Okay, crap.

There's no better way to put it. Here we are, nature and the environment conspired to create a natural disaster that has left Los Angeles drooping like an old party balloon, squashing it and making it hard for us to breathe.

It's breath, not energy, not spirit. We wanted to be stretchy like those old Joe Palooka toy punching bags with a bottom weight that always bounced back after impact.

With this in mind, I began to think about our sister city on the coast, and its near-death experience in 1906, when a fire broke out three or four days after the earthquake: more than 80% of the city was razed to the ground, 28,000 buildings and 500 blocks disappeared , at least half of the population is homeless.

The scale of devastation caused by the recent disaster in Los Angeles was equally severe: nearly 40,000 acres burned and more than 12,000 structures, including many homes, were damaged or destroyed.

My old friend Kevin Starr, the great California historian, is a native of San Francisco. He enjoys and often works in Los Angeles, but he loved San Francisco, people with special enthusiasm call this city "this City. "

One day, as we drove across the plains of Los Angeles, he told me that the collapse of California's premier city (San Francisco in 1906) opened a gap of opportunity in our booming state, and Los Angeles filled it. blank. It was like San Francisco was throwing touchdown passes until Los Angeles intercepted it and then ran the ball back for its own score — over and over again.

San Francisco's resurgence is a heroic story that has kept the city busy for years.

But what Kevin told me is that during those years when San Francisco was marginalized, Los Angeles quickly stepped into the breach, attracting investment and trade to come to California or stay in California—only to do it a few hundred miles to the south.

So it happened. Los Angeles took the lead from San Francisco and never relinquished it.

Historian Mansel Blackford wrote a solid book, Lost Dreams: Merchants and Urban Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890-1920. It was written over 30 years ago, and it's more fascinating than you might imagine from the title. What I learned from this is worth elaborating on here.

After 1906, Los Angeles businessmen "took advantage of the chaos" to "penetrate" northward—presumably to market their wares—into the great Central Valley. When San Francisco's frustrated businessmen asked the state Railroad Commission for rate relief to help San Francisco restore its fortunes, the commission -- under who-knows-what influence -- instead reduce rates in Los Angeles, citing its business growth. In 1911, the head of the San Francisco Civic League complained that the rail system had become essentially "a big funnel...with its nozzle in Los Angeles."

Oakland began to attract port business outside of San Francisco, and Southern California companies in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles also flourished there, extending their reach northward. Simons Brick Co.'s logo-stamped bricks (mine included) can still be found on old patios and staircases in Los Angeles and shipped to San Francisco on hundreds of pallets.

Los Angeles was ahead of San Francisco and then used that advantage to expand into new businesses: movies, aviation, and, of course, oil.

Frances Dinkenspiel was an author and journalist who wrote extensively about California, including about her ancestor, pioneer banker and landowner Isaias Hellman )'s book "The Golden Tower". Hellman actually founded a banking business in Los Angeles to finance large municipal projects, and then he headed north in the 1890s, by which time, as Dinken Spear notes, San Francisco had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world . Hellman spent his desperate years in San Francisco, still maintaining his faith and wealth.

However, this is a difficult process. "San Francisco took a long time to rebuild," Dinkenspear told me, "which is why San Francisco was so keen to host the World's Fair in 1915." (She was referring to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a kind of world's fair.)

“They worked really hard on this,” she said. "They wanted to show the world that San Francisco had risen from the ashes like a phoenix from the ashes." Three buildings from the fair survived, including the spectacular Palace of Fine Arts.

In 1936, 30 years after the earthquake and fire, MGM released the acclaimed film San Francisco starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Janet MacDonald. At the end of the film, as homeless San Franciscans camped out in a park and mourned their dead, a child ran over and yelled, "The fire is out!" and people cheered. They poured out of their tents and climbed a hill a lot of, Singing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and looking down at the city's smoky ruins. One of the men yelled, "We're going to build a new San Francisco!"

"New" is an odd choice of word. Would a "better" San Francisco suggest there was something wrong with the first San Francisco? San Francisco had been prone to fires before—five in two years, just after the Gold Rush began.

In 1905, just months before the earthquake, San Francisco proposed the Burnham Plan, a park-centered model for an ideal reimagining of the city. The plan was popular before the earthquake but was largely ignored after the earthquake - an opportunity lost.

Los Angeles has lost paradise at one time or another in the past. The Bartholomew-Olmstead Plan was commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in 1927 and was billed as "the parks, playgrounds and beaches of the Los Angeles area." It’s heartbreaking to see what could be an “emerald necklace” of mountains, rivers, parks and beaches. If it were adopted, Los Angeles today would be dramatically changed, becoming a more livable and humane place. After being presented to the Chamber of Commerce in 1929, it sank with almost no trace—too big, perhaps too expensive, too ambitious, and too contrary to the plans of the real estate salesmen.

So Los Angeles became...this Los Angeles, and after these fires, what will our next Los Angeles look like? Will it, like San Francisco, lose our world edge as a powerhouse of the moment and a leader in thinking better about big things?

These answers are still too big for this moment and this space. Before last week, I was already writing a column about taking Los Angeles into the woodshed because Los Angeles doesn’t exist, act, and think boldly enough. That moment is coming.

Adam Rose, a research professor of public policy and engineering at the University of Southern California and an expert on disaster economics, pointed out to me some differences that may bode well for Los Angeles’ recovery: San Francisco’s mostly commercial fires, while Los Angeles’ residential damage ; Los Angeles' manufacturing base and its large export operations were largely unaffected by the fire. Ross said the X factors of economic recovery will be completely different: infrastructure, drought, climate change and our politics.

The full machinery of federal disaster relief was set in motion less than hours after text messages were exchanged between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Biden last week.

Also within hours, incoming President Donald Trump took to social media to send a message to California's governor "Newscum" and the "almost apocalyptic" areas that are on fire. His words were not of sympathy or support. He has concocted grievances, lies and accusations about Newsom and the firefighting situation. Trump said Newsom was the culprit.

In 1903, the energetic and curious President Theodore Roosevelt visited California for two weeks. He spent three nights camping in Yosemite National Park with naturalist John Muir. He was cheered on the streets of San Francisco. He toured Los Angeles with Harvard classmate, ethnologist and author Charles Lummis, admiring the city's natural beauty.

Three years later, a few weeks after the San Francisco earthquake, Republican Roosevelt noted at the White House that "the Government of Canada has rendered aid, and its immediate generosity is particularly pleasing and a testimony to the close and friendly relations between Canada and Canada." Linking us to our neighbors to the north…The Republic of Mexico is our closest neighbor to the south, showing the same generosity and the same appreciation”, from Guatemala, from the Empress of China, from Japan, New Zealand and Martinique, and other countries around the world.

At noon on April 18, 1906, Roosevelt cabled the governor of California from Washington, D.C., offering unconditional support—one million dollars had been sent to us, and a promise of more: “If the country has any need, please let me know. "What the Government can do," and it was also reported that the Secretary of War had been ordered to "do everything you direct us to do that we have the power to do."