What was destroyed — and spared — in Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires

The places that burned, in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, have passed from the “here and now” to the “once were there.” The land, though — the land keeps telling its own stories, layered stories older than the ashes. Its lineage goes back to the native Americans, and forward to what our recent forebears had built on those same spots.

Some notable places that were spared stand as a measure of what humans wrought over the modern life of L.A. Here, a few postcard-illustrated accounts of what was lost, and what has lasted.

THE PALISADES FIRE

Westside Waldorf School, 17310 Sunset Blvd.

A double whammy — the Palisades and Eaton fires — took both the Westside Waldorf School, within sight of where Sunset Boulevard intersects with Pacific Coast Highway, and its Altadena K-8 campus, at 209 E. Mariposa St. The Palisades campus had taken a lease and planned its move to the Sunset Boulevard site in 2005 and relocated there some time later.

Beginning in 1957, it had been the Santa Ynez Inn, a low-key hideaway for celebrities, back when Malibu was becoming a real getaway from Hollywood. Its bar was a favorite spot not to be recognized by the hoi polloi, and its terrace was popular for weddings.

Similar to the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, brides and bridegrooms left handprints and their names and wedding dates pressed into cement. Actor Lee J. Cobb’s daughter was married there, and before the inn closed, in 1976, it let couples come back to reclaim their “piece of the rock.” The property changed hands several times, and the Coastal Commission once nixed a high-rise condo complex plan for the site — happily, or the L.A. coastline might have ended up looking like Miami Beach’s wall of high-rises.

Pacific Garden Apartments, 111 Marquez Place

A postcard shows the entrance to the Bernheimer Chinese Gardens in Pacific Palisades. An apartment complex built in 1956 on the site of the gardens burned in the January fires.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection)

The complex of nearly four dozen apartments was built in 1956, on a bluff above the beach. It did not survive the conflagration. The land on which it stands was, until about 1950, part of the Bernheimer Chinese (or Oriental) Gardens. The Bernheimer brothers were textile millionaires who loved California and Asian culture and style. Before World War I, they built their Japanese gardens in Hollywood, above Franklin Avenue, and filled the grounds with antiques and Japanese landscaping. All that’s left of their handiwork today is Yamashiro.

In Pacific Palisades, Adolph Bernheimer devoted himself later to his Chinese/Oriental gardens, which opened around 1928 and which the public could visit — adults 10 cents, children free. These 8 acres were filled with rare objects from his many shopping sprees in Asia. Although these gardens were arguably Chinese in theme, and the Chinese were U.S. allies in World War II, the suspicions hovered around Bernheimer that he was an Axis sympathizer. What finally doomed the gardens was not the war but cliff slippage of the garden-topped bluffs that had already begun by the time Adolph died, in 1944. A week after he died, a slide blocked the Coastal Road. In 1951, his collections were sold off and the pavilions and pergolas he built were knocked down. In 1954, the 12.6-acre property was sold to developers planning houses and apartments. The price: $200,000, a fraction of the $1 million Bernheimer spent on adorning the place.

Will Rogers State Historic Park, 1501 Will Rogers State Park Road

A postcard showing Will Rogers Ranch from the air in 1929. Much of the property became a state park. The January fires burned several historic buildings in the park.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection)

Will Rogers was one of the most famous and beloved figures in the nation in the 1920s and into the ’30s. A humorist and actor, his folksy delivery artfully deflated politicians and pomposities. At a time when L.A.’s Westside was a wild and wide-open place, Rogers bought more than 350 acres of the Palisades and built a ranch house, stables, riding and roping areas, a polo field and other recreations. He died in a plane crash in 1935, a nationally mourned figure, and nine years later his widow, Betty, left almost half of the property to the state as a historic park. The fire burned down the ranch house and other historic buildings.

Serra Retreat, 3401 Serra Road

A postcard showing the Serra Retreat in Malibu. The property was once part of a stretch of land owned by the Rindge family. The building was untouched by the Palisades fire but damage to the utilities has kept it closed.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection.)

Hard as it is to conceive of now, one family, the Rindges, once owned about 25 miles of the choicest coastal property in Southern California: Malibu. Frederick Rindge began accumulating the land in 1892. It was a ferociously guarded wild and glorious kingdom, and after Rindge died fairly young, his widow did battle against all manner of comers: the government eager for highway rights of way, land speculators, the railroads and squatters. But it was a rear-guard action. May Rindge spent much of the family fortune defending the land in court and along the coast, and died nearly broke in 1941. [The Rindge saga is told in the excellent book “The King and Queen of Malibu” by David K. Randall.]

In 1928, May Rindge began building a great family mansion, Laudamus Hill, with lavish appointments like carved mahogany doors and tile from her own Malibu Potteries. Construction came to a halt several years later, and within a year of her death, the building, such as it was, and 26 acres of Rindge land were sold to the Franciscan order. The order converted the vast house and setting as a spiritual retreat, which it remains to this day. It welcomed women to the retreat in the 1970s. The building was untouched by the Palisades fire, but damage to utilities has kept the place closed.

Marquez Charter Elementary School, 16821 Marquez Ave.

A postcard promoting the Inceville Light House Moving Picture Village by the Sea. The Marquez Charter Elementary School burned down in the January fires. The land where it stood once was known as Inceville, a vast movie location.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection)

Not far away from the Waldorf school, the Marquez school also burned down. The land it stood on found its first renown as Inceville. The name Thomas Ince doesn’t register much now, but in cinema’s early days, Ince was a powerhouse director and producer. In 1912, he founded his own studio near where Santa Ynez Canyon — approximately Sunset Boulevard — meets the coastline. He owned or leased about 18,000 acres and put them all to work: as full-sized sets representing Old West towns, a Dutch village with a windmill, Swiss and Puritan and native American and fishing settlements.

Ince was a wunderkind of the new medium, and a man of cyclonic energy and aptitude. Sets were mounted on rollers to take maximum advantage of sunlight. His historical films like “Custer’s Last Stand” and “The Battle of Gettysburg” were much praised for accuracy. Ince kept a settlement of Lakota Sioux living on the Inceville property, and it was probably one of those actors who, in 1916, and in full costume, helped to rescue Ince when a fire spread through the studio. Ince soon sold out to the western cowboy star William S. Hart, who renamed it Hartville; Hart turned around and sold it to a production company called Robertson-Cole. By about 1922, the remains of Inceville/Hartville had been burned to nothing. The owners sold the Palisades land to the Southern California Methodist Episcopal church, which gave Pacific Palisades its true start as a neighborhood, establishing a tent camp that became a community of Methodist-occupied houses on the celebrated Palisades “Alphabet” streets.

By the 1930s, though, the world was moving into a nonsectarian Palisades — specifically, many intellectual refugees from Nazi-menaced Europe. The German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, bought the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion, during World War II and made it a salon hangout for the exiles. The house is now part of a residency program for visiting European artists.

As for Ince, his fame today rests not on film but on rumor: in November 1924, he was a guest aboard publisher William Randolph Hearst’s yacht off the Southern California coast when he had a heart attack and was taken off the ship and home to Benedict Canyon, where he had two more heart attacks and died. And yet … the rumor mill still finds lubriciously irresistible, even a century later, the story that Hearst had found his longtime mistress, Marion Davies, in flagrante with silent movie star Charlie Chaplin, or at least suspected they were entangled. Hearst, in a fury, tried to shoot Chaplin but wound up shooting Ince instead, and the whole thing was supposed to have been covered up. Director Peter Bogdanovich even made a 2001 film about this notion, “The Cat’s Meow.” And who doesn’t love watching even the fictional rich behaving badly?

THE EATON FIRE

Deodar House, 643 E. Mariposa St.

This postcard shows the Deodar House in Altadena. The building was a hotel and boarding house, named after Altadena’s official tree.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection)

From the look of the L.A. County website of the Eaton and Palisades fires’ damage, it appears that the house stands. When this postcard was made, probably in the early 1950s, Deodar House had become a hotel/boarding house with “appointments and comforts of your own home in a magnificent five-acre setting ….”

The deodar is Altadena’s official tree, native to the Himalayas. An Altadena Historical Society posting on Facebook says the original house built here in the 1880s was sold to Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and after that house burned down in 1894, the newspaper sold the land to another Chicago newspaper publisher, Daniel Cameron, who built a Mission-style house. That house was sold in 1920, and after World War II the place became a secretarial school. It was remodeled, and around 1950 it was bought by the Theosophical Society of Altadena. That organization’s immense trove of irreplaceable archives, letters, books, paintings and other historical material was housed in its Lake Avenue library center, which burned to the ground in the Eaton fire.

Lourdes of the West shrine, at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic church, 1879 N. Lake Ave.

A postcard displaying the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes at St. Elizabeth Church in Altadena.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection)

The church and its grotto survived the fire, though the flames charred homes within two blocks of the structure. The shrine opened in 1939 as a version of the celebrated grotto in the French Pyrenees, where a peasant girl saw visions of the Virgin Mary and discovered a spring whose waters reputedly held healing powers. This Southern California version created a statue of the girl, St. Bernadette, and a replica of the pool of water.

Believers by the thousands used to come to the Altadena shrine on pilgrimages, and water was brought from Lourdes to replenish its pool. The grotto grounds are used today by the church for outdoor events. The grotto was created from tons of lava rock by rock sculptor and artist Ryozo Fuso Kado. Less than two years after the shrine opened, Kado and his family were sent to the Manzanar concentration camp.

The Allen Bungalow [no address]

A postcard of the Allen Bungalow in Altadena. The structure survived the Eaton fire.

(Patt Morrison’s private collection)

The Allen Bungalow, which Facebook posts indicate survived the fire, was built around 1904 and looks like Prairie-style architecture, which is not surprising, considering that its owner was Frank Shaver Allen, an architect from Illinois who came to prominence after he was honored at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He moved to Pasadena/Altadena around 10 years later and designed a number of buildings around L.A. He became socially prominent, but in 1910 was arrested in a Los Angeles hotel room in the company of a missing Altadena boy. Charges were dropped for insufficient evidence, and Allen retired a few years later.

Santa Rosa Avenue / Christmas Tree Lane

A postcard illustrates Christmas Tree Street (Santa Rosa Avenue) in Altadena. Most of the trees survived the Eaton fire.

(Harold A. Parker / From Patt Morrison’s private collection)

Planted around 140 years ago, some 135 deodar cedars have been growing along Santa Rosa Avenue ever since, and in 1920, they were first lighted up for the Christmas season, which turned into an annual event and the way that the street acquired its “Christmas Tree Lane” nickname. News and social media accounts show that except for some broken branches, the trees were spared, but more than a dozen homes along Santa Rosa Avenue were scorched. The 1920s postcard shows a couple of cars tooling along between the rows of trees. Today, debris removal trucks rumble along the road, clearing the way for future reconstruction.

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