After the catastrophic fires in January 2025 that burned down over 6,500 structures in Pacific Palisades (and over 9,400 in the Eaton Fire), I restrained my photographic urges and did not run to shoot images of someone else’s loss.

Today, I reasoned that photographing the ongoing rebuilding in the Palisades was not immoral or exploitative, only documentary.

It was a cool, foggy Sunday morning with almost no traffic along the 700 Block of North Hartzell St, just off Sunset. I could stand in the middle of the road without fear.

Around me was a vast emptiness of empty lots, but with quite a few houses under construction, not only on Hartzell, but on nearby streets like Drummond, Carey, and Calloway. You could see through to many streets beyond the one you were standing on, looking at lumber boards on joists hundreds of yards away, just as if you had gone back 100 years to the very birth of Pacific Palisades.

Though there were no people, only a few construction workers hammering and drilling, the presence of the law was everywhere. There were signs against trespassing, US Army Corps of Engineers “California Wildfires Response Debris Removal Support,” NOT FOR SALE, PROTECT THE PALISADES, “This Home Will Rise Again,” #palistrong, Palisades Patrol. I felt the security presence of cameras, cops and Mr. Rick Caruso.

Everywhere there were signs for construction companies, architects, interior designers, garden designers, and realtors. Everyone with a skill to sell had a sign to show.

American flags were planted in soil like a Veteran’s Day cemetery. United in mourning, resolved in moving forward, the spirit of the Palisades shined. Or perhaps it was the spirit baptized in buckets of insurance money.

On all the blocks I walked today the metal street signs on posts survived. No burn marks, no damage, nothing but white letters on dark blue metal.  

How could the fires incinerate automobiles, trucks, refrigerators, washing machines, and hot water heaters? But somehow leave the proper names of the avenues, drives and roads intact? It is one of God’s strangest mysteries, perhaps she knows better than us the value of these named lots.

Further west on Bollinger Drive were some burned up vehicles with a big white house across the street. Every other house was consumed, and the lots everywhere were cleared, save for some with front door steps leading up to the sky; empty driveways, brick chimneys in fields, and sediment logs along the edges of lots to trap debris before it clogged drainage systems.

Walking in districts obliterated by now extinguished flames is a ghostly privilege of survivors. The living can never know the whole truth of what this was before. I hope I was respectful to those who lost everything. I am in no position to know their pain.

And now that the new houses are coming up, who knows what they will endure in the coming years, and even if the American nation and government that they are born into will endure and survive an epoch which seems more horrific each passing day.