LAAK (Los Angeles after Kobe)

I GREW UP with the man!”

Someone shouting on the Willowbrook-Rose Parks Blue Line train platform put the city’s loss into a personal perspective on Sunday, Jan. 26. The death of Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bean Bryant, along with his eldest daughter, Gianna, and seven others that day in a helicopter accident in Calabasas, Calif., was truly a generational event.

Never mind Kobe’s own tender age of 41. The ages of the others who perished in the crash — from 13 to 56 — made this an equal opportunity dasher of hopes. That accidental diversity of disaster had a happier parallel in the city itself.

Almost as soon as the news went up, all the day of the crash and every day in local media after that, you were pleasantly struck by the breadth of diversity reflected everywhere. In the streets of downtown, on the trains around the city, on buses in Gardena and storefronts in Compton, Angelenos paid their respects. Tributes to Kobe and friends even included a 24-second service hold by Metro light-rail trains on Feb. 24.

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The hours and days after Kobe and the others passed saw what amounted to a T-Shirt Silkscreeners Full Employment Act. Caps, shirts, sweatshirts and a wide range of other memorabilia showed up fast — almost distressingly fast — in a marketplace all too ready to receive them.

The championships and the accompanying swagger gave the people of the city vast pride, of course. It was always about more than money, but Kobe and the Lakers were hugely financially successful for the team, the city and its citizens. If you celebrate somebody, celebrate everything about them.

And no art celebrates somebody quite like a mural. The vast scale of the mural makes an image praiseworthy by definition; we tend to expand the contours of our heroes, reflecting the size of their accomplishments.

Los Angeles, a city long seduced by the power of the mural, was overwhelmed in the days after, with designs on vertical surfaces all over town: images derived from photos of Kobe in his high-scoring prime.

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HERE WE ARE in the Ecosystem of the Angels, sharing the subways and freeways, our common microbes and experiences. It took another overpowering social catalyst — the 1992 riots — to provoke a question that L.A. still hasn’t completely answered yet. “Can we all just get along?” Rodney King asked in the wake of vast civil unrest.

The ceremonies, tears and praisesongs of the last 45 days show that, at least in the short term, it’s possible to do just that. Remembrances of Kobe Bean Bryant have been heartfelt, powerful, plentiful and socially panoramic. But comradeship and the unity that tragedy engenders can be a short-lived thing. Can the City of Angels be as ecumenical and all-embracing about the future of the city Kobe loved as it’s been about the past public life that Kobe lived?

The untimely deaths of Kobe and Gianna and the others on Jan. 26 were an annealing event for the people of Los Angeles, something that welded the city together, at least in the short term. Now the hard work of being truly ecumenical begins.

Now — in the face of a persistent city history of informal housing bias, an ongoing existential crisis of homelessness, the emerging specter of typhus amid swarms of rats by the thousands, and the new anti-socializing scourge of the coronavirus — the urgency of the need for a unity of civic objective has never been greater than now.

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Image credits: Gianna-Kobe mural: Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images. Other images: The author.