The New York Times chart he cites also shows that Hurricane Andrew was far more damaging than the Northridge earthquake, but then, when he wants to prove that Northridge was more damaging than Andrew, that chart suddenly isn't the one he wants to cite. Instead, he uses a figure ($40 billion) given by a California disaster agency which takes the actual disaster costs and then adds various other soft costs, such as workman's comp, lost work time and various other intangibles--which they cannot support by actual data when asked to supply it--which is totally different criteria than the lists Davis uses for comparison.

Furthermore, none of those lists take into account the National Climatic Data Center's more extensive lists of weather-related disasters. Their easy winner in the disaster sweepstakes is the Central and Eastern U.S. heat wave of 1988 with its 5,000 to 10,000 deaths with $40 billion in actual damages. And those are unadjusted 1988 damage costs--no inflation or indirect costs added. The same general area was hit in 1980 with $20 billion in damages and 10,000 deaths, in 1996 $5 billion and in 1998 200 deaths and over $6 billion. Nothing in the history of California can come near those figures or frequency of massive disasters. Compared to the Midwest or the South, L.A. is an ecological paradise.

And those same parts of the country are regularly hit by flooding (1993--$21 billion and 48 deaths) tornadoes (billions in damage each year), ice storms (1983--$3 billion in Florida alone), hurricanes (Andrew 1992--$27 billion) and snow storms (1996--$6 billion in damages) which also cumulatively far exceed the death and damage counts that the L.A. area has experienced, much less the frequency of disasters.

All of those correct facts can be gathered with a few phone calls in an hour or two to the appropriate agencies. Interestingly, though, not one of Mr. Davis's sources for his "damage" claims actually comes from a direct source. Instead he picks and chooses from newspaper articles over a several year period. For if he had actually checked the original sources and had gotten the truth, he wouldn't have a book to sell.

In the final paragraph of the book, among its several falsehoods, is the whopper that the fires from the Rodney King riot would--when seen from space--be comparable to the huge fires that consumed the Indonesian forests in 1997. In reality, the L.A. fires were a mere pinpoint on the globe compared to, not only the Indonesian fires, but many other fires in recent times including, but far from limited to, those in Florida, Mexico and Brazil.

For "proof," Davis mentions an 85 square kilometer image which enclosed the L.A. fire area at its height, being picked up by satellites. The fire areas in Indonesia, 1997, were spread over a 1000 by 3000 mile area with 3,000,000 square miles of shifting smoke filled with fire hot spots (the entire city of L.A. in comparison is only 450 square miles); but that was only the central core area of the beast. The smoke area spread thoughout all of Southeast Asia, tens of millions of square miles, the size of dozens of states of California. So Mike Davis both begins and ends his fairy tale with the tallest of tall tales. At least he does have one virtue as a writer: he is consistent--consistently incapable of finding or telling the truth.

It's hard to decide which chapter in the book is the silliest but Maneaters of the Sierra Madre does stand out. His whole premise here is that L.A. is uniquely threatened by wild animals on every side. He starts off with beachcombers finding snakes on the beach after heavy rains. Well, if you read accounts about storms in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, etc., snakes are washed down to the beach after storms in each of those states. Any place in the world where there are snakes, rivers and rain--the exact same thing happens.

But the real silliness begins with his claims that L.A.'s population is panicking due to the threat of man-eating coyotes and mountain lions. The only problem is that in over 200 years of history there have been ZERO people killed, much less eaten, by either a coyote or a mountain lion in the city of Los Angeles. Even when one takes in the entire Southern half of the state, there is exactly one death from each animal in 200 years. This warrants a chapter? When one considers that over 100 people every year are killed when their cars hit a deer, or that alligators have killed far more people in Florida in a single year than all coyote and mountain lion attacks in California in 200 years, it becomes obvious that Davis has gone over the edge from Fantasy Land into Paranoia Land.

An example of how bizarre his rantings can get, he breathlessly states that L.A.will be the first major city in the Northern Hemisphere to experience an attack of the killer bees. Remember here that Davis is, by education, in part a geographer. Mexico City, and most major cities in Mexico, have had "killer" Africanized-honeybees for years. The last time I checked, Mexico City--which is far larger than Los Angeles--was in the Northern Hemisphere, as is every other major city in Mexico and Central America. As are Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, New Orleans, St. Louis, and San Diego which either have, or are about to get, the "killer" bees. What Davis says is the exact opposite of the truth: L.A. may be one of the last major Northern Hemisphere cities to experience killer bees, not the first.

Finally, there's his other thesis that what deaths and damages there are in L.A. are due solely to willful ignoring of the environment. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to try and dispute Davis's assertion, he barely attempts to prove his claim (not that any of the reviewers have noticed this); we are supposed to take it as a given since it has come from the master's lips. The reason, of course, he can't prove it is that his whole thesis is simply untrue. Earthquakes are going to strike almost anywhere in the country in the long run and in the greater L.A. area in the short run. Anywhere you build in California there is a threat of quakes and, after every quake, the building codes are strengthened to prevent future loss of life and property.

As for the idea that the city has created fire and wildlife danger by reckless building into the wilderness well, everywhere outside of the original pueblo was wilderness. Anywhere the city expanded, it bordered wilderness where there would be interaction with fire and wildlife. The Hollywood Hills once had many fires but as the area developed, the frequency of fires stopped (not that fires can ever be totally stopped, of course). The same pattern of numerous fires, then almost no fires, occurred in the Santa Monica Mountains in West L.A; the fire areas kept moving out as the city expanded.

Even in areas such as Malibu, where most of the land remains wild, the replacement of old wood shakeroofed houses with fire resistant structures, better fire truck access, brush clearance and the installation of up to date water lines, insures that fire damage will decrease over the years.
The big fire of 1993 happened because the old water lines were inadequate and the area had not burned since the 1930's, leaving fifty years of brush adjacent to the oldest area of pre-fire code houses left in Malibu. That kind of fire can never happen again as the homes now meet present fire codes and the water lines have been upgraded. The next fire a few years after that--even though it covered almost as large an area in acreage within Malibu proper--did not destroy a single house within the Malibu City limits and only burned one home in the Malibu Post Office area, and that was one of the oldest homes in the area.

Moving on to another chapter of Ecology, Davis claims there has been a massive media conspiracy which has prevented people from learning that Los Angeles is the tornado capitol of the Western United States. He claims the L.A.Times has essentially banned the use of the word tornado in articles about L.A. In randomly checking 12 L.A.Times articles from his footnotes, 11 of them used the word tornado. For further fact checking, let's look at page 157.

He starts off by claiming that 60 major structures have been "wrecked" by twisters in Southern California. There are at least four--if not five--different geographic definitions of "L.A." used in this chapter, making it almost impossible to make accurate comparisons. However, among the wrecked buildings are a movie studio, two airports and a municipal wharf.

He later describes how one tornado destroyed the New York false front street at Universal studios; this 1% of Universal studios is what he called the "wrecked" motion picture studio only pages before. The other "wrecked" major buildings are--for the most part--similar exaggerations. He then claims that 1,440 homes and small businesses were destroyed or seriously damaged; broken windows and some roof damage actually account for most of that number. Then, after earlier citing groundbreaking research articles by Warren Blier and Karen Batten and by Hales, he takes their data and starts spinning facts faster than any tornado L.A.has ever seen.

He starts by claiming that tornadoes occur nearly ten times more frequently in the South Coast Area (roughly, Mexican border to Ventura and east to San Bernardino and Riverside Counties) than in the rest of California. But the study he cites also says what while there were 99 tornadoes in the South Coast area, in the state of California there were a total of a total of 242 tornadoes for the same period, a figure he neglects to mention, of course. By his statement and using the studies he cites, there should have been over 1,000 tornadoes in the South Coast.

He then states that Blier and Batten claim that the South Coast, using a particularly inventive set of statistics, has more tornadoes than Oklahoma. In their article, they quickly modify that by stating that those statistics are really kind of a parlor trick in that not only are the "tornadoes" in L.A. a far cry from Oklahoma twisters, but, even more importantly, the numbers come from two very different data banks. In other words, the Oklahoma count comes from one source while their L.A. figures were put together from many sources to arrive at a far higher total than the standard study showed for the L.A. area. This major point is, needless to say, omitted from the book. Davis then makes the claim that Metropolitan L.A. is hit by tornadoes at a far higher rather rate than any other urban area--with nearly twice as many tornadoes as Oklahoma City. To achieve that "fact," Davis first takes the low figure for Oklahoma--and Blier and Batten show that in Iowa the double checking of those numbers found 300% more tornadoes than the official report--and, rather than using the L.A. numbers from that source, he cites non-comparable, disproportionately high L.A. or South Coast figures, though it is hard to tell exactly where those figures actually come from.

In another chapter, he claims that the Westlake area of L.A. has the highest urban burn rate of any city in the country. I might add that this neighborhood, while described as a tenement district during the 1950's in this book , in Davis' Out of Site, Westlake is described as a fashionable district in the 1960's "threatened" by the demolition of slum housing on Bunker Hill.
While not in any way minimizing the seriousness of the city's neglect in enforcing fire codes in older buildings, the area's burn rate pales when compared with New York, Detroit, Chicago or other cities. Both the Bronx and many areas of Detroit have had more apartment buildings destroyed by fire in one week--if not one night--than have occurred in his self-described "burned over district" in an entire year.

Backing his claim that the Westlake area is the urban fire capital of the entire country is a footnote which says that this "statistic" was given him (presumably verbally) by an unnamed staff member of a local politician. This politician, I might add, whom Davis portrayed as battling the exploiters in his district was--at that very time--buying cocaine from drug dealers operating right around the corner from school yards.

Well, as long as it's from a reliable source. Out of 15 council districts in the city in 1993--the year when Davis called this area the urban fire capital of the entire country--the 1st council district had the fewest structure fires of any of the 15 council districts.

Another of the major themes of recent L.A. history Davis tries to tackle in Quartz is--to paraphrase Davis--the political and cultural clashes between the downtown, largely WASP power structure and the growing, largely Jewish Westside elite in the 1950s and 1960s, resulting in the location of the L.A.County Museum of Art in the Jewish Hancock Park area. The facts in that last sentence, courtesy of Mike Davis, demonstrate just how mystified Davis is when he tries to parse this--or any other subject regarding the inner workings of Los Angeles.
To know Hancock Park and its denizens it to know the story of the Los Angeles downtown establishment in the twentieth century. Many of them were born there, raised there, lived there, went to its schools and died there. It is not uncommon for three or four generations of the same family to still reside in Hancock Park or its sister neighborhoods of Windsor Square and Fremont Place.
For Mike Davis to confuse the neighborhood of Hancock Park with the Fairfax District--LA's traditional Jewish community--is inconceivable to anyone with a first hand knowledge of the city. I checked the index for other references to Hancock Park--the power center of the city he is writing about--to find there were none.

His scenario of the Jewish Westside Howard Ahmanson versus the Gentile downtown Chandlers, et al, makes for good street theater, except there is, as usual, one minor problem: Howard Ahmanson lived virtually his entire business life within the waspy confines of Hancock Park--silver spoon by silver spoon with the rest of the downtown establishment. His savings and loan--Homes Savings--was long headquartered in downtown Los Angeles. When it later moved to the Mid-Wilshire District, it was to the Easternmost you can be in L.A. without being downtown. Virtually all Ahmanson's major charities were downtown oriented as were most of his business activities.

Oh, there's one other minor point. Howard Ahmanson--Mike Davis' anointed leader of the Westside Jewish community--was not only not a Westsider, he also wasn't Jewish! Despite Mike Davis's reference to him as being "despised for his Jewishness," he was a white bread Methodist from Omaha. A few clues any basic researcher could have found on this: Ahmanson's son at the time of the writing of the book was supporting the Christian right wing of the Republican Party, each year the Ahmanson Foundation makes a Christmas gift to the people of L.A., Ahmanson was a member of the very-Waspy Wilshire Country Club and a quick look through the Ahmanson gifts hanging in the County museum will find numerous representations of Christianity.

Returning to Ecology, and examining page 376, Davis starts by talking about the millions of square feet of vacant 1950's office space left vacant on Wilshire Boulevard starting in the 1970's. The only problem is that almost all the modernist space in mid-Wilshire (with a very few exceptions such as the Tishman buildings) was built in the 1960's and the 1970's. Not a huge error, but still, anyone who has any kind of relationship with the physical structure of the city shouldn't be making mistakes like that. Warming up, Davis next repeats the urban myth--which he may have even originated--that Bullock's Wilshire had $10,000,000 in damage from the Rodney King rioters and that the store then promptly closed for good.

Well, there was zero, repeat zero structural damage to the store during the riots, much less ten million dollars worth. A lot of windows and glass display cases were broken and a lot of merchandise was stolen, but the store was open again within the week. It did finally close a year later, but only after the parent store, Macy's, went into bankruptcy; the store was closed, along with many other stores from coast to coast, none of which had been in the riots. Davis then states that Hancock Park houses dropped in value by $200,000 in less than a year and that the Wilshire Corridor became a unique category in urban history, the modern high rise ghost town.

None of this was true. Housing prices dropped due to the recession before the riots and the Wilshire Corridor is well over 70% occupied, hardly a ghost town. As for being a unique urban ghost town, there is little comparison to the see-through skyscrapers of Houston, Dallas and New York at the end of the last two recessions.

He also distorts the truth by listing the buildings in Mid-Wilshire which have closed due to the loss of their institutions but neglects to mention their new uses. Bullock's Wilshire is now a law school, another building is low income housing, the historic Los Altos apartment building has been restored, and the Brown Derby is still a restaurant.

Probably Davis's biggest miss is his contention that crime was about to overwhelm the city, turning it into one giant armed camp. Bladerunner was his immediate prediction for the city. Instead, the future is looking a lot more like Andy Hardy Goes to the Big City. Crime has declined, gun sales are at record lows (while he predicted the exact opposite), the streets are safer than they have been in decades, murders and violent gang activity are both down and almost all types of crime is still decreasing. So how does Davis deal with these inconvenient facts (and there are few things Davis finds more inconvenient than facts) in his new book?

He ignores them! In 484 heavily footnoted pages--with the subject of fear in the title of the book yet--he can't find room for one little sentence to mention that the crime rate in the City of L.A. has gone downward since the writing of the City of Quartz or that the sale of guns in L.A.has plunged to unheard of levels.

Mike Davis has gotten away unscathed--and he will continue to do so. Not only that, but he has walked off with a McArthur Genius Grant, has had two bestseller books, become a Getty Fellow, been nominated for and won literary awards, has worldwide lecturing commitments and various gigs throughout academia.

Davis' entire career has been based upon a self-created myth of his being a native son of Los Angeles and by two books of passably written prose (coating some highly unlikely Marxist dialectics) about a fictional City Of Quartz of his own invention supported only by myths, untruths and inaccuracies masquerading as scholarship. Davis has managed to get himself and his creation validated by major publishers, colleges he has taught or lectured at, mainstream and specialized journals, virtually every major newspaper in the country and a number of major foundations. And they have all proclaimed him the golden boy of L.A., the native son who is the ultimate authority on the city. And they now all have too much invested in him to allow that image to be destroyed.

Mike Davis has become the literary equivalent of the big Japanese bank too huge to be allowed to fail. He can't be allowed to falter for fear of what else he might bring down; to expose his sins of scholarship would be to expose their sins. There is a time when a lie can become too big to ever be corrected and Mike Davis' lie about the City of Quartz has become one of those truths. There are now too many people with too many reasons to allow the "real" truth to ever come out.

It is appropriate that another small town immigrant to L.A., Frank Baum (whom Davis alludes to in his writing), created Davis' literary equivalent almost a hundred years ago. For like the impotent Wizard hiding behind the curtain in the mythic Emerald City, our fair haired boy has constructed an equally illusory City of Quartz out of nothing more than smoke, mirrors and footnotes.
And it is in that way that Mike Davis has finally become a native Angeleno. The poor kid from the sticks who comes to the big city and reinvents himself Mike Davis: L.A. Native Extraordinaire. He is now finally a citizen of Los Angeles. Like so many others before him, by rejecting his past he has reinvented himself. Out of nothing he has created the latest, but not the last, myth in the City of the Angels. --BW

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