LOS ANGELES IS FOREVER fracturing and piecing itself back together—only to find itself on the verge of a fresh crack-up. Semiregularly, the disasters arrive in the form of earthquakes or fires, a pattern that led Richard G. Lillard, in his 1966 book Eden in Jeopardy, to call Los Angeles “the pacesetter in catastrophe.” The scene depicted in Isle of California, the post-apocalyptic mural that the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad painted on a wall facing an otherwise nondescript Westside parking lot in 1972, showing the rubble end of a freeway overpass perched atop a chunk of land marooned precariously in the Pacific, might as well be added to the city seal.
Not infrequently, though, Angelenos hurl the bricks themselves. A select list of uprisings, riots, and other expressions of civic unrest over the last century would include the years 1943 (Zoot Suit Riots), 1965 (Watts), 1992 (Rodney King), 2020 (George Floyd), and of course 2025 (Donald J. Trump). Every generation, more or less, a consequential number of Angeleno neighborhoods decide that they want to tear it all down,…