The Year L.A. Burned

It was incredibly windy in Altadena, California, on January 7. We’d known the Santa Anas were coming—the news and neighbors had been touting it for days—but the 60- to 80 mile-per-hour gusts still felt jarring. Trees, branches, and power lines were down all over the neighborhood and I spent the day worrying that one could come crashing through the roof of my home office at any minute. When the Palisades Fire kicked off on L.A.’s west side, I turned on the news in the background while I wrote, watching as Steve Guttenberg evacuated his neighbors and the LAFD tried to battle the quickly moving blaze.

Around 4 p.m., the afterschool program at my kids’ school sent a message: Things were getting too hairy on campus and they suggested parents come snag their kids if possible. I laughed—the winds were scary, but Californians also tend to make a big deal out of even the most minor weather change, from a slight drizzle to chill in the air. The fire was in the Palisades, I thought, and the kids would be fine. They’d stay inside, do homework, and they’d have a story to tell later.

I finally grabbed my kids around 5:30 p.m.—30 minutes earlier than I typically broke them out of afterschool, because I’m not a total monster—and made the quick trip home. Twenty or so minutes later, our house and street plunged into darkness. The power had gone out. A quick trip to the neighborhood WhatsApp revealed that the blackout was for good reason: A fire had broken out in nearby Eaton Canyon, and Altadena residents east of me were quickly being asked to evacuate.

Naively thinking the fire would go over the mountain rather than come down into our town, we begrudgingly packed up. My husband and I use CPAP machines at night, so sleeping is near impossible without power. And if I was worried about trees falling during the day, I knew my anxiety would be at an all-time high all night given the trees proximity to my kids’ room. As we drove out of Altadena, we stopped near the center of town at a light. That’s when we first saw the fire, which was by then already burning a vertical swath across the front of the town’s entire mountain backdrop. The flames were breathtaking in their enormity and intensity, and while we had to hope for the best, we also feared the worst.

I barely slept that night, and not just because I was sharing an air mattress with my very wiggly son. Waking up at 3:30 a.m., I grabbed my phone and saw a cavalcade of texts and posts. Whole neighborhoods and streets were burning, and no one knew whether their house was safe. Some neighbors had stayed—one of ours camped out on his roof the entire fire, watering spot blazes and posting almost hourly videos of what he could see from his perch in an attempt to calm panicked evacuees—but those who had left in the night painted a bleak picture. The town was burning, they said, and it seemed there was very little that could be done.

And the town did burn, not just on the night of January 7 but also for much of January 8. Friends and neighbors told me that they heard their house was absolutely fine at 6 a.m. but reduced to a pile of ash by 7:30, and slowly, slowly, over the course of the day, a picture started to emerge of what had happened.

More than 9,000 houses and buildings burned in Altadena that day. We’d eventually learn that at least 19 people died. In the Palisades, 12 people died and 6,800 structures burned. Generations of work and love and financial stability were swept away in a flow of fire, and while some of us were fortunate enough to not lose our homes and livelihoods, many, many residents and business owners in our beloved mountain hamlet did.

It wasn’t just structures that were lost—it was memories, baby blankets and Christmas decorations, height charts carved into walls and homes that were passed down through generations. Things could be replaced, but history had been lost forever, or at least dramatically rewritten. As former Dwell contributing editor Alana Hope Levinson noted in the wake of the fires, a lot of architectural history was destroyed as well, structures that could never be rebuilt or recreated in any sort of authentic way.

In the weeks that followed the fires, the stresses and sadness were only magnified. Suddenly, L.A.’s rental market was absolutely deluged—both for long-term and short-term rentals—with prices skyrocketing and availability plummeting. A friend who’d lost his house told me that he went to an open house for a rental and was told that 100 other Altadena families had come through that day, all with a version of the same awful story about loss and insecurity. (And, it’s worth noting, it’s not a problem that’s gone away. Almost a year later, a not-insignificant portion of fire-affected residents are still without long-term housing, often because of financial difficulties, struggles to find rentals that will take their pets, or lack of disability-friendly rentals on the market.)

Then, there were the struggles with insurance. Thousands upon thousands of fire victims in Altadena, the Palisades, and Malibu had taken to GoFundMe to launch crowdfunding campaigns in the wake of their total losses. More followed as it became clear that even those with houses to go back to would face a long path toward ash, smoke, and lead remediation. Some of those GoFundMes met their ask almost immediately, while others struggled to draw even a few thousand dollars. The marketplace was overwhelmed with those in need, and with insurance money slow to come—or, in the case of so many who were under- or noninsured, not coming at all—people needed money. There were meals and clothes and combs and shoes aplenty flying around at charitable pop-ups, but it’s hard to accumulate too much stuff when you don’t know where you’ll be able to store it that night or even that year.

Those small acts of kindness provided relief from the community’s growing frustrations, whether with the insurance companies, with SoCal Edison whose equipment likely caused the fire, or with L.A. County, who it seems were negligent in evacuating residents on Altadena’s west side, even as the fire bore down on them. Online, many Angelenos used their potential platforms to encourage donations and share recovery resources, circulating spreadsheets outlining everything from available rentals to furniture-building manpower or a nice hot lasagna dinner. Some watchdogs called out landlords who were price gouging, hoping to shine a bright enough light that an owner would either change course or get in trouble with the county. Local realtors with large online followings—this being L.A., at the center of the influencer industry and a hotbed for real estate reality TV series—temporarily pivoted their social media presences to share their knowledge and information (and promote their messages and opinions on how the city can and should rebuild). Meanwhile, artists took tintype photos of residents among their burnt out lots and drew line portraits of the homes people had lost, and community members set up plant stands so those who were displaced could snag a new succulent to brighten up wherever they’d crash landed.

Design professionals and tradespeople gave what they could, too. Some Altadenans realized that thousands of Batchelder tiles were sitting on the facades of the now-exposed chimneys that dotted their neighborhoods like lighthouses. They called architecturally, historically, and preservation-minded friends to produce a de facto architectural survey of what was left in town and enlisted vintage tile experts to pull down all the tiles they could, in an effort to preserve them not just for posterity but for the homeowners who’d already lost so much. Upon hearing tales of woe from flummoxed homeowners confused by the rebuilding process and cost, local architects, builders, and project managers came together to help streamline the process. They created services like the Foothill Catalog, which offers preapproved plans for a range of houses inspired by what was already in Altadena, and the Altadena Collective, which both helps buyers find good builders and contractors to work with and aims to drive hard and soft building costs down through the power of group negotiation.

Others offered more niche expertise. Angel City Lumber, for instance, has been cutting down and storing damaged trees from across Altadena’s burn zone, hoping to give residents access to the wood that had been on their land. Local adaptive reuse architecture firm Omgivning’s Morgan Sykes Jaybush enlisted the help of a friend, Brad Chambers, to begin helping Altadena residents find and move historic, well-built homes from across L.A. that had been deemed teardowns by developers looking to build something bigger or more modern. And midcentury preservationists and architects started to step up with thoughts and theories about how they thought the historic homes they loved could be saved—if not from the Eaton and Palisades Fires, then from the ravages of future environmental catastrophes.

But even with all the moral support, media attention, and helping hands, what’s become increasingly clear is that, even though the first Altadena resident reportedly just moved back into his newly rebuilt home, there’s still a long, incredibly difficult route to recovery ahead. (At least one new home has popped up in the Palisades, as well.) In Altadena, developers and Powerball winners have been buying burnt out lots in order to build new homes that will reshape the community’s architectural character, and likely its population also. At the time of writing, the first page of Altadena listings on Zillow includes at least two renderings of modern farmhouse-style houses on sale for upward of $1.8 million alongside listings with photos of burnt out lots of varying sizes and prices. In November, Disney announced it was directing $5 million toward the rebuild of a local park that was destroyed in the Eaton Fire, prompting at least one Mouse-crazed blog to dub Altadena "a new Disney destination."

It’s been a long, mostly soul-crushing road, and despite news reports about permits getting issued and the relighting of Altadena’s historic Christmas Tree Lane or local restaurants like Betsy getting national acclaim and attention, when you drive around much of Altadena, it’s still a ghost town—and one with quite a sad story to tell. And across town, it seems no different.

When I run into old neighbors at hardware stores or sit down with parents from my kids’ school, inevitably the conversation will circle back to where we were on January 7, or what’s going on in all of our latest battles, whether with contractors, insurance companies, or (at least in Altadena’s case) SoCal Edison. We’ve become begrudgingly trauma bonded, learning lessons together out of necessity that appeared incredibly suddenly. And while we know that our town is ensured a new beginning, we also now know something else: that one day—with global climate changes and devastating weather disasters only continuing to rise—we’ll be called on to share what we’ve learned. We’ll be there, with spreadsheets, neighborhood organization guidelines, and coping techniques, but we’ll always wish we didn’t have to be.

Top photos by (clockwise from left): Jason LeCras, Meg Pinsonneault, courtesy Altadena Collective

Related Reading:

What Does the L.A. Midcentury Dream House Look Like in the Age of Fire?

Deciding to Rebuild After a Fire Is Just the First Step