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Los Angeles has portals to its future sprinkled across the city: Silicon Beach. Hollywood. Public schools. The ruins of Pacific Palisades. What goes on inside at City Hall and the Hall of Administration.
But why go to those obvious choices when trying to figure out which way L.A. is going when the best answer is right in front of Platinum Showgirls LA?
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
I parked next to the downtown gentleman’s club on a recent weekday morning to do just that. A hulking security guard stood outside the entrance, the 101 Freeway buzzing nearby. So were the street vendors setting up for another day of business, damn the migra agents driving in and out of the Metropolitan Detention Center just up Commercial Street.
But I wasn’t there for the sights or sounds — or what was going on inside Platinum Showgirls. I was there to scour the sidewalk for a plaque dedicated to a tree.
For centuries, a six-story-tall sycamore stood near this slice of land and saw empires come and go. Indigenous people from across Southern California and beyond gathered under its shade for special councils and to meet with its caretakers, the residents of the village of Yaanga. It was an awe-inspiring sight for the pobladores who came from Mexico in 1789 and set up El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in the name of the Spanish crown. The sycamore — now bearing the name El Aliso — appears as a towering black splotch in the first known photo of Los Angeles, shot in the early 1860s when the city was in the process of turning from a Mexican village into an American town.
When El Aliso was finally chopped down in 1895, felled by brewery owners who inadvertently killed the giant after cutting off too many limbs and paving over its roots, residents took chips from it as a memento mori of sorts.
But El Aliso never truly died.
It lived on in the history books but especially in the memory of the descendants of the people who had seen the sycamore grow from a seed to a giant. In 2019, members of the Kizh-Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians were present as representatives from the city of Los Angeles laid a bronze plaque on the sidewalk at the northeast corner of Commercial and Vignes streets — in the shadow of what was then a different strip club — to commemorate El Aliso.
“While its physical presence is gone,” the plaque stated, “the oral history handed down through the generations has kept its beauty and story alive in the Kizh people.”
Businesses aren’t open or have signs stating that walk-ins aren’t welcome. Popular restaurants like El Gallo Giro and Tam’s are mostly empty. Traffic flows faster. Events and classes are canceled. Once-vibrant neighborhoods are quiet.
I was looking to read those words for myself, to touch them and the etching of El Aliso that hovered above the dedication. To take inspiration from this fundamental part of L.A.’s past in hopes of divining its future. But when I finally figured out where the plaque was supposed to be, I found a shallow slot strewn with trash and the remnants of the adhesive that once kept the plaque in its place.
Leave it to 2025 for thieves to make off with a memorial to L.A.’s mother tree.
The fires. The raids. Housing inequality. Homelessness. Cost of living. Trump’s never-ending war against L.A. anything. Is the Big One around the corner? Probably.
Nothing seems to be going right in Lost Angeles right now. Trump says it. Too many residents feel it. Too many former Angelenos scream it.
How can one possibly even think about a better future when the present is so bad? How can one even think about any future when the current outlook seems so bleak?
But as I walked back to my car, an answer occurred to me that I wasn’t expecting to be so hopeful.
Before I joined The Times in 2019, I never had any real interest or investment in L.A.
Oh, I visited family and friends and paid some attention to the political scene from my native Anaheim. Went to UCLA for graduate school, haunted the Sunset Strip and Thai Town for rock en español shows in my cub reporter days. But L.A. was just … L.A. Huge. Cool. Really diverse.
But special? No more so than any other great world city.
I never felt the metropolis up the 5 to be a den of grossness like too many of my fellow Orange Countians still think it is. It also never called to me as a promised land like it did to my creative O.C. friends, either. I generally rooted for L.A., but its future meant nothing to me.
My opinion obviously changed as I began to cover it as a columnist starting in 2020 and tried to commit the layout and vibe of the city to my mind. One of the first things that struck me in a way I never anticipated was how precarious everyone felt their lives to be.
Oh, I had read enough Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Nathaneal West and other writers to not be too surprised by this. But seeing it manifested was something else, and it made a lot of things about the city finally click.
From the Westside to the Eastside, from Wilmington through South L.A. and all the way to the San Fernando Valley, I met person after person who acted and lived as if what they had scraped for themselves was at risk of disappearing in an instant, in the most disastrous fashion imaginable. I initially thought this betrayed an insecurity in the Angeleno soul, but then I realized it was something worse.
If anyone’s L.A. dream could crumble at any moment, that meant you had to defend it at any cost — and especially at the expense of everyone else.
The more I talked to people and studied L.A. history, the more this outsider felt that the idea of fighting for the dream was what created a famously segregated city that too often erupts, whether electorally or otherwise.
In an era where stratification is worse than ever and the federal government has declared war on various fronts — legal, psychological, financial — the L.A. of the past can’t be the guiding light for the L.A. of the future.
The city might have grown and operated as 19 suburbs in search of a metropolis — as Aldous Huxley infamously wrote — through most of the 20th century, but it’s time to act like a united front if we’re going to successfully navigate the rest of the 21st. And the rallying cry should be what we’re going through right now, what L.A. has weathered again and again:
Disaster.
Because when the going gets tough for L.A., the city rallies like only it can. Americans should see this resilience and the subsequent spur of creativity and hope as a blueprint on how to fight back and not just survive, but thrive better than ever.
Nothing has proved this more than our current year, with two catastrophes that would have buckled, if not outright destroyed, other cities.
The Palisades and Eaton fires in January were infernos of biblical dimensions. People died, houses were incinerated, neighborhoods were eradicated. The suffering will continue for years, if not decades. Residents know their past can never be recaptured — and yet they continue to rebuild for whatever’s next.
Angelenos could’ve stayed to themselves in the aftermath, but they chose not to. They choose not to. The rest of L.A. has stood up to help survivors through financial donations and clothing and food drives and benefits that continue and whatever folks in the Palisades and Altadena need. At one of the city’s darkest hours, Los Angeles shone brighter than ever.
I write this columna during a long deportation summer unleashed on L.A. and beyond by a native son of Santa Monica in what amounts to a racist revanchist snit. Even a generation ago, large swaths of L.A. would have been cheering on the raids. But today’s L.A. isn’t having it.
Throwing cinder blocks at California Highway Patrol cars from a freeway overpass? Ripping out the pink tables and benches from Gloria Molina Grand Park? That’s supposed to keep immigrant families safe and defeat Trump?
As with the fires, fundraisers and mutual aid societies and neighborhood watch groups have sprouted. The city, from Mayor Karen Bass to street vendors, knows that it’s up against an Orwellian apparatus that wants us to collapse — and that L.A. will win.
Because L.A. always wins. We might not know how the victory will look, but we know it’ll happen.
See how I use “we”? Because while I plan to forever live in Orange County, I want to be a part of this future L.A. — an area, a people that teaches the rest of the United States how we’ll triumph as calamities of all types seem to crash down on this country with increasing regularity.
All of the stories and columns in this package are about that, from housing to fires, disasters to palm trees, transportation to climate change and beyond. No one thinks it’s going to be easy — if anything, it’s probably going to be harder than ever.
But everyone expects victory. The miracle of L.A. has gone too far for it to fail.
Which takes me back to El Aliso.
I haven’t read anything about the theft of its plaque, so I’m not sure when it happened. But people will read this and be upset. People will do something to mark El Aliso’s existence in front of a gentleman’s club near the 101 Freeway once more.
That means El Aliso will continue to live — maybe as a plaque, maybe as a hologram, maybe as something even grander. It can’t die, because that means we will. It must live, because that means so will the rest of us.
L.A. is frequently seen as a place of destruction, where the past is bulldozed and forgotten and then trivialized and romanticized. But the Native American tribes that the Spaniards tried to eradicate are still here. The Latinos that Manifest Destiny tried to vanquish are now nearly half of the population of this most American of cities.
L.A. will survive whatever happens next. We will figure it out. We always do. There’s no other way. There’s no other option.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
Los Angeles possesses a unique resilience that sets it apart from other American cities, demonstrated through its ability to rally and unite during times of crisis. The city’s response to recent disasters, particularly the Palisades and Eaton fires, exemplifies this strength as residents across different neighborhoods came together to support survivors through donations, food drives, and mutual aid rather than retreating into isolation.
The current federal administration’s hostile policies toward Los Angeles, including deportation raids, have actually strengthened the city’s unity rather than dividing it. Unlike previous generations when large portions of the city might have supported such actions, contemporary Los Angeles has responded with organized resistance, fundraising efforts, and community support networks that demonstrate a fundamental shift in the city’s character.
Los Angeles should serve as a blueprint for American resilience, showing how diverse communities can thrive despite escalating national crises. The city’s ability to weather repeated disasters while maintaining its creative spirit and hope offers a model for other cities facing similar challenges in an increasingly unstable era.
The metropolis must transition from operating as fragmented suburbs to functioning as a unified front to successfully navigate 21st-century challenges. This evolution from the historic pattern of segregation and competition between neighborhoods represents a necessary adaptation for survival and prosperity.
Historical evidence supports Los Angeles’ enduring nature, as demonstrated by the persistence of communities that dominant powers attempted to eradicate. Native American tribes survived Spanish colonization efforts, and Latino populations have grown to comprise nearly half the city despite Manifest Destiny’s attempts at displacement, proving the city’s fundamental capacity for survival and renewal.
Different views on the topic
Los Angeles’ history reveals a pattern of romanticizing and sanitizing its cultural heritage while simultaneously displacing the very communities it claims to celebrate. The creation of Olvera Street in the 1930s exemplified this tendency, as Christine Sterling’s “Disney-fied take on Mexican culture” emerged during the same era when Mexican residents were being forcibly “repatriated” from the very neighborhoods the marketplace was meant to represent[1][4].
The city’s approach to preservation and cultural representation has historically involved erasure of uncomfortable truths, particularly regarding indigenous history and the trauma of European colonization. Sterling’s crusade to save the Avila Adobe was deeply tied to notions of a “romantic” Spanish past that ignored indigenous culture and masked the darker realities of forced deportations during the 1930s[1].
Urban development patterns in Los Angeles have repeatedly prioritized tourism and commercial interests over authentic community needs. The transformation of Olvera Street into a tourist attraction, while economically beneficial to some merchant families, represented a broader pattern of commodifying culture rather than genuinely supporting diverse communities[2][3].
The city’s relationship with its immigrant communities has been marked by cyclical patterns of displacement despite surface-level celebrations of diversity. Historical examples include the installation of Union Station displacing much of the Chinese population and creating the need for a new Chinatown, demonstrating how infrastructure development has repeatedly disrupted established communities[2].
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