September 2009 Archives

On the blustery spring day in 2000 when the Los Angeles Times was sold to the Tribune Company under the guise of a merger, Kathryn Downing – picked to be the publisher of the Times by its hapless CEO Mark Willes – answered a question which she thought had an obvious answer. A Times staff member, standing in a packed Chandler Auditorium to hear news of the sale, asked why anyone would want to buy the Times

“We are a crown jewel,” Downing answered. “Who wouldn’t want to own the Los Angeles Times?”

“Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times,” (a documentary airing on Monday, October 5 at 9:00 p.m. on KCET), answers that question in bleak detail and long after the paper and the Tribune Company passed into the hands of the even more hapless Sam Zell and into bankruptcy.

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I met Robin Kramer only once, more than a year ago. When she resigned as Chief of Staff to Mayor Villaraigosa in August, Ms. Kramer was memorably called the city's chief grown up and the levelest head in Los Angeles politics in the Los Angeles Times. Before she left the mayor’s office, she had a distinguished career serving men with demanding personalities – Councilmember Richard Alatorre, Mayor Riordan, Eli Broad, and Mayor Villaraigosa.

She had called and invited me to City Hall, I suppose because I had written occasionally about Mayor Villaraigosa, sometimes hopefully and sometimes skeptically. I had hoped that the city’s first Latino mayor since the 1870s would be a sign of something. I had feared that Villaraigosa’s short tenure in the state Legislature was exactly the wrong experience to lead Los Angeles.

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Los Angeles lacks the kind of official warning we’d see on any other consumer product. Perhaps those illuminated Caltrans signs along the freeway can be reprogrammed to read “Get out now! While you still can!”

Today’s news is wildfires. Tornadoes, flood, and earthquake can’t be far behind.

Los Angeles is a dangerous city. As Mike Davis took pains to point out in Ecology of Fear, where we live is hardly fit for habitation. Any reasonable assessment of risk would limit development here to a single story of wood frame construction – and only in the few areas above a 100-year flood and below the quick burning chaparral. None of it would be safe from earthquakes, but a small house is least likely to kill you when it twists off its foundation. Then there’s earthquake liquefaction, when the ground beneath your feet turns into cream of wheat. And drought. And mountain lions. And plague, which swept in during a warm October in 1924.

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