L.A. RIOTS
As far as riots go, the ‘10 Laker one was pretty piddly. Like one of those quakes that everyone Twitters about, but doesn’t break anything. ’92, on the other hand, was the real deal. I remember it vividly. I went to a Dodger game that night. The news of the Rodney King verdict had just come in. On the way to the stadium, while it was still light out, there were people congregating at street corners holding “Honk If You Want Justice” signs, but it didn’t seem like any conflagration was imminent. The next three hours, of course, while the Dodgers were playing ball, is when everything went off the chain. Being among the 50,000 people in the stadium was like being in a little media blackout bubble — no one was watching TV, you couldn’t surf the web from a phone back then. Around the 7th inning, the sounds of circling police helicopters kept getting louder. As soon as the game ended, the Dodger announcer broadcast an ominous but cryptic message over the P.A. system: “The Dodgers and the Los Angeles Police Department advise you NOT to leave on the 110 Freeway. Thank you for your cooperation” That was the only hint that something was amiss — no “what” and no “why” (in hindsight, I guess they didn’t want 50,000 exiting patrons to panic en masse). It wasn’t until we got to our car in the lot and heard the hysterical live reports on the radio that my friends and I had any indication what was going on. Finding oneself in the middle of pre-gentrification Echo Park near midnight and learning about it in this delayed manner with only radio to guide you somehow made it much scarier than it otherwise would have been. It was impossible to tell just how widespread it was. One particularly frenzied isolated real-time report of a broken storefront window in Beverly Hills made it seem like the looters had made it all the way to the Westside (in actuality, most of it was confined to *the hood* and they never really got west of La Brea, though there were buildings right near the New Beverly Cinema that were aflame, as well as some buildings on Pico near Fairfax). The most chilling detail was hearing that the rioters were shooting at firefighters trying to put out burning buildings, so the firemen had to pull out and just let shit burn. We could see smoke in the air and the ambient light from the flames on the horizon and had to figure out on the fly what route to take home and hope for the best. It was the unknown quantity part of the equation that made it so harrowing. Only upon finally arriving home and actually seeing the footage on TV were my friends and I able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together and realize that for all our worrying, we never really had been directly in harm’s way and… well… were basically just being pussies.
NVR 4GET
