Childhood and Teenage Memories of a Paradox - An Angeleno's Tale - Part I

A Cop's Son Recollects Childhood Memories of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and Teenage Memories of the 2001 Los Angeles Mayoral Election

As a born and raised Angeleno with childhood memories of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake permanently etched in my mind, January’s tragic wildfires reminded me of the paradoxical nature of Los Angeles.¹

We are one of the most naturally beautiful cities in the world with a near perfect climate. Yet we are always at risk of major earthquakes and large sections of the city are prone to devastating wildfires, floods, and landslides. It’s often hard to fathom that such destruction and harm can occur in a place that is otherwise so wonderful.

The 1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Riots were, of course, not natural disasters. But they operated similarly, setting swaths of the city ablaze, killing people, destroying property, and up-ending people’s lives, making innocent people victims through no fault of their own. They also were surprising given L.A.’s normally harmonious blending of hundreds of ethnicities, languages, and cultures.

For the Angelenos who live through such disasters, especially those who live through them as children, they become a permanent part of not just our memories but shape our responses and perspectives to new disasters.

The memory of young men driving through her Windsor Square neighborhood brandishing firearms during the 1965 Watts Riots is permanently etched in my mother’s mind.

The smell of smoke and sight of orange skies during the 1961 Bel Air Fire are something my father never forgets. Nor does he forget the sense of panic as the fire rapidly approached his Holmby Hills neighborhood (his parents in New York City desperately trying to return home). Or the relief he felt when his aunt took him and his siblings to safety in Beverlywood.

Both still remember the dramatic, seemingly ceaseless shaking of the 1971 Sylmar Earthquake.

Yet living through these disasters did not make them cynics about the city. Instead, it created a resolute sense of defiance. This is not unusual for many Angelenos.

Angelenos responded to the Eaton Fire and Palisades Fire with an outpouring of generosity towards their displaced neighbors and a demand to rebuild these places for the displaced residents.

In the Netflix special, 1992, after four days of destructive rioting, Angelenos spontaneously come out into the streets to hold up placards inscribed with “Honk for Peace” and clean up the damage.²

It’s a reminder that we Angelenos love our paradox of a city and will not let any disaster break us.

Of course, truly understanding L.A.’s paradoxical nature often requires knowing historical context.³ This is why I found much of the traditional news coverage of the wildfires largely inadequate. Many stories were reported without proper background or historical context.

For example, journalists appeared unaware of the 2001 Los Angeles Mayoral Election. This was evident when Mayor Karen Bass appointed Steve Soboroff to be the Chief Recovery Officer of the Pacific Palisades and when the New York Times reported on then Mayor James Hahn’s absence from the city on September 11, 2001.

In the case of Soboroff’s appointment as Chief Recovery Officer, most news publications omitted a major relevant fact - the man that Bass had put in charge was someone who had once sought her job himself and was the last Republican to seriously contend for the L.A. Mayor’s office.

No major news publication reported this until (to his great credit) journalist and Substack writer

Peter Kiefer

did so in his Hollywood Reporter article, Show Me the Money: Wildfire Recovery Czar Tangles With L.A. Mayor Over Lost Salary, where he wrote: “Soboroff, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2001, has been a fixture of L.A. civic life for decades and he was an early supporter of Bass’ mayoral run.”⁴

The lack of reporting about the 2001 Los Angeles Mayoral election was rather frustrating at a personal level. Even though I was a teenager unable to vote, that election was the first election I followed in depth. In a way, it served as my own coming of age tale.

Like the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, the 2001 Los Angeles Mayoral election is permanently etched in my memory. It’s an election that took place in the shadow of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which killed 63, injured 2,383 others, and cost over a billion dollars in damage.

Only in the first grade at the time, I remember the riots vividly because my father was a police officer in 1992. When violence broke out at Florence and Normandie Avenues on the afternoon of April 29, 1992 and L.A. began to descend into madness, he was called into duty on a tactical alert by his police department. He put on his uniform and defended his community.

For four straight days and nights, he dodged rocks, bottles, Molotov cocktails, and bullets. He learned a good deal about fire department responses because during the 1992 Riots, rioters shot at firefighters and the police had to escort firefighters to burning buildings to protect them.⁵

While my father bravely defended his city from lawlessness, I stayed home with my mom and two siblings. We watched on live television as Los Angeles descended into a frenetic orgy of self-righteous violence and wanton destruction, all the while silently wondering whether we would ever see our dad again.

The 1992 Riots left a profound impact on me.⁶

As a child, the 1992 Riots were something that made me feel ashamed to be an Angeleno. They reflected a violent, crime-filled, racially divided city that gave way to mob violence and destruction of people’s lives. They were an embarrassment. They were also something that I, like so many Angelenos, feared happening again.

Angelenos also grappled with the inherent contradiction between the L.A. that they knew and the 1992 Riots themselves. Many viewed the city as a relatively harmonious racial polyglot.

In L.A., it’s not uncommon to see people of different races casually mingling together socially - shopping, dining out at restaurants, enjoying recreation, attending shows, going to Dodger games and Laker games, sitting in boxes together at the Hollywood Bowl.⁷

There is also a great deal of racial non-conformity where restaurants and specialty food stores long survive the demographic change in their neighborhood or attract demographics that don’t meet expectation.⁸

This is not to say that there aren’t racial issues present in Los Angeles. Far from it. But it feels like a far more harmonious and integrated place than many other cities.

The L.A. Mayor during the 1992 Riots, Tom Bradley, reflected racial harmony. In 1973, he became one of the first black mayors of a major American city, defeating incumbent Sam Yorty, who had run dirty race baiting campaigns against him.

Unlike other major cities, L.A.’s black population never reached more than 17% of the total population. Bradley won repeatedly with a broad multi-racial coalition. Voters happily voting for candidates of different races to lead them reflected a population that was racially tolerant, not racially divided.

For Angelenos who assumed that they lived in a harmonious racial polyglot, the 1992 Riots took away that illusion. Witnessing racialized violence and destruction made many Angelenos feel like strangers in their own city. As a child, I didn’t fully comprehend it, but I picked up on the palpable sense of angst and alienation.

Perhaps those feelings of angst and alienation led heavily Democratic L.A. to do something unexpected in 1993 - we elected a Republican Mayor, Richard Riordan, who lacked any previous political experience.⁹

In The Sorry State of U.S. Cities Is a Choice—A Really Bad One,

John Halpin

recently wrote that “Rather than being well-managed places for people to work and live in safely and affordably—with solid municipal governance, good public services, and thriving private businesses—too many American cities are failed ideological projects that drastically underserve their residents.”

In 1993, Angelenos universally agreed that this statement applied to our city. A wealthy real estate developer, Riordan reflected the desire for change. He would successfully rebuild the city from the riots and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which occurred during his first term.

For me though, even as the city got better, the memories of the 1992 Riots always lingered.¹⁰

When the 1994 Northridge Earthquake struck, awakening in the darkened early morning hours, upon hearing the loud noises in the background (both of our house’s chimneys collapsed), I thought the riots had resumed and rioters were in my backyard.

After the shaking ceased, my family gathered in my parents’ bedroom, the power out, and all of us frightened, but fortunately uninjured.

Ten minutes had not passed since the earthquake when the dispatcher on my father’s police radio reported that looters were burglarizing Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills - the first of many reports of sporadic looting that morning.

It was as if there was a subgroup of Angelenos who simply waited around for any opportunistic disaster to start stealing from others.¹¹

Yet by the turn of the century, under Riordan’s leadership, the 1992 Riots had seemingly faded to a distant memory. Business was booming, crime was sharply down, city services were improved, and neighborhoods were being revitalized across the city. Los Angeles was a thriving city that had been reborn.

As the city approached the 2001 Mayoral election, another paradox emerged.

In one sense, the 1992 Riots were well behind us. But yet for most Angelenos, they remained at the back of mind.

The questions lingered.

Could a major riot happen again? Had the city really healed? Was the city still racially divided? Could the city regress back to its sorry state in the early 1990’s?

These weren’t the main topics of discussion but they lurked quietly underneath the surface, rarely discussed but ever present. And as the 2001 election progressed, the candidate who I would find myself supporting would test whether Los Angeles really had recovered from the 1992 Riots.

Incredibly popular, Richard Riordan would have easily won re-election in 2001 but he was term-limited.

The frontrunner to replace Riordan was Democratic City Attorney, James Hahn, who had served in citywide office for twenty years, first as City Controller and then as City Attorney. He had been re-elected easily as City Attorney in 1997 despite Riordan supporting a challenger against him.

Relatively bland, Hahn benefitted from his family name and superior name recognition. His father was the legendary former Los Angeles County Supervisor and Los Angeles City Councilman, Kenneth Hahn, a white liberal and early supporter of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, revered by the city’s black community. His uncle was a prominent and well-respected real estate developer.

In a Los Angeles city election, there are two rounds. In the first round, all candidates run on the same ballot.¹² If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, there is a runoff election between the top two vote getters in the primary.¹³ At the outset of the election, many pundits thought Hahn might win outright in the primary.¹⁴

But Steve Soboroff, a Republican real estate developer and special advisor to Riordan, up-ended the race. Soboroff had built Staples Center (he’d later develop the Playa Vista neighborhood) and on the Parks and Recreation Commission had brokered the deal that enabled the construction of the Red Line subway to the Valley, once derided as “fantasy”.

Enthusiastically endorsed by Richard Riordan, he would self-fund his campaign to win the election. In a heavily Democratic city, Soboroff was at a disadvantage but a credible underdog.

Soboroff looked the part too. He bore a strong resemblance to Dick Cheney and out on the campaign trail, it frequently led to humorous situations where notoriously apolitical Angelenos confused him for the Vice President.

Around this time, I was becoming politically aware. I began closely following the L.A. Mayor’s race, the first time I had ever done so.

I liked both Hahn and Soboroff.

Hahn was a good Democrat who had been a reasonably good public servant who had conducted himself competently in office for 20 years.

I attended high school with Soboroff’s sons, both of whom I knew. His younger son, Miles, was in my graduating class and one of my friends. I didn’t know Steve personally but felt positively about him because of his sons. Additionally, strongly approving of Riordan, I felt favorably towards any candidate he personally endorsed.

But neither man truly excited me for Mayor.

The impressionable teenage me wanted the candidate who saw L.A. for its true greatness and would show the world that we were one of the great world cities. With the 1992 Riots still at the back of my mind, I wanted a candidate who would show the world that L.A. was so much more than its incidents of civil unrest. Frankly, I wanted a candidate who would make the world forget that they had ever happened.

Into this void stepped former California State Assembly Speaker, Antonio Villaraigosa, who I had never heard of before. A former union representative, he had represented an eastside and Central L.A. based Assembly district.

The formerly troubled son of a single mom from Boyle Heights, Villaraigosa had overcome personal struggles to not only get elected to the California State Assembly, but risen up to become its Speaker. Under his leadership, the state, among other things, passed gay rights legislation for the first time and the prohibition against expiring gift cards.¹⁵

One other odd campaign issue made me love Villaraigosa. Having travelled as a kid to major European cities, I’d ridden mass transit systems in London, Paris, Rome, Prague, and Vienna. I had always lamented that L.A. lacked an extensive subway system like these great cities did. Villaraigosa campaigned on building one in L.A. including a subway to the sea.

I was sold!

Villaraigosa represented L.A.’s Hollywood-style redemption arc. His own personal background - a troubled childhood turned into a successful adulthood - was the story that L.A. wanted to tell about itself. Whatever the past, L.A. could be the great leading world city that Angelenos truly knew it to be.

Villaraigosa’s optimism had me hooked. But it didn’t hook everyone.

While this was the first election I followed closely, it was also the first election where I found myself in political disagreement with my parents.

My father, still serving as a sworn police officer, felt differently. He had no familiarity with Villaraigosa. While he’s a generally liberal loyal Democrat, he’s an extremely pro-law enforcement voter. In local races, which are non-partisan in California,¹⁶ he will vote for the most pro-law enforcement candidate, including non-Democrats.

After meeting Soboroff at a meet and greet, he decided that Soboroff would make a great Mayor. He found Soboroff business friendly and pro-law enforcement. He also thought his fellow westsider had great practical ideas for improving daily life (one of Soboroff’s big campaign proposals was banning rush hour road construction).

Much to my dismay, my father even put up a Soboroff for Mayor lawn sign.¹⁷

Nevertheless, I was determined to do something to support Villaraigosa. Still on my high school water polo and swimming teams at the time, I approached supporting Villaraigosa with the same level of tenacity and intensity as needed to survive a grueling 6 am practice or effectively guard an opposing team’s two meter man in a game while getting repeatedly punched in the stomach under water.

While I would keep my mouth shut at school (not wanting to alienate Soboroff’s sons) and unable to volunteer at the Villaraigosa campaign, I took it upon myself to reach out to every family member, neighbor, and friend of my parents and convince them to vote for Villaraigosa.

As a water polo player, I was a far better defensive player than an offensive one. Unfortunately, this held true for my first attempt at political persuasion (every single shot on goal I took was blocked or sailed over the goal post). Almost everyone I contacted was voting for Hahn or Soboroff and I failed to persuade anyone to vote for Villaraigosa.¹⁸

Many genuinely liked Soboroff and thought he’d be good for business and support law enforcement. Others were voting for Hahn because they were familiar with him and had no familiarity with Villaraigosa.

In a small handful of cases though, I encountered responses that genuinely disturbed me because they were tinged with racism, and in the words of California Supreme Court Justice Jesse Carter, were “the product of ignorance, prejudice and intolerance”.¹⁹

Some adults - people who I had previously respected - told me they wouldn’t vote for Villaraigosa because Mexican Americans “are taking over”. One elderly adult told me she wouldn’t vote for Villaraigosa because “we need a Mayor who can speak English.” Others conjured up the 1992 Riots and suggested that a Mexican American Mayor would support looters.

These responses shocked me. The naïve teenage me did not know that people truly thought this way (at least not people who lived in L.A. anyway). Just like the 1992 Riots taught many naïve Angelenos about the city’s true racial tensions, the 2001 election educated me about the racism of many around me.

This also raised another paradox of L.A.

No Hispanic/Latino had served as Mayor of L.A. since Cristobal Aguilar in the mid 1800’s. In 2001, the Hispanic/Latino population of Los Angeles had reached 47%, a plurality of the population. Yet for a variety of reasons, including the legacy of intentional racial discrimination, Hispanics/Latinos would account for under 20% of the electorate.²⁰ Villaraigosa could not rely on Hispanic/Latino voters to win.

To win, Villaraigosa would need to build a Tom Bradley style coalition, winning non-Hispanic/Latino voters. But after the 1992 Riots, the Bradley Coalition was dead. Multi-racial coalitions could not exist in a city that had experienced a race riot.

As I listened to this punditry, it struck me that if the city had truly recovered from the 1992 Riots, Villaraigosa’s race and ethnicity would not prevent him from becoming Mayor. But if it did so, then the 1992 Riots were still not behind us. And the truth was, no one knew.

But as the election progressed, I was about to find out.

For Part II

1. The author of this article is an attorney licensed to practice in the State of California and the District of Columbia. This article and all of the works on this Substack page are statements of the opinions of the author, only, and do not constitute legal advice; they are not intended to be relied upon by any individual or entity in any transaction or other legal matter, past, pending, or future. A paid subscription to this Substack page supports the author’s scholarship and provides access to research that the author has compiled, but does not establish an attorney-client relationship. The author does not accept unsolicited requests for legal advice or representation, and this Substack page is not intended as legal advertising. The opinions expressed on this Substack page reflect the personal views of the author only.

2. (At 1:48:00).

3. For example, L.A. has a large urban wildlife population. The most notable recent example was P-22, the wild mountain lion who spent nearly a dozen years living in Griffith Park.

More important than just knowing about his presence is knowing the context of the public response to him. When City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell called for the removal of P-22 from his urban, inner city Los Angeles district, he received so much pushback from his constituents that he was forced to reverse himself in less than 24 hours. Angelenos wanted P-22 to remain a member of our community.

4. I continue to highly recommend

Peter Kiefer

’s piece, My Own Private Palisades: A Writer Remembers His Vanished Neighborhood, where he discusses being a victim of the Palisades Fire himself and his unfortunately unsuccessful efforts to save his family home. It is a good read as it humanizes the victims of the Palisades Fire and serves as a reminder of the incredible suffering that has been caused. It’s easy to forget that when covering major disasters, looking at victims and destruction as mere statistics. I hope people will not do that here.

5. There’s archival footage of the 1992 Riots when an apartment building in mid-city Los Angeles was accidentally set on fire by looters and no LAFD units were available to respond, leaving hopeless apartment residents to try and save their homes with garden hoses, the Beverly Hills Fire Department, escorted by the Beverly Hills Police Department, responded as mutual aid and saved the apartment.

6. I enjoyed the 2021 film Belfast, which depicted the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969, as seen through the eyes of a young child. He questions the irrationality of the violence and turmoil, bewildered by how adults act around him.

According to the writer and director of Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, who fled from Northern Ireland as a child, people have come up to him to thank him as they lived through war zones as children and found his film relatable, appreciating his portrayal of being a child lost in madness. Having lived through the 1992 Riots as a child, I found it relatable in that regard too.

7. As an adult, one thing I’ve noticed about L.A. that is different from many other North American cities is that we are more socially integrated by race and ethnicity. In most cities, public spaces are integrated but there isn’t much social integration. People of their own races tend to stick together and keep to themselves even when shopping in the same stores, eating at the same restaurants, or sharing the same public spaces.

8. Langer’s Deli at 7th and Alvarado Streets in Westlake and the Greek Market at Pico Boulevard and Normandie Avenue are two prime examples.

The neighborhood around Pico and Normandie long ago ceased to be a Greek neighborhood. The Jewish population of Westlake long ago disappeared. But it does not matter. These are institutions are beloved by Hispanic and Asian American immigrant residents, adopted as their own.

One of L.A.’s greatest black owned soul food restaurants, Maurice’s Snack and Chat, which pre-dated Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, was located in mid-city L.A. near Pico and Fairfax. It had a mostly white clientele from the westside. Maurice Prinz, the owner who tirelessly helped organize charities and business assistance within the black community, didn’t charge corkage. Wealthy Hollywood types would happily bring in extremely expensive bottles of wine and champagne while enjoying platters of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and her famous spoon bread.

9. After being in office for 20 years, Tom Bradley opted to not run for re-election in 1993. I think it is likely that he would have lost re-election. He had come to power in 1973 on a hopeful platform of change. His victory as L.A.’s first black Mayor had shattered traditional notions of race. Yet his tenure ended with a destructive race riot that left L.A. in a hopeless state.

It is now striking how many major politicians declined to run for L.A. Mayor in 1993. Among others to decline, City Attorney James Hahn (who would run in 2001), County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, and State Senator Alan Robbins.

10. They lingered for the city too.

In 1993, when the federal retrial of the four officers acquitted of beating Rodney King reached a verdict, there was so much fear of a reprisal of events from the year before, that the verdict was announced to the public at 7 am on a Saturday. Two of the officers were convicted of federal charges, two were once more acquitted. But fortunately, there was no further violence. In 1998, a gang related shooting near the intersection of Florence and Normandie prompted a citywide LAPD tactical alert.

11. It was also a good reminder that some of the activities during 1992 were not motivated by a desire for social justice as is often claimed.