Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies at 60
LOS ANGELES? The author of “City of Quartz” has been dead for more than 10 years.
Mike Davis, who chronicled the forces that shaped the city of Los Angeles, died Wednesday of kidney failure in Chicago. He was 60.
In his writing, Davis had an eye for telling details and drew inferences about the personalities and lives of a city that was changing so rapidly. By the late 1980s, it was clear that Los Angeles would undergo a revolution, with a vast influx of new residents, as it lost the city’s traditional jobs and turned its energies toward entertainment and tourism.
On his website, Davis wrote about the city’s decline through the 1980s and ’90s and wrote about the effects of the dot-com boom.
“There is very little left to say about the 1980s and ’90s,” Davis said in an interview when contacted for this story. “The city’s economy took a hit and the city is now in better shape than it was then.”
“City of Quartz” was published in 1994.
Davis was an observant Catholic who wrote on a number of issues.
“I think it has had a big role in my life,” Davis wrote of his upbringing in Orange, Calif., in a 2012 post on his website. “Although I was from a humble family, this has given me great humility and a sense of service.”
Davis studied at Pasadena City College, working on his master’s degree in journalism. He went to work for the Los Angeles Times as a copy boy before moving to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. After a stint as reporter, he was editor in chief of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and launched a newspaper/magazine partnership with the St. Petersburg Times.
During this time, Davis became friends with Hollywood icons, including actors Tom Hanks and George Clooney. But he also befriended a city that was changing.
When Davis arrived in L.A., he wrote, “most of its downtown had been demolished, and the city was in the process of changing.”
It wasn’t just the downtown that was changing, Davis wrote