It was a day like any other. The sun was high. The air was sweet and warm. I had spent a couple of hours on the field at the L.A. Coliseum working with a producer on plans for a Cinco de Mayo celebration, and was driving north on Vermont Avenue.

I turned the radio on and just as I sped from the on-ramp onto the 10 and headed west, an announcer came on the air and said that the Simi Valley jury had acquitted the Los Angeles cops who had been charged with the beating of Rodney King.

The air went suddenly sour. We’d seen the tape, for God’s sake. The whole world had seen it. If those police officers weren’t guilty of beating Rodney King, and beating him mercilessly, no one was guilty of anything.

I pounded on the steering wheel, shouted, muttered, swore, pressed hard on the gas pedal, and drove to the beach.

No one was in the Carousel, but three Santa Monica police officers standing at a window in the Pier Restoration Corporation boardroom on the second floor. They were holding large guns and looking across the beach south of the Pier.

I asked them if they were going to shoot people on the beach. They said they were ordered to the Pier. They said no one knew what was going to happen. It was late afternoon, April 29, 1992, and it was a day like no other.

The whirlwind had already seized the intersection of Florence and Normandie, and L.A.P.D. Chief Daryl Gates was on his way to a fundraiser in Brentwood.

When I left the Pier, traffic was bumper-to-bumper in the north-bound lanes of PCH and barely moving. The south-bound lanes were virtually empty.

At home, I went out on my terrace. I was miles from Florence and Normandie, and I could smell smoke.

It is the nature of whirlwinds to subside as suddenly as they rise. The terrible energy that makes them, breaks them. At dawn, on May 2, 1992, there was still smoke in the air and sirens still screamed every few minutes, but the fires were going out. Thousands of people from all over Los Angeles went to South Central to begin to clear the debris away, but there were soldiers on Venice beach.

54 people died. There were 623 fires, 9,000 arrests. $1 billion in damage. Many palm trees were torched. But, according to L.A.’s street tree supervisor, only 40 were destroyed. “Palm trees will survive fires,” he said. “You can burn almost the whole tree and it will grow back.”

The palm trees have grown back and so has L.A., but a couple of years ago, the Los Angeles City Council decreed that the palm trees were too expensive to maintain and should go – except in the
places where tourists expected to see them.

There are no precedents for Los Angeles. As historian Kevin Starr has written, Los Angeles “envisioned itself, then externalized that vision through sheer force of will, springing from a Platonic conception of itself.”

Its most tangible tradition is the lack of tradition. Architectural historian Esther McCoy said Los Angeles was “oriented only to itself.”

Socially and economically, it is as volatile as its geology and its weather. In its first decades, newcomers arrived in waves and each successive wave swamped everything that came before it. The flimsy economy flagged, boomed, then flagged again, preventing the growth of a home grown aristocracy, a dominant industry, a cohesive political organization or any of the usual sources of what L.A. County Supervisor John Anson Ford called “a fixed elite.”

L.A.’s alleged leaders failed the residents before the fires of ’92 and failed in their aftermath to do any of those things that needed to be done. Never mind. The residents got on with it. The future arrived, and it wasn’t wearing a suit.

Twenty years ago, on that first night, April 29, 1992, a young man, backlit by fires, said, “These are the end times.” But, in L.A., the end times are inevitably the beginning.