A love letter to Altadena.

the eaton fire, a los angeles secret, a scorched fortune

At the scary height of Covid, my mom friend Rosanna and her boyfriend Kevin started making pizzas out of his side yard in Altadena and delivering it through a viral-safe hole in their fence. They called it Side Pie. Driving from our Highland Park house one night in 2020 to go pick up our first Side Pie pizza, we met, for the first time, Altadena. We took a sunset drive up Lake St., a wide boulevard that stretches up towards the vast and dramatic stretch of Echo Mountain and its range that envelops Altadena like a hug. What is this place? I marveled.

Rosanna whispered it like it was almost a secret. “Oh, Altadena. You’ve gotta discover Altadena. It’s LA’s best-kept secret. We love it here.”

I had lived in LA for a decade and knew absolutely nothing about this neighborhood, which was only 16 minutes from Highland Park. Many more trips to Side Pie and a brutal housing search a year later led us to offering on homes almost exclusively in Altadena. More and more of our friends and their families were moving there, there seemed to be a quiet drumbeat coming from that side of northeast LA. Every time we visited a house there, we fell more in love with the area. “It’s cooler there in the summers,” friends mused. “It’s a magical little place,” other friends confirmed, driving an hour each day just to take their kids to preschools there.

Finally, we found our house. It was a 1924 English Revival beauty who captivated us with her charm, her geometric magic attic portal, its multiple gables, its primary bedroom staircase, its enchanting, bright blue-painted pool, its peach and orange trees, its romantic Palladian windows, an afternoon golden light in the living room that harkened back to Renaissance-era Venice.

The day we got our keys (2022).

It wasn’t an easy start, but it became the most perfect home for us. And every day, we fell more in love with Altadena. When I split off from the 134 to the 210 West, on that magical heightened curve in the sky that signaled the end of LA traffic and the beginning of Altadena, dipping into a massive mountain bowl, I always exhaled a little romantic sigh of relief.

My kids learned to ride bicycles in the parking lot near our house. We walked to the post office, where I would run into Rowan’s teachers — “Rowan told me you’re going to Hawaii next week - he mentioned that he loves the grilled cheese there?” (lol). We walked Rowan to kindergarten and first grade every morning, passing by the same senior citizens waving from their little balconies, walking their little dogs. Zoe and I could walk to her ballet class a couple blocks away. I hosted frequent mom drink-ups at the Rancho Bar, a 1953 dive bar completely unlike any other bar in LA, where you could easily get very drunk for under $20, play and lose at pool, where there were always some boisterous neighborly guys to buy you a round of drinks and then leave you alone, just happy you were there.

Could walk home with one slipper, even.

Altadena is being mass-mourned right now because it’s unlike any other pocket of Los Angeles. Each neighborhood in the vastness of LA has its own identity, but I’ve never heard anyone speak about another neighborhood with the quiet reverence that Altadena gets. Everyone gets a sort of dreamy look on their face when they talk about it, even the ones that didn’t live there. I’ve lived in Los Feliz, West Hollywood, Glendale, and Highland Park, but nowhere in LA has felt remotely as exceptional as Altadena. I’m not mythologizing, I mean it when I say it really finally felt like home in a sprawling, tough city that can often give the impression that it cares a whit for you. There’s a reason our local market had hats made with embroidery that read “Altadreama.”

Starbucks has been unsuccessfully trying to open in Altadena for the last decade but thanks to its status as an unincorporated town and its staunch town hall defenders against corporate entities, it was able to maintain an independent identity that championed Small Business above all else. Altadena’s Facebook page is called “Beautiful Altadena,” and every day there was someone championing another ‘Dena local - local French bakers who would deliver fresh baked bread to your door, local restaurants whose best dishes were championed, people with spectacular home gardens who opened their homes to their neighborhood twice a year just so that Altadenans could wander around their property, enjoying their foliage.

Every morning, I click on another piece of Altadena news and my eyes well up with tears, not just for my lost home, my lost treasures, my lost sense of security and safety, but for this wonderful neighborhood that welcomed us newcomers with all the warmth of a grandparent greeting you after weeks or months away. So much has been lost, nearly all of it.

I’m going to miss the best breakfast burrito in all of Los Angeles, served blocks from my front door at the now-decimated Amara Kitchen, where I would always, always run into someone I know. The day we moved into our house I ran to Amara to pick up some lunch and I ran into someone who didn’t even live in Altadena. I hugged him, overzealous. “I can’t believe I’m running into someone I know on my first day in this town!” I exclaimed. It made me feel like I was going to be okay, there.

I’m going to miss Altadena Hardware, which is a deranged thing to say for someone who doesn’t know how to fix anything, basically. When we got the keys for our house, our neighbors down the block came over to say hello. “You’re going to love it in Altadena. We have the best hardware store in America.”

I laughed. “What could that possibly mean?” I asked, imagining well-organized rows of nails.

“You’ll see. They’re incredible.”

On our multiple runs to the hardware store upon move-in, I discovered what they meant immediately. You couldn’t turn a corner without an employee asking how they could help you, then guiding you through every step of how to use or select that thing. Kids were welcomed. There was an air of friendly cheerfulness that I’ve never experienced in a place with so many foreign instruments. When mixing paint for me, they brought my kids over to the machine and told them everything about it, even let them press the buttons. I always walked out the door with her words in echoing in my head. “It really is the best hardware store in America.” The Orlandini family-owned shop created something so special there, I always walked away feeling confident in my nascent ability to sand/shellack/paint/fix. Here is their GoFundMe, if you’d like to contribute. It all burned down, and all those wonderful employees who had a home in that shop are now financially out to sea.

I’m going to miss the local flower shop that let you print things for the post office next door for just a dollar, their little daughter playing in the back amongst her mom and dad’s flora.

I’m going to miss the RiteAid where my kids could get cheap ice cream and hear my voice talking to them through the speakers (a nice ongoing VO job I’ve had for the last couple years).

I’m going to miss the beautifully curated Minik Market, a tiny Turkish market that sold the best farm eggs I’ve ever tasted in my whole life. They just opened less than a year ago.

Hiking Eaton Canyon, being helped by a stranger (aka a new Altadena friend)

I’m going to miss seeing people casually ride horses around Altadena, like we were still in an 1870s cowboy town. I’m going to miss the classic French Toast at 69-year old Fox’s diner, up the street from us. The school where my daughter learned her letters and how to draw rainbows and stick-friends holding hands, up in flames, along with the chickens she chased around and petted every day at the school’s mountainside coop. The Eaton Canyon trails where I’d either hike with my kids or hike with other moms, agonizing about how horribly hard motherhood sometimes is.

9,500 structures, gone. Thousands of lives changed in an instant. It’s too much. Far too much.

Christmas Tree Lane was spared from the fire, somehow. A 104 year-old Christmas tradition, this kilometer-long stretch of oustretched cedar trees are lit with bulbs every December, cheerfully welcoming us home each winter night. Here are my children scootering down it, leaning into the wind and the euphoria that comes from letting go, letting the mountain take you where it will.