Lifestyle
'The only thing still left.' Volunteers race to save Altadena's vintage tiles from the bulldozers
The team of masons, covered in dust and sweat, had been working in the ruins of the Altadena house for hours when a shout echoed across the wreckage.
Volunteer Devon Douglas emerged from a pit of rubble that had once been the living room, staggering under the weight of a concrete slab more than a foot wide.
“It’s a stair,” Douglas said, turning toward homeowner Valerie Elachi. “A whole stair, and all the tiles.”
It was a bittersweet moment for Elachi, 76, who had danced down that tiled staircase when she and her husband first saw the home during an open house in the early 1980s.
She watched from her patio wall as five volunteers chiseled the historic tiles from the stairs and from her massive living room fireplace. Having something to salvage was a gift, she thought, and a bitter reminder of all they had lost.
Cliff Douglas uses a chisel to gently remove historic Batchelder tiles from the fireplace of a 1923 Altadena home built by noted local architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Gray.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The work on Elachi’s home was being done by a ragtag group of volunteers who call their collective Save the Tiles. The group is racing to remove and preserve thousands of vintage and historically significant tiles from the Eaton fire burn zone before the properties are bulldozed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
As part of their work to remove debris and level lots for rebuilding, the Army Corps tears down everything left standing on a property. That includes chimneys and fireplaces, which can be left structurally weakened by fire.
“Anything you haven’t removed is gone forever,” said Eric Garland, one of the Save the Tiles organizers.
The volunteers have preserved the tiles from about 50 homes, and have about 150 left on their list. Already, they’ve had one close call, removing the tiles from one home just two days before the Army Corps arrived.
Finding enough skilled masons was the group’s first challenge. Now, their biggest hurdle is tracking down the homeowners and getting their permission to remove tiles from their properties.
A team of volunteers is using public records to trace homeowners, but they’re hitting a lot of dead ends. Property records generally don’t contain any contact information, and when they do, the phone numbers are often out of date. In some cases, the numbers ring to landlines that burned down.
“There will be a day, soon, when we wake up and there are no houses in our queue,” Garland said, “even though we know there are dozens left.”
The Batchelder tiles removed from Valerie Elachi’s fireplace were placed in a cardboard box before being cleaned and packed for long-term storage.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The group’s last-ditch effort to reach homeowners is a letter. Mail is still being forwarded, Garland figured, so maybe it was worth a shot.
“Dear displaced neighbor,” the letter begins. “… We are just volunteers and Altadena neighbors desperate to reach you because we want to rescue your historic fireplace tiles for free. That’s it. No strings. Just trying to save what’s left of beautiful Altadena and bring some joy.”
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Garland embarked on the tile rescue mission after a walk through Altadena with his teenage daughter.
Their house survived the Eaton fire, but many on their street did not, including their neighbor Fred’s 1924 Spanish-style house. Amid the rubble, they spotted his century-old fireplace, its gray, brown and beige tiles still intact.
“That beautiful fireplace is all they have left,” Garland’s daughter said.
Garland emailed the neighborhood list-serv to ask whether anyone was saving the tiles. One response sent him to Douglas, who had written on Reddit that her father, Cliff, a professional mason, was volunteering to remove tiles from ruined homes for free.
The teams joined forces. In early February, they gathered dozens of volunteers in the parking lot of an Aldi grocery store in Altadena. Garland and fellow volunteer organizer Stanley Zucker handed out printed maps of the burn zone and sent small groups out on foot, telling them to stick to the sidewalks and photograph any tile that looked remotely historic.
In two days, the volunteers completed an ad-hoc architectural survey of thousands of burned properties. They whittled down the list to more than 200 homes with Arts and Crafts tile, many by the famous Pasadena artisan Ernest Batchelder and one of his main competitors, Claycraft.
First produced on the banks of the Arroyo Seco in 1910, Batchelder tiles were a key part of the California Arts and Crafts movement, a return-to-nature style that was a response to the ornate designs of the Victorian era and the industrialization of American cities.
Most Batchelder tiles are in private homes, but they can also be found on the Pasadena Playhouse’s courtyard fountain, the floors of Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church and the lobby of the downtown Los Angeles Fine Arts Building on 7th Street. (One of his largest surviving commissions, the 1914 Dutch Chocolate Shop in downtown, is generally closed to the public.)
California in the early 20th century was rich with clay and with cultural influence, said Amy Green of Silverlake Conservation, a firm that repairs and restores historic tile. In addition to the Arts and Crafts movement, tile artists began producing a wide variety of works inspired by traditional Mexican and Indigenous designs, as well as European styles like Delft.
Devon Douglas, daughter of professional mason Cliff Douglas, inspects a Mayan-style Batchelder tile that had just been removed from a fireplace.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
“It reflects who and what we are,” Green said. “A very interesting mix of people that bring different aesthetics and skills to our work.”
Batchelder tiles can be palm-sized or larger, with muted matte finishes and understated glazes. A company catalog from 1923 described the tiles as “luminous and mellow in character, somewhat akin to the quality of a piece of old tapestry.”
They could be ordered through a catalog and were relatively affordable, said Anuja Navare, the director of collections at the Pasadena Museum of History, which maintains a private registry of homes with Batchelder tiles. Many middle-class families splurged a little and installed them in new bungalows in the 1910s and 1920s.
“He made beauty available to a person with modest means,” Navare said.
The work of Batchelder and his competitors spread to thousands of homes, businesses and civic institutions across Southern California.
American tastes changed, and, by the end of World War II, many of the tile companies had gone under. Arts-and-crafts tiles were painted over or ripped out in favor of the avocado greens and burnt oranges of the 1970s.
But the tiles have come back into vogue in the last two decades and have developed a cult following among design enthusiasts. Actress Diane Keaton has renovated entire homes with historic tiles, and preservationists have been known to dumpster dive to save Batchelder tiles from the landfill.
A single salvaged tile can sell for more than $200. A fully intact hearth and mantle can fetch 100 times that.
Early on, the Save the Tiles group was on high alert for looters in the burn zone. Most people would drive past the ruins of a home without a second look at the fireplace, but a select few know what to look for.
Cliff Douglas, the mason, said he had assessed several fireplaces along one street and returned to find the tiles gone. It was impossible to know, he said, whether the tiles had been removed by the homeowners or by someone else.
The group tackled the most visible fireplaces first, including those on corner lots. One volunteer with Hollywood set-building experience built false fronts to disguise fireplaces as any other fire debris.
The tiles must be removed by trained masons, and Save the Tiles now has four crews ready every day, made up of volunteers and workers whose employers are covering their wages. The group plans to start paying the masons from a GoFundMe that has now raised more than $100,000.
Cliff Douglas inspects a historic fireplace covered in Batchelder and Grueby tiles.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
About 20 volunteers learned from Green how to properly clean, catalog and store the tiles. Some cracked tiles will still need to be professionally restored, which will cost money, but a lot of the work can be done by amateurs, Garland said.
Some of them are sitting in boxes on a side porch at Garland’s mother’s house, and others are in a climate-controlled warehouse in Harbor City donated by a friend in the tile industry. The tiles will wait until homeowners are ready to take them back.
The power of the project, Green said, is that the hearth has such importance in the home: “It provides warmth,” she said. “It’s where you gather.”
:::
Despite the pressure of the bulldozers moving closer, removing the tiles is delicate work that can’t be rushed.
On a recent weekend, ceramicist Jose Nonato stood in the rubble of a three-bedroom home along East Altadena Drive, his hair, forearms and apron coated in dust. The third-generation ceramicist from Mexico City saw a Facebook post about the rescue effort and showed up with his tools. He had been working for hours in the sun on his 30th wedding anniversary to extract tiles surrounding a fireplace.
The tiles had been fired once, a hundred years ago, in kilns that reached 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, Nonato said. He said the Eaton fire had thrown them into thermal shock. They could crumble at any moment.
Nonato laid his chisel against the mortar and gingerly began to tap the top of the tool with a hammer. He gently pried loose a tile the size of a paperback book and wiped his hand across the dusty surface. A faint green hue shone through — a Batchelder.
By the end of the day, Nonato had rescued about 90% of the tiles and laid them on a blanket in the driveway in the same pattern as the fireplace. A few were broken and held together by red duct tape, but those would be repaired. Soon, the tiles would be cleaned, boxed and stored for the homeowners, who planned to rebuild.
“This is basically the only thing still left,” Nonato said. “This, and memories.”
:::
Elachi, the Altadena homeowner, had initially hoped that the tile volunteers could shore up the massive Batchelder fireplace in her living room so the home could be rebuilt around it.
From left, Cliff Douglas and his assistants Martin Vargas, Jorge Vargas and Roberto Murillo remove debris from the hearth of a home in Altadena.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
To her disappointment, Cliff Douglas told her that the mortar had been weakened in the fire. Everything would have to come down, he said, or the Army Corps would take it down themselves.
Elachi and her husband raised their daughter in the 1923 Pueblo Revival-style home and spent four decades caring for the property, embracing its Southwestern style and finding furniture and art that, along with the pink adobe walls and wood beams above the windows, would have looked at home in Santa Fe.
“This house was like another child to us,” Elachi said.
The fire had taken almost all of it: her husband’s memorabilia from 15 years as the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, their ceramics and furniture, all their photographs and books. The loss felt overwhelming and enraging. They hope to rebuild, but aren’t sure yet whether they will.
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners.
Warner Bros. Pictures
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Warner Bros. Pictures
Ryan Coogler’s supernatural horror stars Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers who open a 1930s juke joint in Mississippi. Opening night does not go as planned when vampires appear outside. “In a straightforward metaphor for all the ways Black culture has been co-opted by whiteness, the raucous pleasures and sonic beauty of the juke joint attract the interest of a trio of demons … they wish to literally leech off of the talents and energy of Black folks,” writes critic Aisha Harris. The film made history with a record 16 Academy Award nominations.
We asked our NPR audience: What movie would you recommend to someone who loved Sinners? Here’s what you told us:
Near Dark (1987)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow; starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen
If you want another cool vampire movie with Western kind of vibes, check out Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark — super underseen and kind of hard to find, but really gritty and sexy and another very different take on what you might think is a genre that had been wrung dry. – Maggie Grossman, Chicago, Ill.
30 Days of Night (2007)
Directed by David Slade; starring Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston
It follows a group of people in a small Alaskan town as they struggle to survive an invasion of vampires who have taken advantage of the month-long absence of the sun. Both this and Sinners revolve around a vampire takeover and the people’s fight to outlast the “night.” – Nathan Strzelewicz, DeWitt, Mich.
The Wailing (2016)
Directed by Na Hong-jin; starring Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee, Jun Kunimura
In this South Korean supernatural horror film, a mysterious illness causes people in a quiet rural village to become violent and murderous. A local police officer investigates while trying to save his daughter, who begins showing the same disturbing symptoms. The film blends folk horror, religion, and psychological dread, exploring themes of faith, evil, and moral weakness. Like Sinners, it centers on a supernatural force corrupting a close-knit community, builds slow-burning tension, and examines spiritual conflict and human frailty. – Amy Merke, Bronx, N.Y.
Fréwaka (2024)
Directed by Aislinn Clarke; starring Bríd Ní Neachtain, Clare Monnelly, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
In this Irish folk horror film, a home care worker, Shoo, is assigned to stay with an elderly woman who’s convinced she’s under siege by malevolent fairies. Like Sinners, Fréwaka blends folk traditions and social commentary with horror. The social failures Shoo copes with (untreated mental health issues, religious abuse) are just as frightening as the supernatural forces. – Kerrin Smith, Baltimore, Md.
And a bonus pick from our critic:
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
Directed by George C. Wolfe; starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, Glynn Turman
This is an adaptation of August Wilson’s play about a legendary blues singer (Viola Davis) muscling through a recording session with white producers who want to control her music. Chadwick Boseman’s blistering in his final role. – Bob Mondello, NPR movie critic
Carly Rubin and Ivy Buck contributed to this project. It was edited by Clare Lombardo.
The tiny town of West Goshen, Calif., was exactly the kind of place that community solar was designed for.
Near Visalia, most of its 500 residents live in mobile homes, where companies won’t install rooftop panels without a solid foundation. And until recently, they used propane for heating and cooking, with price fluctuations in the winter posing hardships for low-income families.
Community solar, in which residents get a discount on their bills for subscribing as a group to small solar arrays nearby, was designed to help low-income residents, apartment dwellers, renters and others who can’t put panels on their own roofs.
Over the last 11 years, New York, Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts and other states have built thriving community solar programs. But California has built, at most, only 34 projects since 2015, and experts say that’s a generous accounting.
“We’ve had community solar for a dozen years, and it simply has not produced anything of scale and anything of note,” said Derek Chernow, director of Californians for Local, Affordable Solar and Storage, a developer trade group that’s pushing to get a more robust program off the ground. “Projects don’t pencil out.”
The West Goshen residents were among the lucky few, becoming part of a community solar project in 2024.
“It has kind of allowed us to kind of breathe a little bit,” said resident and community organizer Melinda Metheney. Her bill has dropped by about $300 in the summer months, thanks to the 20% community solar discount, stacked with other low-income discounts and clean energy incentives, she said.
West Goshen’s panels sit about 10 miles out of town, in a field surrounded by farms. Energy and climate experts agree California must add much more clean energy to its grid, some 6 gigawatts by 2032, the California Public Utilities Commission said in a new plan last week.
Assemblymember Christopher M. Ward (D-San Diego), who in 2022 authored a bill to create a more effective community solar program, said the state needs to double its annual solar installation rate to reach that goal and is not on track to do that using only large utility-scale solar farms and individual rooftop arrays.
“We need mid-scale community solar,” he said.
Energy and climate experts agree California must add much more clean energy to its grid, some 6 gigawatts by 2032, the California Public Utilities Commission said in a new plan last week. Above, solar panels at Extra Space Storage in Pico Rivera.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
He and a coalition of environmental groups, solar developers and the Utility Reform Network, a ratepayer advocacy group, worked to put his 2022 law into effect. They coalesced around requiring utilities to pay community solar developers and customers for the electricity they feed to the grid using the same formula they use for people who install rooftop solar.
But in May 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission decided to go with a late-in-the-game proposal backed by the state’s investor-owned utilities to pay community solar at a lower rate.
The agency, along with its public advocate’s office, argued that crediting solar developers at the higher rate would raise bills for customers who don’t have solar, who would still have to shoulder the cost of grid maintenance. It’s similar to the argument they’ve made to cut incentives for rooftop solar.
The new program relied on federal money, including the Biden administration’s Solar for All, to sweeten the deal for developers. But the utilities commission spent very little of the $250 million available under that grant before the Trump administration tried to claw it back last summer, and now it is held up in litigation.
At a legislative oversight hearing last week, Kerry Fleisher, the commission’s director of distributed energy resources, blamed the loss for the new program’s failure to launch.
“There’s been a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of the Solar for All funding that was intended to supplement this program,” Fleisher said. “That’s part of the reason why this has taken longer than normal.” She said the commission still plans to release a program in the next several months.
Ward, the San Diego lawmaker who wrote the community solar bill, called the program “fatally flawed” in an interview.
He’s now considering a bill to bring the community solar program more in line with what he initially envisioned — higher incentives, requirements for battery storage, and compliance with state law that mandates new houses be built with solar.
A study last year funded by a solar trade group found that could save California’s electric system $6.5 billion over 20 years. But Ward’s effort to revive his program last year failed to pass the Assembly appropriations committee.
“All the other states in our country that have adopted similar community solar program models, they are working,” said Ward, adding that 22 states have programs comparable to the one solar advocates want in California. “The writing on the wall suggests that, exactly as we feared years ago, this was not the way to go.”
California Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Terrie Prosper called California “a leader in cost-effective, least-cost solar deployment overall compared to any other state,” in an emailed statement.
Under the commission’s definition, the state has brought on 34 projects, representing 235 megawatts of community solar. But studies from groups such as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Wood Mackenzie use different definitions for community solar, and they show California far behind at least 10 other states.
Meanwhile, advocates and developers involved in successful community solar projects in California say they were difficult to get off the ground.
Homes in the Avocado Heights area of Los Angeles County are part of a community solar project.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
One that came online in May in the unincorporated communities of Bassett and Avocado Heights in the San Gabriel Valley provides solar electricity to about 400 low-income residents. They get 20% discounts on their electric bills for subscribing to panels installed on two Extra Space Storage building rooftops in Pico Rivera.
Organizers said it took nearly five years to find the right location and comply with utility requirements. They also got a grant in addition to funding provided by the state utilities commission’s solar program.
It “would not have happened if it hadn’t been for the grant,” said Genaro Bugarin, a director at the Energy Coalition nonprofit that proposed and coordinated the project.
Brandon Smithwood, vice president of policy at Dimension Energy, the developer for the project in West Goshen, said he still hopes to see a community solar program in California that compensates projects for the way they help out the grid.
“We’ve seen it can work, and we know what we have won’t work,” Smithwood said at the hearing.
There’s a three-story house in Baltimore that looks a bit imposing. You walk up the stone steps before even getting up to the porch, and then you enter the door and you’re greeted with a glass case of literary awards. It’s The Clifton House, formerly home of Lucille Clifton.
The National Book Award-winning poet lived there with her husband, Fred, starting in 1967 until the bank foreclosed on the house in 1980. Clifton’s daughter, Sidney Clifton, has since revived the house and turned it into a cultural hub, hosting artists, readings, workshops and more. But even during a February visit, in the mid-afternoon with no organized events on, the house feels full.
The corner of Lucille Clifton’s bedroom, where she would wake up and write in the mornings
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Andrew Limbong/NPR
“There’s a presence here,” Clifton House Executive Director Joël Díaz told me. “There’s a presence here that sits at attention.”
Sometimes, rooms where famous writers worked can be places of ineffable magic. Other times, they can just be rooms.
Princeton University Press
Katie da Cunha Lewin is the author of the new book, The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, which explores the appeal of these rooms. Lewin is a big Virginia Woolf fan, and the very first place Lewin visited working on the book was Monk’s House — Woolf’s summer home in Sussex, England. On the way there, there were dreams of seeing Woolf’s desk, of retracing Woolf’s steps and imagining what her creative process would feel like. It turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for Lewin — everything interesting was behind glass, she said. Still, in the book Lewin writes about how she took a picture of the room and saved it on her phone, going back to check it and re-check it, “in the hope it would allow me some of its magic.”
Let’s be real, writing is a little boring. Unlike a band on fire in the recording studio, or a painter possessed in their studio, the visual image of a writer sitting at a desk click-clacking away at a keyboard or scribbling on a piece of paper isn’t particularly exciting. And yet, the myth of the writer’s room continues to enrapture us. You can head to Massachusetts to see where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. Or go down to Florida to visit the home of Zora Neale Hurston. Or book a stay at the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Alabama, where the famous couple lived for a time. But what, exactly, is the draw?
Lewin said in an interview that whenever she was at a book event or an author reading, an audience question about the writer’s writing space came up. And yes, some of this is basic fan-driven curiosity. But also “it started to occur to me that it was a central mystery about writing, as if writing is a magic thing that just happens rather than actually labor,” she said.
In a lot of ways, the book is a debunking of the myths we’re presented about writers in their rooms. She writes about the types of writers who couldn’t lock themselves in an office for hours on end, and instead had to find moments in-between to work on their art. She covers the writers who make a big show of their rooms, as a way to seem more writerly. She writes about writers who have had their homes and rooms preserved, versus the ones whose rooms have been lost to time and new real estate developments. The central argument of the book is that there is no magic formula to writing — that there is no daily to-do list to follow, no just-right office chair to buy in order to become a writer. You just have to write.
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