The Brief

Late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler started to imagine the worlds that would become best-selling books while a Pasadena public school student.

Washington Junior High School was renamed Octavia E. Butler Magnet in 2022, 60 years after she graduated the eighth grade.

Butler’s portrait gazes out at the students from murals above the library, in a second-floor hallway, and from the front of the school. Her legacy is alive in the school’s science-focused curriculum and in the annual SciFi writing contest and festival.

“I want [students] to realize that their ideas matter,” said school librarian Natalie Daily. “I think that Butler is a testament to that, you know, she was writing stuff and thinking about really, really deep ideas when she was a student here.”

Thanks to the author’s meticulous archives, which include her journals, early writings, and even her homework, students learn not just about the award-winning writer’s list of adult accomplishments, but the awkward adolescent who walked the very same halls.

“I did hear that she wasn't very talkative either, and she'd write a lot,” said eighth grader Dayana Diaz. “I felt like that's something we had in common.” Dayana's short story about the cost of war between humans on Mars and Jupiter won the school’s 2022 science fiction contest.

“People didn't believe in her,” Dayana said. “But she still made it either way and that's what I would like to do as well.”

Brock St. James with his daughters, Kobe Arnold, 2, and Guinevere Arnold, 7, inside the Octavia E. Butler Magnet library on March 22, 2024. The space is stocked with hundreds of books, board games, puzzles, and craft supplies.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

It started with the library

Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, a city shaped by policies and practices that limited where Black, Latino, and Asian people could buy houses, receive health care, eat at restaurants, and attend school.

The city’s libraries became her second home. Butler wrote her first novel from downtown Los Angeles’ Central Library.

“I'm a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries,” she wrote in a 1993 column sounding the alarm about the shrinking access to public literary spaces. “I'm Black, female, the child of a shoeshine man who died young and a maid who was uneducated but who knew her way to the library … At the library, I read books my mother could never have afforded on topics that would never have occurred to her.”

Butler was almost 6 feet tall by the time she was 12 and as anyone who has ever attended middle school knows, being different is not always greeted with kindness.

“She knew what it was like to be what she called the out kid, like the kid on the margins,” said Ayana Jamieson, a scholar of Butler’s life and assistant professor of ethnic studies at Cal Poly Pomona, as well as the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.

Butler’s professional writing career was inspired, in part, by the idea that she could do better than Devil Girl From Mars, a “terrible movie” she watched as a kid.

“I was very lucky to be born just in time for the space race to build public support for education,” Butler said in a 1998 MIT speech. “All of a sudden there were plenty of supplies, for instance, for science education.”

Students can see Octavia E. Butler's yearbook picture in the library.

(

Mariana Dale

/

LAist

)

A George Washington Junior High School certificate of promotion given to Octavia E. Butler in 1962. Butler graduated from John Muir High School in 1965.

(

Courtesy the Octavia E. Butler Papers

/

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

)

Butler worked and took classes at Pasadena City College.

“I wrote and wrote, and sent things out, and collected rejection slips until I realized that collecting rejection slips was masochistic,” Butler said in the same speech. “And I took the drawer and threw them all out.”

Butler sold her first short story at 23 and when she died in 2006, she’d created a dozen books and several short stories. Her narratives often center on humans trying to figure out how to navigate a dire future that is frightening in its familiarity, rather than its foreignness.

But Jamieson said there is hope in her stories.

“No one has the right answers, but we just have to do our best ... what we can, at the time when we have to make the decisions,” Jamieson said. “I think that's really powerful.”

Changing the name

The board approved the naming of the Octavia E. Butler Library in 2020. Former principal Shannon Malone, who wrote the proposal with librarian Natalie Daily, said it was a “no brainer.”

The reaction from parents was so positive Malone and Daily started to explore changing the school’s name. Institutions everywhere were reckoning with who is memorialized in public spaces and who is not.

“The context of the time made it more important for us to have a school named after someone whose genius started here in the halls,” Malone said. “To recognize someone who represented the community.”

“The idea is to have the exposure to a lot of different things so you can see yourselves in that science diaspora," said former principal Shannon Malone, of Octavia E. Butler Magnet's curriculum.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

The school’s existing name carried nearly 100 years of history. Washington Junior High School opened in Northwest Pasadena in 1924. Jet Propulsion Laboratory founders Jack Parsons and Edward Forman and baseball player Jackie Robinson are among the school’s earliest alumni.

The school was also at the center of a 1961 lawsuit, in which a judge eventually ruled that district leaders had created boundaries “for the purpose of instituting, maintaining, and intensifying racial segregation at Washington.”

A 1970 U.S. District Court ruling ordered Pasadena Unified to desegregate and students were bused to increase racial diversity. The following exodus of white students to private and charter schools drained resources from the district.

“Part of changing the name of the school was to almost give a reboot to that space for people to remember that, oh, great people have walked through here,” said Malone, who’s now a district administrator overseeing schools from transitional kindergarten to high school.

Leira Ruperto graduated from what was then Washington Junior High in 2000. Her family still lives within walking distance and her oldest son is in seventh grade this year. She anticipates her three younger sons will follow.

“The schools have changed dramatically from when I was going to school,” Ruperto said. “There's a lot more resources, there's a lot more help for the kids, they do a lot more activities for the kids.”

The school's full name is Octavia E. Butler Magnet, a dual langauge STEAM Middle School. The acronym stands for science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

In 2013, the school adopted a focus on science, technology, engineering, mathematics and art and in 2018 the school started a dual-language Spanish immersion program. There are also accelerated math classes, and a focus on college and career readiness.

While Pasadena Unified, like many Los Angeles school districts, faces declining enrollment, Octavia E. Butler Magnet has attracted 13% more students than five years ago.

California funds schools based on average student attendance, so more students bring more money to a school.

Ruperto said the new name can help teach students a subtle lesson.

“It's good for them to know like, ‘OK, things don't always last forever,'” Ruperto said. “Sometimes some kids kind of struggle with change.”

Ruperto’s answer recalls the gospel in Parable of the Sower: "All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.”

Learning from Butler

When Butler died in 2006, she left 398 boxes and 18 oversized folders of journals, manuscripts, notes and other ephemera to the Huntington Library, including many artifacts of her childhood.

At Octavia E. Butler Magnet’s library, students can see her picture in the 1961 yearbook, her eighth grade promotion certificate, assignments, even report cards from her time at the school.

Daily showed them to a student whose grades matched Butler’s at the time— Bs, Cs, and Ds.

“She just goes ‘Well this is very inspiring,’” Daily said. “That's what we're supposed to think. Like just the idea that somebody, she didn't have it all together in middle school yet. Look what she did.”

Ayleen Medina, 12, puts on an astronaut helmet prop during the Octavia E. Butler Library Science Fiction Festival in Pasadena on March 22, 2024.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Daily also said the reports prompt questions about how educators evaluate student success.

“What was she being graded on? Was that appropriate? Was she being graded on the things that made her shine?” Daily said. “Was what she was capable of valued? I think those questions are just as valid.”

There’s also a ranked list of “Favorite Movie Stars.” Nick Adams, was her top-ranked actor— five stars— for his role in the TV western series The Rebel.

“It just really shows that she was a middle school kid just like any other middle school kid,” Daily said.

There are drafts of short stories Butler wrote on her own time.

In “Evolution,” dated in July 1962, the month after she graduated from middle school, a woman finds a baby in a post-war landscape.

“It had two small hard lumps on its shoulders,” Butler wrote. “Probably some new kind of disease brought on by that war.”

The lumps grow and feathers emerge.

“It was time she thought of something to call it. Years before it would probably have had a name on the day of its birth. Now names did not matter much. There was no time for making friends,” the story continued. “A child with wings though. Such a child. deserved a name. There had been mutations before, but none like this.”

"Something that we really want our students to be able to do is have a sense of agency," said librarian Natalie Daily. "[Butler's] a really great model of someone who did exactly that."

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Daily visited the archives at the Huntington and said there’s about a dozen versions of the story.

“There's a lot going on in a kid's mind,” Daily said. “We really need to explore it with them and encourage them to keep pulling those threads.”

A new generation of explorers, creators

Octavia E. Butler Magnet educators are encouraged to weave the author’s work into their classrooms.

Eighth grade English teacher Roslyn Terré, a science fiction lover and aspiring writer, recently assigned students a poem based on one of Butler’s.

“They were able to say things like, ‘I am my power,’ ‘I am great,’ ‘I have skills,’” Terré said. “They each talked about their different talents and then how those talents would take them into the future.”

Eighth grader Brooklyn Roffman started exploring Butler’s work after the library was renamed: First, the graphic novel adaptations of her work, then “the real thing.”

In “Speech Sounds,” a disease wipes out much of humanity and those left struggle to communicate.

“I get a lot of social anxiety, and sometimes I don't really have the right words,” Brooklyn said. “So that, I don't know, felt personal to me.”

Brooklyn describes herself as a mix of African American, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

“There's been a lot of like, feeling like I'm not Black enough, if that makes sense. Or like, I'm not enough of what I am,” Brooklyn said. “I don't fit into any of the boxes. And so in a lot of Octavia's works, it's quite often about characters who don't really fit into a box.”

"When you go out and like meet a mushroom, I recommend smelling them," said Aaron Tupac (left), 32, a mycologist at the Octavia E. Butler Library Science Fiction Festival on March 22, 2024. "Some smell like farts, some smell like uh, apricots, some smell really sweet, some smell like things that you never smelled before. There's over 300 different mushroom smells."

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Daily organizes an annual science fiction contest to honor students’ short narrative, poetry, art, and graphic fiction.

“We don't want them to just be consumers of sci fi, which is awesome,” Daily said. “We also want them to be creators of it.”

Each year, every submission is collected into a book for the students.

The school also holds an annual Science Fiction Festival. This year students could make space-inspired art, code robots, and compete in a cosplay contest.

“It's just ways for kids to be engaged in both science and art, and creation,” Daily said. “To see themselves as part of all of it.”

In the spring of 2020, the library was re-named the Octavia E. Butler Library. “Something that I really try to provide as a space for the library to just kind of be a central location,” Daily said. “[I] try to keep it at the heart of the school so kids want to keep coming back.”

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

Butler, "La Autora," is part of a lotería mural created by Jen Swain in 2023 on the school's second floor.

(

Julie Leopo

/

LAist

)

In one classroom, mycologist Aaron Tupac laid out an array of dried mushrooms for inspection.

“Have ya’ll ever met any mushrooms in your neighborhood?” they asked.

Grayson Schnnitger watched as Tupac zoomed in on the spores of a Turkey Tail specimen with a microscope.

“I haven't ever learned about [mushrooms] before,” Grayson said. “So it was something new.”

Just one example of the middle school exploration, many students were eager to tell LAist about.

Eighth grader Maxine Molnar joined the musical theater club. She’s portrayed Linus in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown and a friend to Jasmine in Aladdin.

“I've explored more of, like, what I enjoy doing,” Maxine said. “What I'm really good at and things that I also need to work on.”

Arturo Nuño has learned to code robots in an after-school club — a discovery preceded by an earlier failed after-school experiment. “This is actually a funny story,” Arturo said. “First my mom put me in Glee, but I didn't really like it.”

Sixth grader Naila Walker recently dissected a chicken leg — “It was really gross, but really fun at the same time.”

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

(

Courtesy Steve Campos

)

It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

(

Laura Hertfeldz

/

LAist

)

New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

(

Laura Hertzfeld

/

LAist

)

“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”