On Christmas Day, 2025, the second storm of three had passed and the rains were no more.
We went out for an early morning walk on our street where the palm fronds littered the road.
On other streets the light was cinematic, filtered through the clouds, casting golden hues on banal buildings, arranged through heavenly contract by the Chief Gaffer, Mother Nature.
Only a few days in a year, if we are lucky, is Los Angeles drenched in rain. It transports all the motor oil, fertilizer, cigarette butts, and grease into the few unblocked storm drains and down to the Pacific. For a while we can imagine that we live in a tidy and green city.
On the day we walked here, a few hours after we left, a 68-year-old woman, fighting a purse snatcher, was stabbed 8 times but survived. Her attacker was tackled by others and kept down until police arrived and arrested him.
One can sense the presence of danger here even though it may not be knifing you in the chest. You wouldn’t just rationally wander here at midnight. Maybe if you were drunk.
North Spring Street is neglected. There are burned out buildings, empty storefronts, and lots waiting for life to return. New High Street between Alpine and Ord is made of one-story buildings and 50% asphalt parking lots.
What a struggle to run a business in Los Angeles, especially a restaurant. How have any survived the pandemic, taxation, crime, inflation, food costs, employee wages? It’s a wonder anything is functioning.
My architectural imagination wonders why many streets in this district, adjacent to downtown, are so depleted of apartments above stores, why there are still one-story buildings and acres of parking lots all around.
Along Alameda Street, there are gas stations, and a concrete building from the late 1960s housing The Los Angeles County Fleet Services. Against the brutal and blank façade are shrubs, a mid-century idea of environmental eyeliner.
The light rail station is good looking with bright colors of red, green and yellow and decorative chinoiserie. There is a whimsical, large bunny statue on a pedestal standing guard across from the train.
There are handsome new buildings nearby but I hadn’t taken any photos of them. I will, perhaps, return here and photograph them someday.
There were many dramatic scenes from the “record breaking” winter storm which slammed into Southern California over the weekend: downed trees, car crashes, torrential rains, rapid water speeding down concrete channels, trees bent over in the winds, dark clouds and intermittent sunshine.
The Southern California mountains were like Switzerland before global warming, buried in many feet of snow.
Our well-fed people went up there in monster trucks and three-ton SUVs; McDonalds, sodas and donuts on laps; to enjoy the novelty. They wore their best black sweatshirts and black elastic pants to frolic in the white stuff.
An old man driving down slippery Kester Avenue near Vanowen had to avoid an enormous tree that fell down, so he accelerated, instead, into the same apartment building where the tree toppled down. He caused major damage but escaped with minor injuries. The unfortunate apartments and its residents had to evacuate but many stayed put. Once again bad driving caused misery for innocents.
A news helicopter was kind enough to rotate around the accident early the next morning around 6am, gently waking up thousands as it chopped, chopped, chopped overhead, broadcasting yet another bad accident to a sleep deprived audience which can never get enough.
Sunday morning, 6:45am.
The power had officially turned off last Friday, February 24, 2023 at about 8pm. Then it turned on, then it went off, and then it went back on. Our internet went out, as we were marooned halfway through “You”, episode 6, season 1, a horrible, odious, superficial show on Netflix full of self-absorbed young Manhattan people which we cannot stop watching.
Though our power is now on, it is weak, and all the normal things that we rely on, lights, oven, furnace, fans, are at 50% or are not working at all. There has been no heat in the house so we used an electric space heater, but that portable device, like a 58-year-old erotic dancer, emits a pathetic and hobbled hotness.
Yet there is nothing so tragic in our current calamity to compare to people living in war zones, under occupation, under dictatorship or without rule of law. That helps to put our LA inconveniences into perspective: the heartbreak of a cancelled yoga session, a microwaved cup of coffee that takes 5 minutes to heat up, a child without Disney Plus.
And yesterday on Sunday, the sun came out brilliantly, and the San Fernando Valley was surrounded by snowy mountains glistening against blue skies and white fluffy clouds.
To see the winter mountains in their glory we drove to a picturesque scenic outlook, in Sun Valley, along Branford Street where Chico’s Auto Dismantler, West Coast Audi VW Dismantler, Express Metals Recycling, Hooper’s Rear End, Javi’s Auto Repair, Sheldon Auto Parts, Jak Tire Recycling, and Honda Foreign Auto Parts border the Hansen Dam Recreational Area.
Beyond the steel gates and the steel junkyards, beyond the homeless tents and the wrecked cars, beyond the speeding vehicles dodging a potholed road, we saw the glorious San Gabriel range covered in snow, pure white snow, a gift from nature to the inhabitants of California, a reminder that no matter how hard we try and destroy this land, there is still one force stronger than us.
The ladle shaped storm that began to pound the Southland on Friday, February 17, 2017 arrived like a landing jet over the Pacific. It circled, counter-clockwise, landing onto Los Angeles, dropping horizontal blasts of wind, and pounding sheets of rain. It blew down trees, power lines, cable and telephone wires, flooded roads and carried away cars. And drowned our sinned and parched city in a cascade of baptizing waters.
A few died in strange and tragic ways. A man on Sepulveda was electrocuted fatally after strong gusts brought down a tree that hit an electrified power line. Another man was drowned in a raging creek at Thousand Oaks.
What minor choices of life, where to walk, what path to take, might bring us to death?
In Studio City, at Woodbridge St at Laurel Canyon, an aged sewer burst under water pressure and pulled out the soil underneath the road. A 30-foot wide, 20-foot deep hole emerged, sucking two drivers and their two vehicles into a subterranean river. People in those cars were rescued. Thankfully, nobody died or were seriously injured.
Here in Van Nuys, on Hamlin Street, late yesterday afternoon, the departing storm closed its one-woman show, packed its bags, and headed east.
Solar klieg lights were aimed on the darkened sky as its magnificent performer paraded off stage, led by a chorus line of tall, skinny palm trees, lined up to bid good-bye to the wind and the fury, the destruction and the drama.
It was a thrilling show, taking our eyes off the irrationality in Washington, and bringing us back to the true leader of the planet, one who never relinquishes power, but whose atmospheric whims are capricious, indifferent, and violent, but somehow understandable and predictable.
After many days of successive, concussive waves of rain swirling into Los Angeles, the hills in Griffith Park were wet, green, and soaked.
I walked there, yesterday afternoon, along the bike path, and the bridle path, at the point where the 134 roars alongside the LA River.
The storm, now depleted, had moved east, sent into exile. And in the distance, under dark clouds, I saw the Verdugo Mountains, the flat roofed towers of Glendale, and all the man-made highways and power lines: showered and renewed, glistening and spot lighted by sun.
The littered homeless encampment on the island in the middle of the river was vacated. There was nobody else around but me, except for a lone man riding a child’s bike.
A bridge over the waters and the freeway, a bridge under construction, its metal rods exposed, a messy conglomeration of concrete, lumber, fencing and plywood, that incomplete, torn-up bridge evoked others before her time destroyed by floods.
Angelenos in the 1930s and before lived in fear of the river and put their hope in President Roosevelt. Now we trust the river and fear our president.
Once we trembled under the fury of nature. Now we shudder under the drama of political malfeasance.
After 1940, the army conquered the unpredictable river, contained its fast water, and controlled its deadly fury.
Tomorrow, we trust, we hope, will fold out and reveal itself as it did in Genesis.
“Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth. And God said
never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.
Here in Van Nuys 
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