Wizard of Oz Piano & Other Lost Treasures

A Thriving Neighborhood

A Black Changed community sees its heritage razed by the Eaton Fire.

On Jan. 9, the day fires would rage through the predominately Black middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena, Snoop Dogg was at the home of producer and videographer Joseph Austin working on an edit of the upcoming film The Greatesta collaboration between the rapper and Ryan Reynolds. Hours later, in the middle of the night, Austin was ushering his fiancée and their young daughters out of the home they’d just moved into six months before, black smoke and embers from the fire encroaching so rapidly, they didn’t have time to grab their evacuation bags.

“Everything I’ve ever shot for the past 15 years is gone,” says Austin, who made a career directing music videos and photographing the professional highlights of such L.A. icons as rappers Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle and Lakers superstar LeBron James. “All my cameras, every lens, everything I’ve ever owned, gone.”

That’s the resounding refrain from Altadenians who are mourning both the loss of personal artifacts that bore witness to the richness of Black culture in the region and communal landmarks like the Lake Avenue business district made up of mom-and-pop shops and restaurants, where the “Greetings From Altadena” mural on the side of Grocery Outlet once welcomed shoppers. The faces of former residents — artist Charles White and author Octavia E. Butler, who wrote of a wildfire sparked by climate change ravaging Los Angeles in the year 2025 in her 1993 genre novel Parable of the Sower — are painted within the letters.

Famed jazz musician Bobby Bradford, who moved to Altadena in 1964 — just as the demographic of the once overwhelmingly white neighborhood was beginning to change — is among them. “I lost my two cornets and all my books and films from the last 50 years,” says the 90-year-old former lecturer who taught the history of jazz at Pomona College for 44 years until 2021. “All that material that I had that covered Charlie Parker and the beboppers, Louis Armstrong, all the photographs, everything’s gone.”

Gone also are the spaces that brought residents of the small town of 42,000 together regularly, like Altadena Community Church and Altadena Baptist Church, which once stood two blocks from Bradford’s home. “There’s a small community hardware store that everybody goes to a couple times a month to fix faucets or whatever, that’s gone,” he adds.

Actress Gillian White, who’s married to fellow actor Michael Jai White, lost the childhood home she grew up in. Her parents, both 76, bought the house in 1970 for $17,250. “Their down payment was a dollar,” she recalls. White fondly remembers perusing the shops on Lake Avenue as a young girl and getting candy from Webster’s Community Pharmacy, which miraculously survived the Eaton Fire. Such was not the case for another personally beloved landmark.

“The one thing that hurt my heart the most was Farnsworth Park,” says White of the space that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. “Farnsworth Park was a block from my mother’s house, and there was a little arena where they would do concerts. My friends and I would go up there when nothing was going on, put on little shows and pretend like we were singing to an audience in the stands. There are so many wonderful memories from that.”

The restaurant Fox’s was a personal favorite of Bob Hearts Abishola co-creator Gina Yashere, who frequently had breakfast there after she purchased her now-destroyed dream home in Altadena in 2020. Rhythms of the Village, a shop and cultural center celebrating African heritage, also was razed. “I used to have clothes made there all the time, and now they’re gone,” she says. “I’m just hoping to God that they’ll come back, because these kinds of stores, if you lose those, you lose the spirit of Altadena.”

It’s that possibility that gives Yashere, who’s now filming Star Trek: Starfleet in Toronto, pause about the future of her neighborhood. “I want to come back and rebuild, but I don’t want to be surrounded by tech bros and trust fund babies. I want to be surrounded by the mix of people that made Altadena what it was,” she says. Austin says he and his family, sheltering in Pasadena, will be one of the first to return when the time comes. “I’ll never move away from Altadena,” he says. “This is home.” — BRANDE VICTORIAN