A year after the Eaton fire, the loss of Altadena is still raw

"I rarely told people I was from a small town called Altadena. There was no easy way to describe my hometown. It didn't fit any of the expectations of Southern California. It wasn't a tourist destination like Hollywood, or glamorous like Beverly Hills, or beachy like Malibu or Venice. We didn't have our own lingo and mall culture, like they did in the Valley. We didn't have the Rose Bowl or a world-famous parade like Pasadena."

"Altadena was where people raised chickens before it was trendy, where no one batted an eye at the neighbors with a pet dingo, or thought much about the so-called haunted road said to defy gravity. Some people lived off the grid up against the mountains and used their own generators for electricity. Others were engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab and professors at Caltech and teachers and artists and plumbers and everyday commuters to downtown Los Angeles."

Altadena sat near Pasadena but did not match typical Southern California stereotypes. The town lacked major tourist draws, glamour, beach culture, or valley mall identity. Residents kept chickens, owned unusual pets, and told local legends about a gravity-defying road. Housing ranged from off-grid mountain homes with generators to neighbors employed as engineers, professors, teachers, artists, plumbers, and commuters to Los Angeles. Multigenerational families and immigrants from the Jim Crow South, the Middle East, and Latin America formed a diverse community. A fast-moving wildfire destroyed much of the town, killing at least 19 people and burning approximately 9,000 structures.

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