Angelenos have spent the past week under a haze of smoke, barraged by evacuation warnings, many of them searching for a place to stay after fleeing their homes.
On Tuesday, though, the sky over Mid-City, a Los Angeles neighborhood about 15 miles east of where a major wildfire devastated Pacific Palisades, was clear and blue. The air was refreshing and the temperature was a balmy mid-60s, with little wind. People lined up for the bus, FedEx trucks made deliveries, and a truck serving tortas was opening. A city parking officer scribbled out a ticket for a van.
Life, in other words, went on.
One of the defining characteristics of the greater Los Angeles region, an area of 18 million people and more than 33,000 square miles, is its enormous sprawl. So while tens of thousands have been displaced and are dealing with immediate needs like finding shelter, many other residents have been grappling with the unsettling feeling of witnessing a crisis unfold from afar — but not that far.
“It’s this weird balance of, How much do you pause, and how much do you keep going?” Nathalie Martin said, as she stood in the contemporary art gallery where she was associate director in Mid-City. “The whole city isn’t shut down — it’s definitely shocked.”
Ms. Martin, 24, said she had friends who had lost their homes or had been evacuated, and the gallery had artists who had lost their work and their studios. She said people like herself, who live far from the damaged areas, were trying to help out — including offering refuge to friends and displaying art so that displaced artists could earn money — while continuing to live their lives.
“It’s walking a line of putting your energy where it’s needed but also working your job so you can make money,” she said. “It’s definitely jarring.”
After days of hazy skies, the air quality on Tuesday in many parts of Los Angeles, especially farther from the fires, was recorded as “good” or “moderate,” according to AirNow — better than in other areas of California, like Sacramento and parts of the Bay Area. Most schools reopened on Monday, and the city’s two N.B.A. teams, the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers, both hosted home games on Monday night, after contests last week were postponed.
In Santa Monica, just south of the evacuated zone for the Palisades fire, people were walking their dogs and jogging in Palisades Park along the water, even as the view of burned patches of the Santa Monica Mountains to the north offered a sobering reminder of the devastation.
