Before Altadena burned down, it was a tight-knit community that welcomed my family | Opinion

On the fringe between Los Angeles and the San Gabriel mountains, my childhood neighborhood of Altadena now lies in ash. When I saw what was left in the wake of the Eaton Fire, which burned through entire blocks of bungalow homes and their back gardens, I was somehow surprised that the mountains maintained their shape — even with the neighborhood unrecognizable, its trees missing and the foothills bald, I could still see the same outlines of Mount Lowe and Mount Wilson.

Altadena conformed to no single cultural or religious expectation. It proved that a community could be tight-knit even when its members had almost nothing in common — and there was really nothing unifying about Altadena other than its close proximity to the mountains. For my family’s own peculiar immigrant story, it filled all the holes left from my parents’ choice to live a secular life. My mother defied the wishes of her small Jewish community in Turkey by marrying someone from a Muslim family, and both my parents wanted to live without the rigid structures of their upbringings.

For my mother, the Hanniger Flats trail was her synagogue, a place where she’d make neighborhood friends. Instead of minarets, we had pine trees and palm trees lining our streets. For some, the Altadena Crest trail served as a kind of confessional booth — a place outside the home to mull over problems or personal secrets.

I always thought that no one could get lonely in Altadena, not only because of the friendly neighbors you would encounter in the hills, but because the mountains themselves would always be next to you.

There is no clear way to categorize the people who lived in Altadena: On a single block, you might find NASA engineers, school teachers and jazz musicians, all going about their days. One man, who donned a long white beard, frequently told me of his mushroom picking excursion. And for a high school history project, I interviewed our neighbor, a leading Isaac Newton scholar at Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology.

Up Rubio Canyon Drive, the steepest street in the neighborhood, we’d visit a neighbor from Norway and look at her outdoor Christmas tree illuminated against the backdrop of the expanse of LA.

I recently learned that Altadena is one of the few places in LA county that has no parking rules. When we left the family minivan parked on the street for months at a time during my college years, the car accumulated piles of dried pine leaves, but not a single parking ticket. I took it for granted at the time, but now it seems bizarre that there’s somewhere in LA where you can park your car for an eternity and never get a ticket.

There are no sidewalks in Altadena either. In fact, on its southern boundary with Pasadena, you can see where the LA sidewalk ends. If in California you’ve run out of continent, then in Altadena you’ve run out of Los Angeles. It turns out that the absence of parking rules and sidewalks is because Altadena is unincorporated Los Angeles County and doesn’t have a mayor or local government to make these kinds of rules. By the time I learned this, I had already understood something deeper about Altadena’s unincorporated identity that goes far beyond municipal status.

Altadena made us feel like we didn’t have to conform to any kinds of categories or social expectations. Hiking, day or night, was a pastime for us. In high school, my friends and I opted for a hike up Mount Lowe to see the city lights instead of going to Disneyland for graduation night. I remember an argument that took place at sunset with a friend over whether we could see Catalina Island or not (he ended up being right: you can, in fact, see Catalina from the hills of Altadena).

After I got a mountain bike, I’d challenge myself every weekend to get further up Mount Wilson toll road. One winter, I biked up to Mount Wilson after a snowstorm and captured a photo of the entire LA basin beyond the beach from a wooded area with a foot of snow. Although it was, after all, another LA suburb, even people who visited Altadena loved it. Some people said it made them feel like they were on vacation, but I think most people were picking up on the way Altadena made you feel like you didn’t have to be any particular way.

Already, the work has begun to clear the ash and debris from Altadena and to salvage what’s left. The brick chimneys that are left standing help to orient where houses and backyards used to end and begin. The brush and plants that used to cover the foothills are charred, but the mountains still rise up above the neighborhood.

Though no one knows quite what Altadena will look like after its reconstruction, I know the mountains will still be there for us.