Altadena

In recent days we’ve been reading about Altadena, a community between Pasadena and the San Gabriel Mountains that has been badly damaged by the Eaton fire in LA. Before the fire, the town had been small and charming and neighborly. We know, because we lived there for ten years.   

Yvonne and I, recently married, had just bought a condo in a crowded section of West LA. After a few months, we grew tired of it and began looking for another place to live. Our condo had high ceilings, which appealed to a tall member of the LA Lakers, who thought he might like to buy it.

While our basketball player considered his options, we house-hunted. Somehow we were steered across town to Pasadena and then farther north to Altadena, where we found not a condo but a house—a real house with views of the LA basin and, on clear days, the ocean. You can see the house here. We decided to buy it.

Moving in, we explored the downtown. We discovered the first nine holes of the local golf course and learned that our house had been built on one of the last nine. We met neighbors and, putting on our boots, hiked up trails to the top of Mount Wilson, where Albert Einstein had viewed the stars in 1931. In the years since, Altadena had been full of famous people, including Zane Grey the Western novelist, physicist Richard Feynman, and dozens of jazz musicians.  

Was there wind and fire? Yes, there was. Perhaps three or four times, flames burst out on the hills above our neighborhood, though we never had to evacuate. And I vividly recall a hundred-mile-an-hour wind, which I decided to investigate by opening our front door… and seeing a set of lawn furniture fly by in a perfectly horizontal line. I closed the door.  

We spent the first ten years of our marriage in Altadena and loved it. We ate Mexican food at Burrito Express and pizza at Domenico’s. We took long walks with our friends the Beans. We spent every New Years with the Starbirds, playing charades at night and going to the Rose Parade the next morning. And now, years later, some of those people and memorable locations are threatened. Many of the homes, including those on both sides of ours, have burned to the ground, though our house has survived, so far at least. 

We will go back to Altadena, though we don’t know when. The place will be very different, I fear.