It’s late on Wednesday January 15, 2025, and I’m on a plane flying from Orlando FL to Burbank CA. I’m on my way to visit the town where I grew up, Altadena. Actually, I’m on my way to visit the remains of the town where I grew up.
In my mind it’s all still there. The places all exist. Of course, I’ve seen the photos and videos, so I know it’s all gone, but in my mind, right now, sitting on this plane, all those places that I recognize and have lived in still exist. The house on Boulder Rd, the house on Visscher Pl, Noyes Elementary, Eliot Junior High, Altadena Hardware, Webster’s, the Rancho are all still there and real in my mind, despite those photos and videos.
Some years ago, prior to going to my 10-year high school reunion, I was speaking with an old high-school friend that didn’t want to attend the reunion. We spoke about it at length and at the time I found his explanation baffling. He explained that he preferred to keep the memory of high school exactly as it was and if he saw our former classmates at the 10-year anniversary, the memory of them would be changed. He would ruin the perfectly preserved memory of all those people as they had existed 10 years ago.
Thinking about Altadena and what I’ll soon see and soon experience, I can’t help but think about memory and how we associate places, objects, and people with those memories. It’s a classic philosophical question that my brother and I would explore in the days to come.
Now it’s 9pm Pacific Time and I’m on the ground at Burbank airport waiting for my brother and mother to pick me up. It’s chilly, but life at this little regional LA airport is normal. I flew through Denver and there are people with skis and snowboards. When I get picked up we head south on the 5 and then east on the 134. Passing the 2 freeway we begin the long dark stretch of highway perched above Eagle Rock, Glendale, and the hip neighborhoods northeast of Los Angeles. This little hill creates the western boundary of the Arroyo Seco – home to the Rose Bowl – and it’s where I first start to smell the aftermath of the fire. The car vents are open and the smell of an extinguished campfire pours in. My brother and mother don’t notice.
The shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains is there, indiscernible in the distance. Its darkened silhouette is a good sign. If the fire still raged, we would now be able to see it instead of the broadcast tower lights on the ridge of the mountains floating mysteriously above the valley. We make our way eastward across Pasadena to my brother’s house which sits just southeast of the Eaton Fire’s eastern limits. The winds swept the fire westward through Altadena and although he was evacuated, his home was spared and is still occupiable. My mother’s house too is intact, but it’s still located in the fire zone. The rest of the family greets us when we arrive. Just two weeks ago we were in this house together, ringing in the New Year. Now we gather around the dining room table for a late nightcap and then off to bed.
On Thursday January 16 my mother and I get in her car. We drive west along New York drive, skirting the closed area that extends from our right up into the foothills above.
Along the way, at every entry to the quarantined area, there are national guard, sheriff deputies, and police. Beyond them we can see swarms of cranes, electrical workers, building inspectors, natural gas company vehicles, and ground crews. Something not widely reported but should not come as a surprise is that the high winds that made the fire so widespread and destructive, also knocked down trees and branches. In addition to fire and utility concerns, there is a great deal of debris to be cleared.
The days of warm Santa Ana winds were always a fond memory of growing up in Altadena. The smog would be pushed out to the sea revealing crisp blue skies and clear air. Dead leaves and branches would be swept from yards into the complex storm drainage system that protects the homes from flooding. The Santa Anas were always invigorating. Now the leaves and branches that have been left in their wake are potential new hazards and crews are working to remove them and check them for still glowing embers.
My mother and I continue westward toward the fire’s western-most edge, Lincoln Ave. Time and again we encounter work crews and I can’t help thinking about the logistics of getting a construction site ready. Our projects frequently involve developing raw, never-before built parcels of land and beyond the jurisdictional development regulations, there are logistical questions that need to be answered before we can begin. Typically, these questions will center on utilities such as water, sewer, and electricity, but they can also involve site access, soils conditions, staging of materials, and other minutia that affect how the building is designed and how the contractor will ultimately build it.
The crews that are working beyond the security barrier are reconstructing the systems while simultaneously investigating their condition and identifying faults. I imagine the process to be frustratingly recursive as the resolution of one issue probably reveals another two or three. There are probably large segments of the system that are out-dated, but replacing them will cause cascading needs for upgrades up and down stream. And in these moments of restoration one is frequently faced with a choice between the expedience of simply replacing like with like or upgrading with its potential for additional costs and longer durations. Many times I’ve sat in meetings where that choice is posed with professional consultation to the project owner for a decision. In these moments it can be immensely refreshing to have an owner that is empowered to make decisions without consulting a board or team. I can only imagine what bureaucracy is making decisions on this project.
It can also be easy to think about these restoration efforts as ending at a single property’s boundary, but the fire has damaged some of these systems far upstream. Altadena gets its water from a collectively owned utility company called Rubio Canyon that pulls water from the mountain streams and rivers above Altadena. Every homeowner owns a share in the water company. Now the area has been advised that the water is not safe to drink and looking at aerial photos, it’s apparent that some of the water facilities dotted around the area have been severely damaged. The water has been made undrinkable at the source and we’re advised that boiling will not remove the pollutants. I imagine flushing a city’s entire water system and wonder at its logistics.
My mother and I reach the northwestern limit of the fire near Lincoln and Altadena Dr. We won’t be getting to my mother’s house today and so we return to my brother’s. As dinner approaches we gather in the dining area and before long everyone is sharing their story of evacuation. My nephew was out with friends and suddenly cut the evening short to return home. My mother, with 50 years of experience living in Altadena, waited at home with confidence the fire would be stopped near the edge of the wilderness and never make it to her door. Only when the trees in her yard caught fire did she gather her things and head out. My brother shares that in those frenzied 15 or 20 minutes between the decision to leave and the departure, decisions about what to take became frantic and confusing.
He and his wife laugh as they share that during their preparations they suddenly fixated on some quilts that her sister had made for their sons some years ago. Their house is over-populated with objects her sister has crafted, gifts from family, and mementos of their wedding, but in that moment it was these quilts that became the single most important thing to be packed and all other efforts were stopped as they tore through the house looking for them.
My mother commented that she left her house in such a rush that she has only the clothes she is wearing. She thought to grab her jewelry but not the family photos of her Danish ancestors. Those photos are the only copies. She grabbed the mortgage papers for the house, but not the many other personal artifacts in the home.
Somewhere in my Florida home I have a small container of soil that I collected at the top of Mt Fuji many years ago. It’s tucked away in a drawer somewhere. I almost never look at it but when I come across it, I’m reminded of that trip and all its particular details. I think I’d remember that trip just as well without that object, but it seems possible that it is in fact the act of occasionally seeing it that causes me to revisit the memory and refresh it. Somehow, I’m confident that if there was a fire in my neighborhood and I had 20 minutes to get out of the house, that container of soil would be left behind.
Working in commercial architecture we often focus on the product we’re delivering, the profitability of that product, meeting the specific needs of commercial tenants, managing the project budget effectively for the client, and trying to squeeze some predictable and formulaic design features into the project. We rarely ask ourselves how this place will create memories and I chuckle to myself as I imagine sitting down with a financially motivated developer to discuss how their project will create memories.
But places do create memories. We may not be conscious of their creation at the time, but place is a part of memory. The home where I spent my high school years in Altadena was an architectural gem of classical features. Years after my family moved out it was owned by a location scout for a Hollywood production company and was frequently featured in films and television shows. In recent days the county has posted photos of the house’s remains online. Now it’s just a spindle of a chimney rising from an ashy, crumbling pile of framing and pipes. An object, a place that was definitively part of my history has been removed permanently from existence in the world. I still remember watching Live Aid on TV there and camping in the backyard with friends. There are many other memories that are still clear to me. Could there be other memories that are lost because I can never return? How will I ever know or remember?
Friday muddles by with little change in the state of affairs. My brother is working from home and I too am logged into my office. My sister in law is at work and the boys are still on Winter break. Late that afternoon, LA County disaster management announces two more areas are accessible. The area east of Allen, bounded by New York Dr on the south and Altadena Dr on the north are downgraded from Evacuation Order to Evacuation Warning. At the intersection of Altadena and Allen we would be less than a mile from my mother’s house. We resist the impulse to immediately drive into the area and decide to wait until morning.
Saturday morning the sky is overcast and temperatures are in the 40s. The forecast is for clear skies by 9am and warming temperatures as the day wears on. Once again, my mother and I head up the hills into Altadena. We’re turned away at the intersection of Sierra Madre and New York Dr. A string of enormous utility trucks carrying massive power poles are staging along Sierra Madre and slowly moving past a sheriff’s truck onto the New York extension. It’s the side of construction we rarely see.
I’ve worked on a number of large, all concrete buildings and the slabs and walls are always poured at night. The logistics of a continuous loop of large concrete trucks circulating between the nearest concrete plant and the construction site is greatly simplified and more manageable when public roads are empty. This process of reestablishing large portions of urban infrastructure would seem to be no different. Above ground power poles have burned to the ground or been blown over. The wires strung between them also evaporated in the scorching heat of the fire. Transformers that step the power down from the high voltage lines to the more manageable voltages used in houses have been destroyed in the fire. Simply moving the materials into place is a massive undertaking by itself. The subsequent installation and testing within a disaster zone posing a whole new set of challenges beyond those normally faced by those installing high voltage.
Turned away at our first point of entry, we head west around Pasadena High School where the local farmers’ market appears to be happening despite the destruction in the hills above. At Altadena Dr we head north and for the first time in over a week we’re allowed to cross New York Dr and head further north. Eaton Canyon is to our right and the houses to our left seem largely intact. It’s less than ½ a mile north of New York Dr that we encounter another sheriff’s blockade. This time we’re able to speak with them and mother turns on her sympathetic elder character. The female officer that greets us has a face of deeply sympathetic understanding when my mother explains that she simply needs to get some more clothes from her home and allows us to pass. The gracious admonitions to be careful and not stay up there are offered before we move on.
We’re on the curving portion of Altadena Drive that follows the rim of the canyon. On our right, homes once sat with magnificent views into the canyon and the San Gabriel mountains. In the early 80s my father considered buying one of those houses. We always jokingly referred to it as The View with a House. The San Gabriel Mountains had burned just a few years prior. I remember being 7 or 8 years old and standing in front of our house on Boulder Road and watching the fire on the hills. With the memory of those fires still fresh, both insurers and my father were less inclined toward owning a property right on the canyon.
Altadena Drive curves away from the canyon and bends toward its more westerly run to Lake Ave. Here, just one or two rows of houses away from the canyon, there are slightly fewer houses burned. Our primary charge as a licensed architect is to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public in the design of buildings and there is a litany of standardized strategies built into the codes and regulations. But another necessary skill is the ability to think about how elements like wind, rain, fire, smoke, and earth will behave when they meet a building. On the outside we drive water away from a building’s exterior with slopes, drains, and other tools and on the inside we work to isolate fires with rated walls, floors, and a variety of technology designed to keep fire from spreading within a building. As we’re passing burned out homes on our right and seemingly unaffected homes on our left, I can’t help but speculate that the wall of Eaton Canyon and that first row of houses effectively created a ramp for heated embers, carried by the wind to fly up and over this second and third row of houses and land deep into Altadena.
At the intersection of Altadena and Allen we are met by a determined cadre of National Guardsmen who advise that the area is closed and we must turn back. Foiled once again, we turn back to my brother’s home.
Later that evening, the Watch Duty app shows that another area of Altadena been opened. From its limits we would be just 2000 feet from my mother’s home. Despite suspicions that we will once again be turned away, we plan to head up the following morning.
Before we get on the road Sunday morning Mom’s friends start calling. The area including her house is open to residents if their house is still standing. It’s not being highly publicized, but with an ID we should be allowed through. A low-key reenactment of last Tuesday’s evacuation seems to be triggered as we find long sleeve shirts, gloves, N95 dust masks, durable shoes, bottled water, and try to plan for every eventuality.
My brother and sister-in-law join us and before long the four of us are driving up Allen to Altadena drive. We are once again met by Sheriffs and National Guard, but it seems they’re expecting us this time. My mother passes over her ID, they radio in the address and after some back and forth, sure enough, we’re allowed into the no-go zone. We are travelling west on Altadena Drive from Allen. My mother’s house is just a couple thousand feet ahead near Holliston. Along this stretch it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that every house has been burned until just a husk is remaining. A gabled end wall or a free-standing chimney are all that’s left in most cases.
When I was a child, I would walk this way to school from our home on Boulder road to Noyes Elementary School (now Aveson School) at Allen and Altadena. In recent years, as an adult, this stretch of road was often used for a morning constitutional. Some houses I remember. That one with giant weird staircase in front didn’t make it, but the weird stair survived. The one that’s been under construction for years, that one survived. The Walsh Residence from the 90s television series 90210 is still standing but all around it is devastation. Many lots that are now just occupied by remains of a house are strikingly unfamiliar despite having been driven or walked by hundreds of times. There are no specific memories for that specific place, but as a piece of the fabric of the town, the absence is jarring.
Mom’s house is intact. There are fire debris everywhere and the backyard has been scorched, but the house seems intact. The stench of a refrigerator without power for 10 days fills the home. It’s as cold inside as it is outside. The furniture and decorations scream out that the house is occupied and yet the cold and putrid smells simultaneously tell us that it is vacant. My mother had demurred the call for evacuation even after the power had gone out and had set a candle next to her favorite chair along with a book and a blanket. They were still there when we arrived.
Many times I’ve walked through vacant spaces after a tenant has abandoned their lease and the landlord has taken possession. Typically the power will have been turned off and the air conditioning will not have been running for days or possibly even weeks. It so quickly becomes apparent how dependent modern buildings are on climate control systems. Moisture creeps into the building and quickly converts to mold in warmer conditions. The moisture barriers and their professional installation that are needed in construction are often the piece that is skimped on since it won’t be seen when the building is finished.
We were advised that items in the fridge can be considered material losses for insurance purposes, so we record the emptying of the fridge with a narrative naming everything we pull out and put in the trash. Rewatching that video later reveals an entertaining segment where I’m off camera wretching and my sister-in-law is saying, “Take that outside! Take it outside!”
When that chore is complete, we explore the backyard and neighboring properties. Clearly there was fire in the backyard. The ground is scorched and the dense shrubbery that lined the perimeter of the yard is gone. On one side of the yard, the fence has been partially burned away and we can pass through to the west. This home is intact, but beyond it there is simply wreckage as far as we can see. A neighbor to the rear calls out to us and explains that they did not evacuate and had used garden hoses to put out small fires that developed around them, including some in our yard. We expressed our gratitude and resisted the urge to tell them they were fools for staying behind.
Power to the property is run above ground on power poles along the rear property line and we can see that the feed to the house has been cut. Not professionally disconnected at the meter, but cut with a tool about halfway between the house and the power pole. Examining things further, we find that the power meter has also been removed. To be sure, the electrical panel and equipment at my mother’s house is dated. Perhaps the meter required an upgrade and this one of those downstream upgrades. We speculate that a more likely explanation is that some industrious (and foolhardy) citizen will reconnect the power if the opportunity presents itself and removing the meter is just another deterrent being used while working through the restoration process.
It’s widely known that electrical California utilities have been blamed and found guilty in the past for causing wildfires. In the days following the fire and with scant evidence available, there was unbridled speculation that the energy company was to blame. The consequence of this has been the utility’s implementation of heavy handed policies to prevent further incidents that include de-energizing large areas when high winds occur. Perhaps this disconnection and removal of the meter are a part of such a strategy.
We finish up at my mother’s and bundle into the car. Instead of immediately heading back to my brother’s we head west, toward Altadena’s modest central business district and the home that I once owned on Marcheta St. Turning down Maiden Lane, the unrelenting power of this fire storm is made apparent. Churches, schools, and home after home have been leveled. The first home that I ever owned is just a pile of debris and every single house as far as we can see in any direction is gone.
Trying to comprehend the extent of this damage seems akin to trying to comprehend the size of infinity or explaining the endlessness of the universe. Standing in the middle of Marcheta St and looking at the devastation in every direction, my mind starts to swim thinking about the logistics of rebuilding all these homes. All the people that have been and will be affected from owners to insurance agents to contractors and building inspectors. The breadth and extent of the damage we’re seeing is more than physical places and the emotional toll their destruction has wrought, but it also the shockwave of impacts that the restoration will have on so many lives for each of some 9,400 structures. It feels as big as the entire universe.
We make a loop through the business district before starting home. Most of the local businesses are destroyed and Lake Ave is busy with police, firefighters, and national guardsmen. We don’t linger but instead start heading east and decide to stop by the home in which we lived as small children on Boulder Road. Growing up on the aptly named Boulder Rd was like a storybook tale. It’s just one block long and large boulders line the street. The houses were of many different styles and seemed to all bundle up against each other. Almost every house on this street had a family with children and as we ease down the steep incline at the street’s north end we begin naming them off by the names of the children that had lived there. Conditions here are the same as Marcheta. Every house, large and small, has been burned to the ground.
Our family hasn’t lived here for over 40 years but there is a vivid feeling of familiarity and attachment. My brother and I walk about halfway down the driveway. “It seems smaller than I remember it,” comments my brother. I agree. From here we can see clear to the back of the yard, a distance I remember from my youth as being endless.
Heading south on Boulder and then east on Braeburn brings us past one family friend’s home after another, many destroyed, a few still standing. Slowly we find our way back to Allen and head silently south toward my brother’s home.
One potential upside to this tragedy has been reconnecting with lots of old friends and acquaintances. I reach out to an old high school classmate who had been practicing architecture in northern California for many years. She’s trying to support her friends and family members in Altadena that need design services. I speak with a college professor who is a well known architect in Los Angeles. He lives in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles and was not directly impacted by the fire, but we note that he’s not far from Griffith Park and it seems plausible that something similar could happen there. I get in touch with a friend that I grew up with that is now a successful writer. Having grown up in Altadena, many of his fellow writers have reached out to him for insight and brought him along on press-pass led expeditions into the no-go zone in the days immediately after the fire. Still another friend is a grammy winning musician that lost his home in Altadena. He's as disoriented as all of us and has just been performing as much as possible to try to raise funds and awareness.
Everyone has started their own complex path toward the restoration of their personal lives. Each person on their individual journey that will somehow, in the years to come, recreate Altadena.
Later that evening, after dinner, I ask my brother (the philosophy major) about the ship of Theseus, the classic philosophical thought problem that asks if an object is still the same object if you replace all its parts over a long period of time. My instinctive response is no, but I’m thinking of an ancient artifact. An ancient ship for example that was raised from the bottom of the sea after sleeping on the seabed for perhaps 300 years and put in a museum. The boards are slowly rotting and for the sake of the museum’s exhibit, planks and parts are periodically replaced. It seems to me that once every part has been replaced, what you have is a replica. The distinguishing feature of this example being that the original ship was once used by Theseus. Theseus came in contact with this ship.
Philosophers have been knocking this idea around for a while and so it’s no surprise that my brother is able to present a counter argument. What if you buy a house and one year, replace the ceilings. The next year replace the floors. Next the roof, and so on until within a few years, everything has been replaced. The house is the same form, same address, and it is still the home where you live. In this instance, my instinct is that the object is still the same, even after all these changes. The aspect of continual occupation and the lack of a significant historical element seem relevant to me.
It seems to take on a different quality when instead of changing a little at a time, the house is burned to the ground and everything is replaced all at once with all new pieces. Even if the pieces as assembled are the exact shape, size, material and form as the original it strikes me as a different thing. The floors won’t creak in the same places and that one window suddenly doesn’t stick anymore.
I can’t help but imagine someone in this situation would inevitably have an old friend stop by who was somehow unaware that the home had burned down and been rebuilt as an exact replica. The visitor would be none the wiser that this house was in fact a replica of the original. Would the visitor perceive that the house was different? Maybe the visitor would feel the difference somehow. Or maybe the house would somehow “slip-up” and reveal its secret. I imagine the host quietly watching and waiting to see if the visitor would notice. And maybe, if the visitor didn’t notice that the house was a replica, then perhaps it isn’t a replica after all.
The conversation spins frustratingly around and around. We briefly discuss Umberto Eco’s Travels in HyperReality, a book that looks precisely at the cultural value and validity of structures that are compelling replicas of famous buildings. If the Old North Church that’s built at Forest Lawn Mortuary in Los Angeles is an accurate replica, why isn’t it as historically significant as the actual Old North Church in Boston? It seems you are not too far from simply saying a sequined glove was worn by Michael Jackson and is therefore as significant as a sequined glove that was actually worn by Michael Jackson.
The exercise seems fruitless and never ending because we’re searching for a definitive answer, a judgement and there’s always a counter argument. The real question we’re trying to answer is if Altadena will still be Altadena after its recovery. Altadena’s architecture has always been distinctly without recognizable consistency, but within the mixture of ranch houses, craftsman style homes, Spanish haciendas, and modernist builds, there was a consistent sprinkling of unexpected delights. Delights like a small, wrought iron gate at the end of a walkway, a peculiar hand-crafted sconce, or a meticulously carved front door. These objects and details inspired the creation of new ones and kept Altadena’s buildings from drifting toward stamped McMansion architecture. It doesn’t seem too far of a stretch to say that this type of physical environment attracts and begets a particular type of person and that those people, in turn, create the place and the history of the place.
The real effort that needs to occur is helping folks get back to Altadena. Working with developers for so many years and seeing the juggling act of controlling the land, getting plans and permits, securing bank loans, signing tenant leases, and getting all those things to culminate at exactly same time, I am sometimes surprised that anything gets built. It can be difficult for well funded developers with a supporting team of professionals to get something built even in ideal circumstances. Now there are literally thousands of people that have only the slightest notion of how to get a building built stepping into a complex process that will be frustrated by a litany of characters. Some of whom may be bad actors.
It’s a big project made up of a lot of little projects. It’s going to take patience and perseverance by those on the ground and charity from those less affected. Altadena will be back. Not tomorrow, but eventually, parcel by parcel, the people that love it and have made it that strange little rural community wedged between the wilds of Los Angeles and the wilds of the Angeles National Forest will put it back together. It has to be done. There will simply be too much of us missing without it.