Lifestyle
A Bastion of Los Angeles Hippie Culture Survived the Flames
In Topanga Canyon on Saturday morning, suspended midair from an electricity line, hung the smoldering top of a utility pole. The pole itself had burned away. Its remaining crosspieces resembled a crucifix on fire. By the time Bob Melet videotaped this eerie scene, firefighters had managed to halt the advance of flaring patches that elsewhere had been whipped into infernos.
Barely 100 yards from the front door of Mr. Melet’s store, Melet Mercantile — a destination for fashion and interior designers who for decades have tracked Mr. Melet’s idiosyncratic tastes — lay the fire line at Camp Wildwood, a disused summer camp established in the 1920s and later turned into a resort and community center by two locals, Julia and Oka Stewart. To its west and along the Pacific Coast Highway, almost everything was torched.
“The canyon is a funnel that comes right past my doorstep,” Mr. Melet said by phone from a friend’s apartment in Corona del Mar, his evacuation point. “If it had reached me, it would have wiped out the entire town.”
The fact that it had not represented the miraculous survival of an ecosystem as fragile and anomalous as it is naturally untamed. An eccentric holdout of a countercultural ethos that once went a long way toward defining the Southern California lifestyle, Topanga lies at the western limit of an extensive system of canyons resembling a series of Cyclopean knife cuts slashed into the Santa Monica mountains.
Others among the 28 canyons — Laurel, Beachwood, Runyon — may be better known beyond the Los Angeles basin, largely for their place in rock ’n’ roll history and lore. While gradually over the decades those places succumbed to the irresistible forces of gentrification, Topanga Canyon has clung to its wildness, its renegade spirit and the durable aura it retains of a one-time redoubt of bootleggers and drug runners. Bisected by a single winding mountain road, Topanga straddles the mountains and links the sprawling suburbs of the San Fernando Valley with the blue vastness of the ocean.
“One of the things we’re proudest of in Topanga is the strength of the community,” said Stefan Ashkenazy, a long time resident of the canyon. By some standards, Mr. Ashkenazy’s exclusive hotel complex, Elsewhere — built on 39 hilltop acres of what was once a vacation ranch for the Howard Johnson family — could be seen as a harbinger of gentrifying forces. That it is not owes to his efforts to keep the hotel’s vibe communitarian and local (he has offered free lodging to the area’s ad hoc firefighting teams that call themselves Heat Hawks), and its imprint light upon the land.
“Believe me, I know how lucky we are to have this holdout,” said Mr. Ashkenazy, who also owns the four-star Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood.
For Emmeline Summerton, a self-taught social historian whose Instagram account, Lost Canyons LA, has become an addictive source of Los Angeles history and lore, the story of Topanga Canyon is one of improbable survival — a thoroughly wild place less than an hour’s drive from the city’s business center.
“I’m not sure how much people outside Los Angeles know about it,” she said, referring both to the canyon itself — populated by coyotes, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions — as well as a community that has long worn its ornery countercultural reputation as a badge of pride.
“There is the local, small community and a very rural feeling,” Ms. Summerton said, one still largely under the influence of the first wave of New Age pioneers. There were free-love naturist hide-outs like Elysium Fields and Sandstone Retreat, she explained, along with Moonfire Ranch, a 60-acre sanctuary established in the late 1950s by Lewis Beach Marvin III, an animal-rights activist and heir to S & H Green Stamps, a once popular grocery store reward system.
“It was very much about people living off the grid, with solar and rainwater collection,” Ms. Summerton said, and about a tolerance for oddballs and eccentrics that hung on long after a succession of real estate booms permanently altered the character of other, less remote canyons. “A lot has changed and there’s a new breed of hippie-type people out there, influencers and wellness entrepreneurs, so, yes, it’s more exclusive and expensive than in the past,” she added. “But it’s still the one canyon where you get a sense of what it has always been.”
By this she meant a refuge for renegades and outsiders, for artists like Neil Young, who wrote his landmark solo album “After the Gold Rush” at his house there; for storied ’60s groups like Canned Heat, whose members once worked as the house band at the Topanga Corral club (which burned down not once but twice); for Linda Ronstadt in the days after she quit Stone Poneys, the folk rock trio, to go solo and make music with musicians who would later form the Eagles; for the American actor Will Geer to create an open air amphitheater set in a hillside and call it the Theatricum Botanicum, a name derived from a 17th century English botanical text.
To this day in Topanga Canyon there remains an itinerant community informally known as the “Creekers,” whose members live off the grid in encampments set along creeks in the hills behind the disused Topanga Ranch Motel; residents who ride horses to do their marketing at the Topanga Creek General Store; and naturists hiking canyon roads clad in little besides sun hats and sneakers.
This, of course, was before the wildfires.
Gone on the first day of the Palisades fire was the Reel Inn, a beloved Malibu fish joint opened in 1986 by Teddy and Andy Leonard at the base of Topanga Canyon. Also gone was Cholada, a bustling Thai restaurant whose takeout was both a staple of coastal dining and the source of catered meals for the art world honchos that regularly decamp to Los Angeles for the annual Frieze art fair. Gone, too, were the Topanga Ranch Motel, a bungalow style motel complex built in 1929 by William Randolph Hearst to house railroad workers, and the Malibu Feed Bin, a holdout from an era when this stretch of the California coast was still largely agrarian.
Entire hillsides and washes were reduced to ashes and, later that same afternoon so, too, was an entire stretch of multimillion dollar homes improbably perched oceanside where the canyons meet the water along Pacific Coast Highway.
“If you’re ever going to use the word surreal,” Mr. Melet said of the devastation, “it was surreal.”
What seemed almost miraculous, given the surrounding destruction, was that the fires failed to reach the Theatricum Botanicum, and left unscathed the Inn of the Seventh Ray, whose dining tables are set on stone terraces by a creek side and whose gift shop is filled with crystals and mystical arcana.
“So far Topanga has mainly been spared,” the actress Wendie Malick said by phone from her ranch set on a ridge above Topanga.
“The winds were in our favor,” she added. “Though we’re not out of the woods yet. Things can change on a dime.”
And, indeed, the cyclonic winds — biblical, raging, like nothing in memory — started up again on Monday.
“The fires didn’t get to us last week,” said Nick Fouquet, a French American designer whose Western-style hats are favored by celebrities including Tom Brady, Rihanna, J. Balvin and LeBron James. When the first alert came last week, Mr. Fouquet raced up the coast from his business’s headquarters in Venice to the geodesic dome in Topanga that he calls home and, aided by a band of locals pumped out his swimming pool to soak his house and its surroundings.
It was a scene being repeated throughout the canyon, Mr. Fouquet said, neighbors on a mission of “house triage,’’ putting out small burns before they could grow. Videos Mr. Fouquet sent this reporter from the early days of the fire showed crimson flames crowning a ridge less than a quarter-mile from his property line. “The wind, the firefighters, a myriad of factors have been on our side,” said Mr. Fouquet.
Among those factors were the triage efforts of a tight knit community that stayed put despite evacuation orders and that banded together — as it has consistently across the decades when the canyon was visited by the wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides and rockfalls that are a fact of life in a seismically unstable coastal desert perched at a continent’s edge.
“Topanga always felt like the ugly stepchild no one cares about,” Mr. Fouquet said, while acknowledging the role in his current reprieve of both firefighters and fate. “We’re used to doing things for ourselves.”
Zoe Latta, a co-founder of the fashion brand Eckhaus Latta, saw the clock on Instagram and started searching for pharma swag on eBay. “It was just a hole I got in,” she said. Latta soon rounded up some examples at “Rotting on the Vine,” her Substack newsletter, describing them as “silly byproducts of our sick sad world.”
Pharma swag feels somewhat like Marlboro Man merch — “like this very specific modality of our culture that’s changed,” Latta said, adding, “At first, I thought it was ironic and cheeky. But it’s also so dark.”
In particular, swag like the OxyContin mugs that read “The One to Start With. The One to Stay With” is regarded as highly collectible and highly contentious. Jeremy Wells, a newspaper owner and editor in Olive Hill, Ky., remembered, for example, seeing the mugs sold at a Dollar Tree in New Boston, Ohio, in the late 1990s or early 2000s. “At the same moment that the epidemic is blowing up,” he said.
“You can do a chicken-and-egg argument, and I doubt very seriously that those mugs made anybody get addicted,” he said. “But I do feel like things like those mugs did add to the mystique and the aura of seduction.” (After a protracted lawsuit, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has been dissolved and is on the hook to pay more than $5 billion in criminal penalties for fueling the opioid epidemic.)
“I was surprised to see how much this stuff was selling for in general — there is demand,” Latta said, pointing to a vintage Xanax photo frame listed for $230. Latta said she could imagine buying it for a friend who takes Xanax on planes (“if it was at a thrift store for under $10”) or maybe a pair of Moderna aviator sunglasses that she found, which seem to nod at Covid vaccines and the signature Biden eyewear, she said.
Pharmacore — medical-branded pieces worn as fashion — has found new expression at the confluence of identity, medicine and commerce, and at a time when skepticism toward pharmaceuticals is at a high (see: the MAHA movement).
Goth Shakira wears a Blumarine jacket, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top from Wild West Social House, Jane Wade bra and Ariel Taub earrings.
My ex-boyfriend, whom I just got out of a relationship with, had a pure heart and was a loyal lover. However, he lacked ambition and his family didn’t have the best values. I don’t see myself raising children with him because I don’t want my kids to be surrounded by his family. (I broke up with him on the night of his birthday because his sister got violent with me.) We dated for over a year and I’d always be the one to take care of the check when we’d go out on dates. He had no network, so we would always hang out with my friends and colleagues. Am I wrong for leaving him? Is his loyalty worth going through all that?
Girl. (“Girl” is a gender-neutral term of endearment, by the way.) I’m going to need you to take a deep breath, look at your gorgeous self in the mirror and relish in the fact that you have made the right decision.
First, let’s focus on the good. Loyalty and purity of heart are beautiful traits that many, many people on this earth have. When you find someone who does, and then combine that with your attraction and attachment to this person (along with the reality that many, many people also lack these traits), it makes sense that you’d be feeling like your ex is a rare find that you might not encounter again. However, you can care for someone, and also acknowledge the truth that the life they are setting themself up for is not the life you envision living — or, crucially, the life that you envision your children living. A long-term partnership is so much more than love. It requires a shared vision for fulfillment and happiness, based on compatible values. It necessitates a wholeness from both parties, wherein two individuals take ownership and accountability over their own success and well-being. It is loving to let someone go so they can live their life in peace and free of judgment, and even find someone else whose version of an ideal life more closely matches theirs. Most importantly, letting someone go who you know is not aligned with the life you want to live is a deeply self-loving act.
The meaning I glean from your words is this: It’s not so much that you yearn for him romantically and fear you made a mistake simply because your life is empty without him. (In fact, it sounds like you were the one adding a lot of value to his otherwise limited existence through your resources.) It seems that you feel guilty for leaving him behind as you went on to pursue a better life for yourself. That kind of feeling is more caretaking, and dare I say maternal, than loving (at least the kind associated with romantic partnership). He’s your ex, not your son. Unconditional love is only healthy and appropriate in the context of a parent-child relationship, and that’s not the situation here. People who engage in romantic relationships with men — women, femmes, gay men, etc. — are socialized to be ever-forgiving, to have infinite patience and compassion. The lines get blurred when you do feel kindness and genuine compassion for someone you care about. It can be difficult to discern when you’re being too harsh, and when you’re just setting a healthy boundary. Society makes it difficult for us in that way. But we don’t have to succumb to that pressure.
You can’t fall in love with someone’s potential. If a person, especially a man, shows up to a relationship as someone you can’t envision spending an extended period of time with, then that’s not your person. Not only is it impossible to truly “fix” or “change” anyone, it’s simply not an efficient or productive use of your precious energetic and material resources. Of course, we all change over time, and hopefully in positive ways. But that change needs to be self-directed, coming from within each individual. “Change” exerted on another through force robs the receiving party of the dignity of authoring their own life path. Even the verbiage of your question indicates that you’ve already extended a lot of generosity and patience toward someone who didn’t feel like working toward social and financial independence, and setting boundaries with their family should have been a top priority. I can sense your exhaustion underneath the guilt. That’s the root of the matter. And what matters is you.
I can sense your exhaustion underneath the guilt.
Loss is just space. It can hurt and feel empty at first. But it also allows you the room you need to expand your world with abundance, not shrink it and drain it into scarcity. Affirm in your heart and in your mind that love itself is an infinite resource. If you channel the patience and generosity that you once put into your ex into a life where you are fulfilled to the utmost, the right person (or people) will find you.
And, girl. Some time from now, when you are loved by a man who takes his own dignity seriously, and supports you in the feminine energy of rest and calm that you deserve to experience and embody, you will be so grateful to this current version of you that had the courage to let go. I’m proud of you.
Photography Eugene Kim
Styling Britton Litow
Hair and Makeup Jaime Diaz
Visual Direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo Assistant Joe Elgar
Styling Assistant Wendy Gonzalez Vivaño
The kiss finally happened at a Halloween party Chatterjee hosted at her apartment, while the two were watching “American Psycho” on the couch at 3 a.m., when everyone else had gone out for food. “We’re sitting so close our legs are touching and I’m freaking out,” Braggins said.
“I looked at Abby, and I was like, ‘I’d rather kiss you than watch this,’” Chatterjee said. So they did. About a month later, they were official.
On April 10, Braggins suggested they take a trip to Home Goods in Brooklyn. When they ended up at Coney Island Beach instead, Chatterjee was none the wiser. It was an early morning, so the two, along with the dog they adopted together, Willow, enjoyed having the beach to themselves.
Braggins ran ahead with Willow and crouched behind some rocks. When Chatterjee got a glimpse of Willow, there was a bandanna tied around her neck. It said, “Will you marry me?” Braggins pulled out a shell with a ring in it. The answer was yes.
A few days before, Chatterjee had proposed to Braggins amid a gloomy, cloudy sky on top of the Empire State Building.
The two were married on April 21 at the New York City Marriage Bureau, in front of three guests, by Guohuan Zhang, a city clerk. Afterward, they celebrated at Bungalow, an Indian restaurant in the East Village, with a few more friends.
Though Chatterjee’s parents were not present at the wedding, one of the couple’s most meaningful moments came in 2023, when Braggins traveled to India to meet Chatterjee’s family for the first time. Chatterjee had never brought a partner home before, and she had warned Braggins that same-sex relationships were still not widely accepted there. But by the end of the trip, Chatterjee’s mother had embraced Braggins as family, telling her, “I have two daughters now.”
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