A Neighborhood’s Death Foretold

Remembrance of things lost

News about the fire arrived in fragments. First, that the blaze in Eaton Canyon was spreading rapidly, then that a few homes in the foothills were consumed, then whole neighborhoods, including my former one on the southern perimeter of the Angeles Crest National Forest. The house I owned on Jaxine Drive, designed in 1959 by Randell Makinson, burned to the ground. The loss to the current occupant is obviously much greater than mine. I hope that she finds solace in the love of family and friends, and that she may rebuild if she chooses.

I haven’t lived in Altadena for more than 25 years, and most of my friends from there have also moved on. But the place still figures large in my memory. It was there that the sweetness of life in Southern California was revealed. Of course, the distance of time and space enhances flavors, so there may be some unintentional exaggeration in what follows.

Life in Altadena felt easy — il dolce far niento. My (former) wife Mary and I entertained friends – mainly artists and academics — on the redwood deck of our house, beneath the shade of a 400-year-old oak tree. About 200 yards up the road lived Bill (a lighting and set designer) and Joyce (a sculptor). They often invited us over to use their pool or for a barbecue. Their rambling house, cluttered with Mexican artesanias and other folk art, was often filled with the music of the Grateful Dead – Bill was a dedicated Deadhead. Their little boy Matt liked to play with our daughter Sarah, and because there was almost no traffic on our cul-de-sac, they could walk up or down without supervision.

Our neighborhood was in a shallow canyon that contained no more than about 30 houses. Updated fire regulations banned any new building in the area. We were surrounded on three sides by mountains and the national forest. The word “forest” gives a misimpression. Most of the terrain was chaparral with occasional oak thickets and pine woods. Its predominant color was not green but the tan of decomposed granite. That changed in the late winter and spring – assuming the rains came – when there was green everywhere. But much of the verdure was foxtail, a tall grass annual that when it ripens, sheds barbed seeds that stick to shoes and socks and can get lodged in the noses of dogs. (Foxtail actually describes several, similar species of grass.) In the summer and autumn, it goes from green to brown — and can easily catch fire. When it does, it races up and down hills like a lit fuse, sparking other flammable material.

From my front door, I’d could jog about 500 yards to reach a steep trail that led up into the National Forest, then down another trail to Millard Canyon campgrounds, and then up along a fire road, and down again toward Arroyo Seco Park and the Rose Bowl. But that would be about 10 miles and too far for me to run. So, I usually turned around at the top of the fire road or else took an entirely different route into the mountains, up a steep trail toward Echo Mountain, the site of the former Mt. Lowe tramway. The Alpine Tavern and other facilities at the top, including the funicular itself, were destroyed by fire and the Great Depression. But the view from up there is terrific – you can see the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island.

Along the trails in the spring were yellow/orange monkey flowers, white Matilija poppies, purple lupins, yellow tower mustard, purple nightshade, and blue California lilacs. Sometimes I bent down to snack on the abundant miner’s lettuce. In rainy years, small streams crossed the paths in several places, requiring me to leap to clear them. Still, today, when I want to fall asleep, I imagine myself bounding down the eroded trails, springing from rock to rock, and over streams without fear of falling. I still run, but it’s mostly flat here in Norfolk and muddy – in any case, my days of bounding are over.

During my decade in Altadena, I taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles, about eight miles away. It was a good job – excellent colleagues, a diverse and energetic student body, and a handsome campus, mostly designed in the 1920s by Myron Hunt. But the absence of graduate students was frustrating – one could teach up to a certain level, and no higher. Plus, I had to do all my own grading. While running down steep trails remains a recurring dream, slogging through hundreds of “bluebooks” (a blue-covered paper book used for answering test questions) is a recurring nightmare. Nevertheless, it was with regret that I left Oxy in 1998 for a position at Northwestern University. They hired Mary too, in the Department of Anthropology – the offer was too good to refuse.

In the decades that followed, successive writing and research projects brought me back to Altadena, and to the city of Pasadena, its larger, wealthier neighbor. My friends Peter (a brilliant studio musician) and Irmi (a manager at the Goethe Institute) offered me use of their guest cottage, just a block from my old house. And even when my gigs in Pasadena ended, I kept coming back — for the last decade and a half with my wife, Harriet. She’s less keen on Los Angeles than I am, but Altadena and Pasadena always pleased her. She enjoyed the sight of the mountains looming above both communities (snowcapped in the winter), the historic Craftsman and mid-century architecture, the museums, and especially the hikes in the forest, including Millard and Eaton canyons.

There were portents of disaster. In 1993, the Kinneloa fire burned the slopes of Eaton Canyon and a few dozen homes. We could see the smoke from our house and the leaping flames from Bill and Joyce’s. At one point, Bill climbed up on his roof with a garden hose to extinguish any cinders that landed. I thought he was crazy. “The biggest risk for you is falling off the roof,” I shouted. Between the sound of branches jostled by Santa Ana winds, and the steams of water, I don’t think he heard me. Mary and I (Sarah wasn’t yet in the picture) retreated to our house, packed a few essentials, including a favorite etching by Goya, and drove off to spend a couple of days in a motel by the beach in Santa Monica. Our homes were all spared.

The neighborhood generally practiced good fire hygiene. We planted xerophytic gardens, scrupulously raked leaves in fire season, and plowed under fields covered with foxglove. (The county did this for a fee.) For several years, Bill and Joyce kept a pair of goats to munch the grasses on slopes that couldn’t be reached by their bush-hog. We all knew, however, that grazing animals weren’t the solution. If a big fire arrived, our mostly wooden, mid-century houses would go up like matchboxes.

Altadena history, in brief

It’s a silly name, a real estate promoter’s name. Alta in Spanish is the feminine form of “tall”. “Dena” signifies nothing. Put together, they were supposed to mean “above Pasadena.” Pasadena is an Ojibwe word meaning “valley”. The Ojibway tribe flourished 3,000 miles away in the Great Lakes region, and Pasadena is not a valley. But what’s in a name when there is money to be made? By the 1880s, a group of real estate entrepreneurs, including John and Frederick Woodbury, had bought up a huge tract of agricultural land and enticed some rich businessmen from the East and Midwest to plant stakes. Among them was the Chicago printing mogul Andrew McNally. His stately Queen Anne on East Mariposa Street was constructed in 1887. It burned down last week. So did the Arts and Crafts style Scripps Mansion built in 1904 for the newspaper magnate William Armiger Scripps. (For decades, it’s been used as a Waldorf School.) The 1907 Woodward home designed by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey — a little later the residence of the popular writer of American westerns, Zane Gray — also burned.

The 1920s was a major period of residential building in Altadena, especially low-cost craftsman and Spanish revival bungalows. The developer and con man E.P. Janes built several hundred cheap houses in a mashed-up craftsman, Spanish, Tudor and Queen-Anne style. They generally had tall gables, arched doorways, trowel-swept stucco walls, cement terraces, and dormer windows. In 1926, he left town in a hurry, leaving behind several hundred unfinished (but paid-for) houses and a pile of debt. The houses were eventually finished, and “Janes Village” became a sought-after Altadena address. Last week, dozens of these houses were destroyed by fire.

In Northwest Altadena, fire damage was equally significant, consuming hundreds of homes, schools and churches, including the United Methodist Church. The fact that its congregation is primarily Black, tells another significant story about Altadena. Because it was unincorporated, the community lay outside the redlined zone established by the Federal Home Owners’ Loan Association during the New Deal. (De jure segregation was not only a Southern thing.) Nevertheless, Altadena’s Black population remained small until the 1960s and ‘70s. That’s when fair housing laws spurred white flight in both west Altadena and adjacent parts of Pasadena. The non-white population surged again a decade later with the completion of the 210 (Foothill) freeway. It destroyed or divided several, primarily Black neighborhoods of Pasadena, with many of the 3,000 displaced folks moving a half-mile north to Altadena. The Black population surged to 43% by the mid-1980s, about the time we arrived. Today, its 18%.

Overall, 58% of residents in Altadena are people of color, including 27% Latino. The Eaton fire destroyed homes that, in some cases, had been passed down for two or more generations. It also eliminated hundreds of affordable apartment rentals in a region with a severe shortage of them. But with home prices in Altadena now averaging about $1.5 million, it’s unclear whether a new generation of middle-class property owners or lower-income renters will ever again be able to move there. With little new home building and an unregulated rental market, Altadena was rapidly gentrifying. The fires will only hasten the process – the vultures of disaster capitalism have already alighted.

Why Altadena burned

The fires in Southern California, including the Eaton fire, began as forest wildfires and quickly spread into what’s called the “wildland-urban interface” (WUI) – the potentially hazardous zone where homes or other structures abut or mix with undeveloped wildland. Contrary to suggestions that fire victims bear some responsibility for their predicament by choosing to live in the WUI, residents of Los Angeles are less likely to live in a WUI than people elsewhere in the country. In California, about a third of the population (over 11 million people) live in the WUI, consistent with the national figure. In Los Angeles, the number is about 15%. While significant parts of Altadena (as well as Pacific Palisades and Malibu) do abut or reach into the WUI, the real cause of the disaster was dryness, heat, and strong, Santa Ana winds, all exacerbated by climate change. The failure of emergency responders is another factor. There were simply too few of them, and when Altadena burned, they were nowhere to be found.

2024 was globally the hottest year on record. Los Angeles experienced its warmest summer ever, following a decade of record heat. To make matters worse, a succession of stationary high-pressure systems prevented the arrival of seasonal rains. New research indicates this may be the consequence of record-high ocean temperatures disrupting or blocking the usual path of the jet stream. The same kind of perturbation may have been the cause of the excessive heat and drought that brought brush fires last year to parts of New York City. In addition, “hydroclimate whiplash” – large, sudden or frequent changes from very dry to very wet conditions – appear to be an additional consequence of global warming. Los Angeles was subject to two years of drenching “atmospheric rivers”, followed this year by drought – just four millimeters of rain have fallen this season. In California, 17 of the largest 20 fires in state history occurred in the past 18 years, with 5 of the 6 largest coming since August 2020, not including the Palisades, Malibu, and Eaton conflagrations. The recent fires may prove to be the most damaging and costly in U.S. history. Estimates are approaching $200 billion.

In addition to global warming, poor land and fire management practices have also contributed to the extent and severity of the destruction. There is considerable debate about this, but otherwise intelligent writers, including David Wallace-Wells, offer too easy and often mistaken formulas for fire prevention. Historically, the U.S. Forest Service employed fire suppression for all wildfires, including those that don’t threaten people or structures. This led to artificially high fuel loads and fires of much higher intensity than otherwise. In recent years, the Forest Service reversed course and began to use prescribed burns in areas with a more than-average fuel load. Then this year, it stopped its program of burning in California for budgetary reasons.

The best research (contra Wallace-Wells) indicates that most woodlands should simply be left alone to burn or not burn, except for areas immediately contiguous to homes. Logging and grazing in forested lands – often proposed as a means to reduce fire risk – actually increases it. The former by removing larger and more valuable trees that resist fires, and the latter by removing native grasses that burn slowly, while promoting the growth of invasive grasses – like foxtail — that burn faster and hotter. In addition, thinning forests tends to increase wind speed in woodlands, fanning any flames that erupt and carrying embers further than otherwise. Also, the fuel load in burned forests is quickly replenished, meaning that burns need to be repeated on a massive scale, and with few evident benefits. The forests surrounding Altadena (mostly chaparral) have had multiple fires in recent years – they did little, if anything, to prevent the latest blaze. More frequent burns, as George Wuerthner recently observed, would only destroy the chaparral ecology, making space for invasive species with even greater flammability. More important than prescribed burns is fortifying individual homes and neighborhoods against the flying embers from inevitable fires.

Wildfires ignite homes in three possible ways: embers, heat, and flames. Embers are the most common. Depending on the type of fuel and wind speed, embers can travel upwards of 20 kilometers, igniting new spot fires far from the original flame front. Under conditions of high wind, fuel breaks – highways, rivers, ditches, prescribed burn areas — are useless. Embers fall in a blizzard and quickly accumulate on structures or infiltrate homes through windows, vents, or other gaps. They may also inflame vegetation or other fuels around a home. Doorbell videos from Altadena show wind-blown embers raining down on houses and businesses and quickly igniting them. Once a structure starts to burn, its heat may suffice to ignite buildings within the approximately 30-meter home ignition zone. Contact with direct flame of course, whether from vegetation, piles of firewood, fences, cars, or other structures, spreads fires even more rapidly. Once a single house goes up in flames, the one next to it will go, and so on until fuel sources are exhausted, fire engines arrive, or it starts to rain.

If there had been fire trucks on the scene, many of the fires in Altadena could easily have been extinguished. Stories of homes saved by people with garden hoses prove the point. (Doing so, however, can be deadly.) As one eyewitness and videographer reported, “there were no fire personnel anywhere.” On Jan 14, The New York Times reported:

“Carlos Herrera, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department,…said that by the time the Eaton fire had broken out on Tuesday, all resources were already dedicated to the raging Palisades fire across town.”

If confirmed by further investigation, the fires in Altadena – an unincorporated community of 40,000 that is nearly 60% non-white – may have been a victim of environmental racism as well as climate change and bad luck. The irony is that the wealthier and whiter residents of Pacific Palisades fared no better. They may, however, better afford to rebuild.

It’s possible to protect homes in the WUI better than currently. In addition to having well-supported fire services, local and state governments can mandate (and support with grants where appropriate) defensible zones around properties. This entails separating houses from vegetation and any flammable attachments, such as decks and fences. Home and apartment owners should also use structural elements that are fire-resistant. Windows that are not outfitted for wildfire conditions – for example vinyl — can easily melt, break, or ignite if exposed to radiant heat, flames, or ember buildup. Roofs are one of the most vulnerable parts of a home. While any roofing material can be treated to make it fire resistant, metal or tile roofs are best, however, testing has found that the latter (common in Southern California) are vulnerable to ignition from showers of embers due to spaces between the tiles. (Homeowners can install rooftop sprinkler systems.) Vents are also common entry point for embers to flow into a home. Noncombustible mesh coverings can help slow down penetration. The exterior siding of a home, though less important than other structural features for wildfire resilience, is sometimes the weak link. Noncombustible or ignition-resistant materials such as metal, adobe, or fiber cement should be used if a house is located in a vulnerable WUI or within 30 feet of another house or combustible vegetation. There are many other ways to make homes safer, but zoning, construction, and insurance regulations have not kept up with the increased level of fire risk due to climate change.

The future in the past – Gregory Ain’s Park Planned Homes

Because I’m especially interested in art, architecture and design, I’ve been struck by the destruction of so many fine buildings in Altadena. I mentioned some earlier. Here’s another loss, the remembrance of which could offer a guide to Altadena’s successful rebuilding: Park Planned homes by Gregory Ain and landscape architect Garett Eckbo. (21 of 28 Ain houses were destroyed.)

The complex was designed and built in 1947 to solve a problem: How to provide affordable homes to returning, limited income GIs and their families at a time of housing and material shortages. Ain’s solution, developed in Altadena and then a little later in Mar Vista and Silver Lake, entailed use of standardized plans; common finishes, hardware and appliances; easy access to the outside; and privacy sufficient to affirm the American ideology of individualism while still suggesting communalism. Each house was about 1350 sf, (considered generous at the time), and contained an open plan with adjacent kitchen, dining and living rooms. A built-in closet/cabinet, separating the living and dining areas, stopped well short of the ceiling to allow the passage of light and air. Three bedrooms are accessed by a corridor.

The houses are symmetrically paired along Highview Avenue, but mirrored, creating a sense of different-but-same. Each has a shared patio/driveway in front (partly divided by a low wall) and a private garden in back; property lines are thereby both denied (in the front) and affirmed (in the back). Neighbors may be either welcomed or not, as determined by circumstance. The building type looks back at once to the formerly ubiquitous L.A. bungalow courts of the 19teens and twenties, and the much larger Siedlungen (collective housing) from the same period, made by Bauhaus architects for the Weimar Republic.

Ain’s project was only partially realized; he originally intended to build twice as many Park Planned Homes. But the fires in Altadena suggest his plans ought to be rescued from the archives and reanimated. Or, more appropriately, new sets of architectural plans developed using modular or pre-fabricated elements that can be assembled in a factory or workshop and quickly assembled on site. They must, of course, be fire resistant. Burned public properties should be made available for the siting of attractive, new housing – a mix of rentals and low-cost owner-occupied units. Ain’s mostly destroyed Park Planned Homes, with their assertion of the value of both community and individuality, can thereby support the rebirth of Altadena as a community of mixed-income and ethnic diversity.

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