in concert, saying, hey, we got you.

I have seen signs of that same ethic in action these last few days, as Angelenos reach out to help those whose homes have been destroyed, giving them clothes, food, even shelter.

I sometimes joke that flaky Los Angeles is built on a foundation of tentative plans, where appointments are as unstable as the ground beneath your feet.

But there has been nothing tentative about how Angelenos are already taking care of our own.

Freddie Freeman would later lead the Dodgers to World Series rings with a performance for the ages.

But that July night, the Dodgers won, so as is the custom, as the players left the field, a certain Randy Newman song came on.

I have a complicated history with “I Love L.A.” I find people miss the irony in it, especially when Newman shouts street names – Century Blvd! Victory Blvd! – that are commercial avenues where you’d go to get a car wash or JiffyLube, not have a night to remember.

But what if what was ironic becomes sincere out of circumstances or necessity?

What if loving Los Angeles means loving all of that constellation – its neighborhoods, its communities, its Angelenos?

What if that’s the map that takes us where we need to go? ◊