Story by ILI Year 6 Nahshon Dion

Altadena, CA, with almost 44,000 residents, is known for its diversity and tightly-knit community environment. It has been home to well-known figures such as Charles White, actor Sidney Poitier, sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jeffrey Stewart, and Rodney Glen King.

According to What’s Up Altadena?, statistically, it has the second-highest number of black-owned businesses and real estate (homes, buildings, and plots of land) per square mile in Los Angeles County. Two-thirds of the shopping centers on Lake Avenue were black-owned. Yet, seventy-three percent of those homes and businesses are now gone.

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This community represents the legacy of the Great Migration in the 1920s and 1930s when African Americans left the racially oppressive conditions of the American South to find a better life in the West. They established thriving working-class and middle-class neighborhoods here. However, due to discriminatory housing practices called redlining, it wasn’t until after 1968 that they were able to fully settle throughout Altadena, primarily in the northwest section.

A wildfire started on the evening of January 7, 2025, in Eaton Canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains at around 6:18 p.m. PST near Altadena Drive and Midwick Drive. The Eaton Canyon wildfire is one of several fires that were driven by an extremely powerful Santa Ana wind event, along with the larger Palisades Fire. The estimated number of evacuees in Altadena and Pasadena reached over 100,000.

As of January 28, the fire is 99 percent contained, and over 14,000 acres of land have burned. Over 9,000 structures have been destroyed, and over 1,000 are damaged. This is the fifth deadliest fire in California history. Tragically, seventeen people are confirmed dead, and another twenty-four are unaccounted for. By most official accounts, this is the most destructive natural disaster in Altadena’s history.