Amid wildfire recovery’s race against time, Altadenans defend art and history, one tile at a time
Within days after the ruinous Eaton Fire swept through Altadena and Pasadena, Cliff Douglas chanced upon a mission.
The masonry contractor was checking on a job site in Altadena when he noticed the chimneys standing alone among a landscape of rubble. Rising above one otherwise leveled home was a Batchelder-tiled fireplace.
Intact.
Douglas knew the cultural and historical value of those historic tiles.
By the time he sat down to dinner that night, he told his daughters, “I want to save the tiles. And I want to do it for free.”
Related: His history-making tiles earn instant name recognition. Who was Ernest Batchelder?
Across town, third-generation Altadenan Eric Garland and his neighbor Stanley Zucker resolved to do the same thing.
The trio connected on Reddit, “and we were off to the races,” Garland said. The race? To save artistically significant tiles amid the rubble of the wildfires’ acres of devastation.
And while the wildfire recovery will take months to complete, it is indeed a race against time.
Under pressure from local leaders and the bosses in Washington DC to move quickly to empower communities to rebuild, the oncoming bulldozers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are on the horizon. They are tasked with the largest wildfire recovery response in modern American history.
Securing the tiles ahead of those waves of cleanup corps called for helpers. Lots of them.
“As Mr. Rogers said, ‘Look for the helpers,’ and there are helpers everywhere,” said Amanda Garland, who said the project is helping their daughters process watching their town burn down.
“It’s their whole lives, their personal history, and Lucy (who pointed out the tiles while walking with her father) said, ‘We have to save everything we can.’ And fireplaces speak of hearth and home, right? It’s the heartbeat of a home.”
Among the work the tile-hunters trek for: The Pasadena Museum of History’s Batchelder Tile Registry studies and preserves the work of Ernest Batchelder, which embodies the Arts and Crafts movement, said Iris Shih, project archivist at the museum.
One of the preeminent tilemakers in the early 20th century, Batchelder tiles are highly collectible due to their rarity, historical significance and artistic quality, she said. “Batchelder’s tiles encapsulate the intersection of art, history and design,” Shih said.
Most of the tiles being saved are Batchelders’ work, but the styles vary wildly, his efforts influenced by work of Japanese artists, work found in ancient Mayan sites and others.
The museum is compiling the registry in part because Batchelder’s company records were lost in a fire, making each surviving tile a piece of irreplaceable history, Shih said.
The tile teams’ mission is a task that Valerie Elachi appreciates more in the weeks since she lost her home on Crescent Avenue in Altadena.
She and her husband Charles, director of JPL from 2001-2016 and professor emeritus at Caltech, lived a wonderful 40 years at their two-story pueblo-style home.
The one-of-a-kind house was built by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey for writer Zane Grey’s literary secretary in 1923.
Elachi, 76, said aside from a guesthouse behind the historic home, the Batchelder-tiled fireplace is one of the few things remaining of her property. The fireplace was central to the home’s living room, with its coffered ceiling and an actual stage at one end, where actress Mary Pickford performed at the many parties held there.
The Pasadena Museum of History’s Batchelder Tile Registry studies and preserves the work of Ernest Batchelder, which embodies the Arts and Crafts movement, said Iris Shih, project archivist at the museum. One of the preeminent tilemakers in the early 20th century, Batchelder tiles are highly collectible due to their rarity, historical significance and artistic quality, she said. “Batchelder’s tiles encapsulate the intersection of art, history and design,” Shih said.
Mildred Smith, who was also Grey’s mistress, welcomed guests who flew in from Hollywood to the Altadena Airport, established by Cecil B. DeMille near the Altadena Town and Country Club.
Irreplaceable doesn’t even begin to describe what’s been lost, Elachi said, watching tile masons chip away at the grout to free the tiles.
Within days of the three men’s call to action, more than 100 volunteers have mobilized to scout the burn area, catalog and survey sites, and contact homeowners. Helpers include experts from Altadena and Pasadena historical and heritage groups, neighboring architectural preservation groups and private museums, Garland said.
“So what’s next for the tile rescue team? Well, on day two, the scope of work is already creeping. It is now clear that we will be at this for years, and the mission is even more ambitious than we first understood and the lift just massive in scale,” Garland wrote online, sharing information about a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for professional tile masons and repairers. Right now, all professional work has been paid for by the campaign founders.
“This is exactly what we should be doing,” said Hans Allhoff, chair of Altadena Heritage and a Zane Grey aficionado. “We have to do more to restore what is lost because some things are not coming back.”
When Elachi installs the tiles in her rebuilt home, the those rectangles will become individual memoirs of place, he added, a continuing homage to writer Zane Grey, who immersed himself in the mountains of Altadena as many residents do.
For now, tiles are collected, repaired, cleaned and stored. All the homeowners the group has contacted want their tiles back, a good sign that local history will continue in some form. The group is looking for more tile masons to help, too.
For Zucker, seeing people rally around a cause that’s all about preserving art and history can reflect what’s happening post-fire.
“A large part of the old Altadena is gone, and what will be rebuilt is a mixture of the old and the new,” Zucker said. “Eric said it best when he said ‘Save the tiles. Save the town.’”