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They gathered on the street that had been their home until the firestorm blasted through west Altadena, forcing them to flee and destroying all but the memories.
Of the cat that routinely followed a dog around the neighborhood.
Of the kids playing in front yards and the street before growing up and moving on.
Of the clip-clop sound of horses hoofing by.
Of the actress who wandered the streets, head down, memorizing lines for her next performance.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
Of the music from Robert’s homemade instruments, the sizzle from Julio’s backyard grill and the Sunday gatherings at Steve and Lily’s yellow farmhouse.
We measure the losses from the Palisades and Eaton fires in numbers — the thousands of structures destroyed, the billions of dollars in damages and the lives lost. But the casualties include some of the things we often take for granted: the rhythms and routines that fill each day, the comings and goings of neighbors, the histories of the places we call home.
Anthony Ruffin and his wife Jonni Miller, social workers in the business of housing the homeless, became homeless themselves on Jan. 8. A short time after evacuating their two-bedroom house on West Palm Street, their block was incinerated.
Ruffin, a longtime friend, told me a week or so after the inferno that he and his displaced neighbors on West Palm Street had established a text chain in the early days of their shock and grief. Although they’re scattered now, their lodgings temporary and their futures uncertain, they wanted to keep the neighborhood together, in a manner of speaking.
A dozen of those neighbors — mixed by race, age and income — returned to their block on Feb. 15 to talk about what life was like before the fires and whether they intend to rebuild. Whether it’s possible to recreate the community they treasured.
“When this all happened, I was like, ‘Where’s our next Altadena?’” Monica Koskey said. “Maybe we should all just go and make a new Altadena if this is going to take so long. And I don’t know where that is.”
West Palm Street extends east and west above Altadena Drive, not far from where the greater metropolis runs up against the mountains. The slopes of the San Gabriels rise sharply, fire-scarred at lower elevations but majestic still, in stark contrast to the flattened wasteland below.
On the stretch of Palm between North Olive and Glen avenues, all but a few of the houses are gone, replaced by a row of rectangular ashtrays. Charred trees are dead or dying, some with blackened fruit, some with charcoal limbs clawing at the sky.
We gathered in the backyard of Koskey’s property and sat on patio furniture next to a conspicuously lush green lawn and a garage that was still intact, as if the fire had been a rumor. But a few feet away, the house looked like it had been taken out by a missile, the chimney rising like a tombstone over the debris of a structure that had stood for a century.
“This was a Janes,” Koskey said, referring to the architect Elisha P. Janes, who built dozens of English-style cottages with gabled roofs, as well as some Spanish-style homes, in Altadena between 1924 and 1926.
A 100th anniversary party had been in the works, said Koskey, a speech pathologist, and Janes homeowners whose houses burned are now sharing notes on the feasibility of rebuilding in the same style.
Directly across the street from the remains of Koskey’s house is the rubble of what had been the house owned by Lily Knight, a film, TV and stage actress who is convinced it’s easier to memorize a script while on foot, and her husband Steve Hofvendahl. He’s an actor, too, as well as a master gardener and chief caretaker of what was a backyard paradise, with dozens of fruit trees.
When they moved in 25 years ago, the soil was rich and trees were prospering, so Hofvendahl planted more, and more, and then more, turning his yard into an orchard. He went from standard citrus, apricot and avocado to a more exotic collection, adding finger limes, valentine pummelos, jaboticaba, cherimoya and pawpaw.
It was way more fruit than the two of them could eat, so they began making baskets for friends and neighbors, and at harvest time, they hosted a porch market with homemade jams and scones along with all the produce. Miller described it as the “neighborhood hub.”
Robert Hilton, a retired art teacher with an interest in African and Indian music, would wander over with a lute-like stringed instrument, or one of his other homemade instruments, to provide the entertainment.
“He would cast a spell, and it really defined the space,” Knight said.
When Ruffin and Miller got married, Knight and Hofvendahl strung lights across their yard and hosted the reception. “The people from the block came over and celebrated with us,” Ruffin said.
On Chinese New Year, Knight and Hofvendahl would take a basket of fruit to their nextdoor neighbors, Aimin Li and Shigang Xiong, who met decades ago in medical school in China and now work in medical research. Half an hour later, Li would return the favor, delivering homemade dumplings.
“They had a dumpling-making party” for neighbors, Koskey recalled, with Li and Xiong, hosting the affair in their backyard. Li had wanted to pass her skills on to her friends. Toss the flour, roll the dough, stuff it with meat and shrimp. And with vegetables for Hilton, a vegan.
“They all got the hang of it,” Li said.
One lesson of the fires? Your possessions can “go poof in a second,” Knight said, adding: “These connections we all share — that’s what the real stuff is.”
Maxwell May and his wife, Lauren Ward, moved onto the block about two and a half years ago after taking some walks to check out the vibe. They found a Janes house in walking distance from May’s favorite coffee shop, and the neighborhood reminded him of Mt. Washington, where he grew up.
“Everyone was walking around and saying hi and stopping and talking for five or 10 minutes, and I think that’s what really spoke to us,” May explained. He’s a tech in the self-driving auto industry, and Ward is a TV and film costume designer. “We wanted to come here and be a part of it.”
Hilton, who’s lived on West Palm Street for 50 years, said that when he moved in, the neighborhood was predominantly Black. Ruffin and his family came in at about the same time, choosing west Altadena because Black families were excluded from many other neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area.
As property values rose through the decades, Hilton said, west Altadena changed. “We have people from all ethnicities and backgrounds.”
Despite all the comings and goings, Ruffin said, he still knows residents up and down the street, just as he did when he popped into neighbors’ homes as a kid, or wandered into someone’s backyard to grab a piece of fruit off a tree. The familiarity makes him feel safe on the block, Ruffin said, “and protective of it.”
Not that residents gathered in the street every morning to sing “Kumbaya.” Some were inclined to simply wave or nod, but maintained their privacy. And Altadena was not without its problems, Koskey said.
“You still hear gunshots, right? So it’s not like the safest place you could possibly live,” she said, but for her, the positives outweigh the negatives. “It doesn’t feel like there’s the racial tension in Altadena. You look into people’s eyes and you don’t feel [it]. I think that’s really rare and … it was really important to raise my son in a place like this.”
Knight echoed that sentiment.
“I think this is what the world needs a lot more of right now,” she said. “A sense that we’re all in it together, and we’re going to pull each other through.”
On the evening of Jan. 7, when the fire was still a couple of miles to the east, Li and Xiong checked in with Knight and Hofvendahl, who told them they should gather up their valuables. They hugged each other, and the Chinese couple went home to pack passports, diplomas and photographs.
At midnight, Knight called a few of her neighbors to tell them the fire was closing in. Everyone got out safely, but the houses went down like dominoes, except for Hilton’s and a couple of others.
“I’m super angry,” said Miller, who has lots of questions, as do many of the others.
Why were so many county firefighters pulled away to the Palisades fire? Why did it take so much longer for evacuation warnings to reach the lower-income neighborhood of west Altadena, where all 17 of the Eaton fire deaths occurred? Why wasn’t the westward march of the fire anticipated sooner, and why did so many homes burn without fire crews ever arriving?
It may take years to get the answers, and it may take years to clear the waste and rebuild. Most of the residents I met with said they want to return, but the paperwork, planning, financial considerations and uncertain timeline are exhausting. And given the climate change realities that fueled this fire, will they be safe, and will they be able to afford the cost of insuring their new homes?
“It’s a trade-off, because we love the mountains, but then it’s a very extreme fire risk area,” said Bryan Martinez, a real estate agent who lives between Knight and Hofvendahl on one side, Miller and Ruffin on the other.
Knight and Hofvendahl, whose home was such a key part of the ambiance so treasured by neighbors, are undecided. They’re approaching 70, Knight said, and it would take years to grow another orchard. The farmhouse they adored, built before World War II, was made of wood, and Hofvendahl suspects new building codes would probably prohibit that.
“I think we’re torn, because we love this neighborhood and we love all these people,” Knight said, but they have a lot to sort through before committing to a return.
Ruffin has no doubts. He’s determined to recreate the look and the layout of the house he loved, and to begin his days in the front yard again, listening to the birds and gazing up at the mountains. Already, there are sprigs of green growth in that yard.
May said he and Ward are staying nearby at her parents’ house, but he visits West Palm every day, “just to drive by and feel like I’m home again.”
I asked Julio Partida, who works in construction and lives next door to Ruffin and Miller, what he misses most.
He answered with a single word:
“Everything.”
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