Black Altadena Residents Mourn What They Lost In The LA Wildfires & Try To Rebuild

Blair Imani Ali has lived close to Altadena, the historic Black neighborhood of Los Angeles, all her life. When I asked which Altadena landmark she was most concerned about losing in the Eaton wildfires that have now torched over 7,000 homes, schools, and churches, her answer was surprising: a funeral home.

Woods-Valentine Mortuary, one of the oldest Black-owned businesses in the area, is where the homegoing services were held for Ali’s grandma, Mama Brown. Ali, who is a Pasadena-based education activist, shared that during her grandma’s funeral last year, the family skipped over one of Mama Brown’s final requests: for the hymnal “Blessed Assurance” to be sung.

“For whatever reason, we were stressed out, and we were about to conclude the funeral service. It was the final sermon, and there was an earthquake,” Ali told Unbothered.“The earthquake epicenter was in Altadena. And so we were like, ‘Okay, Mama Brown, we hear you. My bad.’ So we looped back around and sang that,” she said.

From Ali’s perspective, this story is a quintessential Black ‘Dena story: eco-conscious, family orientated, spiritually vibrant, and lively — even in death. It’s from this cistern of immortality that the community now must glean from, as thousands of Black residents wade through ashes of their paradise lost. 

Altadena, an enchanting community nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, is a bastion of Black homeownership, with 8 out of 10 Black residents owning their homes — double the national rate. During the Civil Rights era, Altadena was one of few Los Angeles neighborhoods that were open to Black buyers. At the time, most of the city’s land was subject to discriminatory redlining practices that kept qualified Black lenders from securing credit to mortgage homes. Altadena stood as a promised land flowing with milk and honey for Black families looking to build generational wealth.

Regina Major, an educator and substitute teacher for Pasadena Unified School District, said the home she lost last week in the ongoing Eaton blaze has been in her family since childhood. Just last December, Major hosted a huge 101st birthday extravaganza for her father in that same home. Major said during the celebration, one of her longtime neighbors came up to her, almost in tears, saying, “I can't believe I'm sitting here on the same porch as back in the day when I was a little boy.” That porch is now gone. 

The 62-year-old told Unbothered that sweet moments of shared history are commonplace in the tight-knit community of 42,000 souls.“I guess that's the kind of thing, there's a lot of ties to each other and memories like that,” Major said. Major evacuated to a hotel in Arcadia with her dad on Tuesday, January 7th, when the hurricane-force Santa Ana windstorms knocked out power and started to pick up and blow things off of the roof of her house. “Because [my dad is] an elder and has a walker and a lot of needs, I thought, let me get him to a hotel outside of town until the winds die down, and we'll come back."

By 5 a.m. Wednesday morning, Major said her neighbor called her and delivered devastating news. Having barely escaped her own home fire, the neighbor told Major the entire neighborhood had been lit up in flames. At the time of publication, Major said her father’s house, which is around the corner from hers, is still standing. But her house, along with the rest of the block, is destroyed.

As Major mentally wades through the rubble, she mourns irreplaceable treasures, like her vast refrigerator magnet collection from her world travels (her favorite is a replica of The Great Wall she got during a 2015 trip to China), her cherished Disneyland merchandise, a fancy family bible, and her Uncle’s military flag that she inherited when her mom died.

Markay Lewis, an L.A. based music manager, told Unbothered he is also grieving losing family heirlooms, particularly a special keyboard that belonged to his grandfather that was lost when the Eaton fires disintegrated his rental. Lewis said he settled in Altadena in 2024 after years of being displaced by the Covid pandemic in 2020. Lewis bounced between temporary housing solutions for years before he was finally able to secure a spot from a family member’s landlord in the conveniently located scenic suburb of Altadena. 

“I'm the person that hates to be driving hours to get to work, and to be able to get downtown within minutes makes it awesome,” Lewis said. But he would only be settled in his new home briefly before wildfires ripped through his rental on the one-year-anniversary of his move.

“I didn't get any warning to leave, to evacuate. I left on my own cognizance,” the 39-year-old musician told Unbothered. “The only interaction that I've had with the police is them trying to keep us away from our homes, rather than protecting our home from the fire. No one sprayed water. There were no sirens; there was no direction of where to go to evacuate, which ways were not safe. There were no closures, no emergency broadcasting system,” Lewis said. 

Now, Lewis says he is looking for an attorney to help him bring to justice any local and state officials that may have failed to administer timely alerts to residents about the impending danger to their lives and homes. And Lewis is not the only Altadena resident lawyering up. 

SoCal Edison, LA’s electrical utility, is named in a January 13 lawsuit that claims the Eaton inferno was sparked by a transmission line fire. While local officials are still investigating the trigger point of what is now considered one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history, the city-wide whodunnit has some residents pointing fingers at political negligence, others, lackadaisical attitudes towards climate-change, and some, the societal abandonment of indigenous land management practices. 

The multi-layered answer could be tied up in research and legal-tape for years, if not decades. So for some residents, the only productive direction to go in is towards a hazy future. 

Karen Tinsley-Williams, a therapist and part-time faculty member at USC, told Unbothered that her residence in Altadena is the manifestation of her husband’s dreams.“He would ride through Atladena and say ‘I’m going to buy a home here one day,” Tinsley-Williams said, noting he fell in love with the city’s history. “I remember he always talks about the fact that there was this big Buffalo soldier sign up at Loma Alta,” she said. 

Her husband purchased a house in the storybook town in 2009, and Tinsey-Williams moved in with him after her own home caught on fire in another Pasadena blaze in 2011. The couple made new memories in their fairytale home, enjoying the bustling farmer’s market and the close-by trails of Echo Mountain together. “It was just interesting to be able to leave your home and hike and to be in nature,” she said. 

During the pandemic, the pair started a long remodel process and completed over $700,000 in renovations by November of 2023, expanding their property with an ADU unit, a larger main bathroom, and an opened living room. Now, what remains of that work hangs in the balance, as Tinsley-Williams and her husband wait for news on the state of their property. 

“We're locked out. The National Guard is down there,” Tinsey-Williams said. She said they tried to go see their house on January 9, but they were driving in fire, so they turned around. “Saturday, the National Guard was called in. So we still haven't seen our home,” Tinsley-Williams told Unbothered. But based on hearsay from neighbors, Tinsley-Williams thinks their home is standing, but the uncertainty is its own kind of hell. 

Some of the renovations, including the installation of fire sprinklers in the house and a firewall on the ADU, could have spared the home from being completely destroyed, which leaves Tinsley-Williams hovering between grief and survivor’s remorse. She’s concerned about how psychologically and emotionally safe it will be to live amongst the ruins of a city-wide apocalypse. “If it's fixed, we're thankful for that. But at the same time, what is that like, to be in all that destruction, and for years, and to witness all that?”

Atladena is on a long road to recovery, and rebuilding will take time and requires a “smart” and “creative” approach, Matthew Trotter, a licensed architect in California, and the President of the Southern California Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects, told Unbothered. While stylistically designed buildings of historic cities add to a town’s charm, some older buildings may lack the up-to-code standards of contemporary buildings that are more equipped to withstand fire damage, he said.

“You have to find synergy between the best design practices of today that will support keeping your community safe, while also synergizing that with the look and feel of the design of the past,” he said. 

The challenge ahead for Altadena-based architects will be to navigate the question of “how do we bring in our modern understanding of building and construction techniques, while still creating a feeling of nostalgia and understanding that, ‘this is my neighborhood, this is where I grew up, and it feels the same, but it's just better?’” he said. 

One of the ways to preserve that hometown essence of Atladena’s history will be to ensure Black folks are at the helm of the rebuilding efforts, a mission L.A. native Breanna Hawkins is spearheading.

Hawkins, the Co-Founder and Principal Consultant of Fractal Strategies, has worked in public policy in Los Angeles for over 15 years. She says while it is still too early to know, she estimates the loss of Black wealth due to home fires alone to be upwards of $1 billion, and her company wants to work with residents to recoup that loss. 

“One of the primary barriers to being able to retain their home is a lack of insurance or full lack of insurance coverage,” Hawkins said. “The Legal Aid Foundation, and a host of other organizations, are providing one-on-one legal consultation for people who have been impacted by the fire so that they can advocate with the insurance companies to be able to get the assistance or support that they need to be able to retain their homes.”

A branch of Hawkins’ company, The WildSeed Collective, a transformative justice grant program, is also offering emergency grants to business owners in the area, as well as hosting grant-writing workshops to help home-owners in need access funds from government agencies, like FEMA. One of TheWildSeed Collective’s partners, BlackLight Imaging, will be offering free portraits for families who have been impacted by the fire so that they can create new memories during an upcoming wellness event in L.A. “I think this is an opportunity to pay homage and support the collective healing that's needed for us to all be able to recover from this time,” Hawkins said. 

While it’s true that unprecedented tragedy has gripped the city in fiery fear for the last week, compassion and support has flown like a river, too.  A Google doc database, run by Community Aid Dena, lists links to the GoFundMe sites of survivors and is circulating among folks outside of Altadena who want to support displaced families. And local groups, like The Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge Of California Free & Accepted Masons, and Black law firms, like The Cochran Firm and Ivie McNeil Wyatt Purcell and Diggs, have set up recovery funds with the hopes of raising $5 million to help Black Altadena residents pay for housing, bills, and rebuild, KCRW reported. “What I don’t want to happen is that this small Black community be forgotten,” said James Bryant, a partner at The Cochran Firm who is spearheading the fundraiser.

Octavia‘s Bookshelf, a local book-store named after prolific sci-fi author and Altadena native, Octavia Butler (who is buried in the neighborhood, and while her grave did catch fire last week, it suffered “minimal damage”) has turned into a mutual-aid hub. Its shelves are now stocked with food and toiletries to aid displaced survivors of the Eaton fire. 

Major, who is an active member of Tournament Of Roses, a group that helps plan and execute Pasedena’s iconic Rose Parade and Rose Bowl Game, said while she was in the middle of a breakdown over the loss of her home, she got a call from one of the executive members.

“One of the staff members called me, which was just sweet, as she didn't have to. Then, she let me know that they were going to do a financial thing to all the members affected. And I was like, what? So that is over and beyond,” Major said. 

Lewis told Unbothered that while the fires burned his neighborhood, he saw a group of Black and Brown individuals who took it upon themselves to grab shovels, trucks, and dirt, going back and forth, fighting the fires on their own. “Things can all be replaced, so I'm not mad about things that I can buy,” Lewis said. “The biggest thing is the amount of support that has poured in from calls, from prayers, from funds.”

While the last week has been a scorching hell on earth for millions of Black Los Angelenos affected by the fires, the city’s name has never been more apt; angels have shown up to restore and blanket Altadena with love.