Aspects of Loss in Los Angeles

Nothing we have is solid, even what’s under our feet.

My father and mother — she heavily pregnant with my older brother — came to live in Lakewood in 1946. They were just a few years from their lives in Manhattan. They let go of that. They came to a street of small houses with plowed fields beyond. My parents and their friends (though they did not have many) knew what they found and lost by coming to live on a street like that. They found ways to reinvent themselves, though later, some knew that reinvention had gone badly. The men, in particular, lost what adolescence they had. It made them remote from their sons and daughters. We learned that loss came with the territory.

For some migrants, not welcome because of their color or unfamiliar speech, the stories were of war, of desperate necessity, of flight. For children who listened in the suburban sunshine, the stories may not have seemed quite real.

Millions more had come to Los Angeles from back East or down South. Those places teemed with stories that unraveled in a place assumed to be too sudden to have stories of its own. Timothy Turner, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, was assigned to find some of them: in a Japanese garden behind a flower shop on San Pedro Street in Little Tokyo, at a Basque handball court that was a wall of the Pyrenees Hotel downtown, and at the old plaza and in Pershing Square where people sat and told their stories in the sunshine they came for. The garden was lost in the incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942. The handball court was demolished with the hotel. The plaza and square no longer encouraged sitting. Other habits were substituted. Forgetting is our inheritance, despite the Los Angeles Times.

Read: The Lessons in Los Angeles’ Murals

We forget that Los Angeles has living streams and springs. One of them — a place of memory for the indigenous Kizh-Tongva — is at Kuruvungna on the edge of a high school campus in west Los Angeles. The spring rises from an underground aquifer, flows with more than 20,000 gallons of water a day, and empties into a county storm drain. Elsewhere in the flood control system are more buried streams. Beneath the traffic noise, the sound of free-flowing water can be heard in the dark.

On the sidewalk, at the foot of a streetlight, is a cluster of devotional candles decaled with Jesus, his heart exposed, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, sympathetic and melancholy. There may be cards, gifts, and balloons as if for a child’s birthday. The candles have gone out. The balloons sag a foot or so above the pavement. From the highway, the memorial is gone in a blur. A walker pauses, wondering what tragedy is being commemorated. Weeks go by with no attention paid. Someone is grieving somewhere, but not here.

There once was a tall sycamore called El Aliso that flourished for 400 years where drivers today take the 101 across the Los Angeles River to Boyle Heights. The Kizh-Tongva lived around the tree or near it until colonial disruptions dispersed them. The city’s oldest residents remembered the tree as a landmark showing the way to the heart of the newly American city. Later, the tree stood among the buildings of the Maier brewing company until the tree grew old, its trunk hollow. El Aliso was cut down for firewood in August 1895. There’s a bronze plaque where the tree might have been, set into the sidewalk on Commercial Street across from a strip club. It’s probably the city’s least visited historical monument.

Read: Nipsey’s Los Angeles

We feel something slipping away. The ground beneath the Palos Verdes peninsula is moving. Lloyd Wright’s Wayfarers Chapel was dismantled in 2024 to save it from collapse in the slow-moving landslide. Almost all of Palos Verdes is at risk of sliding into the Pacific. The coastline is eroding faster because of sea level rise. Nothing we have is solid, even what’s under our feet.

We lost (a short list) Wanda Coleman, Octavia Butler, Kevin Starr, Robert Winter, Carolyn See, Ray Bradbury, Barry Lopez, bell hooks, and Eve Babitz. They told us what we were and might become.

Having become old, I’ve come to the place the old keep that is loss, familiar as a room I can safely cross in the dark. My lightless body knows where to place each step, unconsidered, without reflection. When everything of mine is gone, as it is going — when the room itself will be gone — knowing that about the room will remain.

D.J. Waldie’s most recent book is “Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place.” His essay is one of 10 on the subject of loss collectively titled “The Road From Loss” that were solicited by LMU Magazine. The others can be found here.