The Brief

 When thousands of homes were reduced to ash by the Eaton Fire, one of the few things left behind were the chimneys — and the kiln-fired tiles that adorned them.

“They were born of fire,” says Eric Garland, co-founder of Save The Tiles and long-time Altadena resident. The tiles were popular during Altadena’s architectural boom of the 1910s and ‘20s, “and were a defining characteristic of a handcrafted, unique home.”

But Phase 2 of the debris cleanup has begun in parts of the community, meaning the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will bulldoze burned lots down to 6 inches below topsoil.

“What will be lost is not only the very last of old Altadena, but for that homeowner, emotionally priceless artwork that surrounded the hearth,” Garland says.

“That's the countdown clock that we're racing.”

Save the tiles, save the town

I meet Eric Garland on a Saturday in a parking lot just outside the burn zone. We drive through the destroyed streets of Altadena toward a tile rescue site.

Mangled cars, a few stray planters, the occasional mailbox. And lots and lots of still-standing chimneys.

Garland tells me he and his family were out of town when fire tore through their neighborhood. His neighbors, minutes after watching their own homes burn, stamped out embers and dumped buckets of pool water onto other houses to establish a perimeter.

Garland’s home was the first they were able to save.

“Your first mission is to save your life,” Garland says. “Your next mission, save your home. And failing that, you've got to try to save what you can. You draw a line and say this is as far as the loss goes.”

Garland credits his daughter Lucy with the idea to rescue the tiles. As they walked along Holliston Street, through what remained of their neighborhood, he remembered her asking, “Is there nothing else that survived?”

Now  “we're hearing from so many homeowners that if you could save even one tile,” he says, “it would be the only thing I have left.”

Neighbors and Save the Tiles co-founders Eric Garland, left, and Stanley Zucker have cataloged more than 200 historic fireplaces in Altadena.

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‘All that’s left’

We arrive at a job site — the outline of a destroyed craftsman home on Palm Street. The once-lush courtyard of bougainvillea and lavender has given way to a blackened jumble of ash and stray nails.

It’s dead quiet, save for the occasional car and the steady beat of hammer and chisel.

Garland introduces me to his neighbor and Save the Tiles co-founder, Stanley Zucker. “My partner in tile,” he adds.

Stanley Zucker helps Mary Gandsey climb out of a burnt Altadena home on Palm Street.

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Zucker grabs empty cardboard boxes from the truck, and carefully hops over what was once a side wall into the interior of the home. “Watch out for up-turned nails,” he warns me, leading the way through the rubble to the chimney.

For a homeowner, he says, “all of their memories, everything on this lot that was important to them, is channeled into the tiles, because they’re all that’s left.”

Expertise required

The fireplace opening stands about four feet above the home’s burned foundation. A few planks of makeshift scaffolding allow access to the tiled facade.

Cliff Douglas and his daughter, Devon, take turns chiseling grout and taping off slabs of tile. “Team Douglas,” Garland calls them. “The third co-founders.”

The older Douglas specializes in masonry restoration — an important skill for a project that involves tiles prone to cracking and chimneys that could topple. Garland says Cliff has already had to ask some volunteers not to come back — they cracked too many tiles.

Cliff Douglas hands a taped-off Batchelder tile to his daughter, Devon Douglas.

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Pressing his ear to the fireplace, Douglas gently taps with the blunt end of the chisel, listening for hollow spots. Once he’s confident, he tapes off the large central tile and grabs his hammer.

"Ernest Batchelder. He’s the artist who made these tiles — in his backyard, originally, on Arroyo Boulevard and La Loma,” Douglas says. “Then they moved to downtown Los Angeles.”

Douglas believes these tiles were likely made shortly after the move, about a hundred years ago. The design is in line with Batchelder’s earlier work, but the stamp on the back says “Los Angeles.”

Similar individual tiles regularly sell for hundreds of dollars, and Batchelder’s work represents one of L.A’s biggest contributions to the American Arts and Crafts movement.

“ They're beautiful pieces of art,   and hopefully we can bring them back to life again,” Douglas says.

“Maybe a fireplace when they rebuild, or maybe a little memorial area.”

Devon Douglas, left, Cliff Douglas, and Mary Gandsey take a break from recovering fireplace tiles.

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Painstaking work

It can take several hours to recover tile from a single fireplace, and with more than 200 houses on the list, Team Douglas needed to expand. So Zucker connected them with an old friend, one of the best in the business.

Mary Gandsey is an expert restorer of wood whose resume includes the Gamble House and Castle Green. Today she’s training under Douglas so she can lead the recovery at other sites.

Gandsey says she came out of retirement because she loves these homes and has worked on many of them. “Now that they're all gone," she says, "I want to save some piece of what was here for the future.”

Boxes of recovered tiles will be cataloged and stored so that they can be returned to homeowners later.

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200 chimneys, 200 stories

As Douglas swaps his hammer and chisel for an angle grinder, Garland gets a call from another homeowner — she has signed the consent form that allows the team to enter her home. It’s a five-minute walk away.

On our way out of the gate, we run into Myungeun and Dan Strickland, who are back to visit the remnants of their home and check in on the neighborhood.

The Stricklands are an elderly couple who lived on Palm Street for more than 20 years. They lost everything: antique Korean furniture, historic family documents from Massachusetts and old family photographs.

But remarkably, her orchids are growing back, Strickland says, and she’s hoping her charred pomegranate tree survives too.

On our walk, we pass block after block of empty lots — extending our line of sight for miles in every direction.

The Eaton Fire burned through nearly 22 square miles, leveling entire neighborhoods of Altadena. But many fireplaces and chimneys survived.

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Elizabeth Richie meets us on the concrete steps of her home.

Richie was the first person Garland met after the fires. The intense heat had changed the tiles on her fireplace from “tans and browns to turquoise, with pinks and whites in it,” she says. “The original colors.”

The devastation had scoured clean a century’s worth of smoke, soot and everything else.

“This over here was the original rose garden that my friend’s grandmother had when she lived here,” Richie says. “And we had big grapevines over here.”

She pauses, and points beyond a few burned cars. “That was the back house, where Ozzie lived with his dogs,” she says.

“The police tried to get him out but he wouldn’t leave, he’d been here since he was 7 years old. At the very end, he just ran out of time.”

Oswald Altmetz, Richie’s long-time family friend, died along with his dogs that night. He was 75.

The magnitude of loss will always be with her, Richie says. But she’s finding ways to preserve what remains. She plans to use the aluminum slag from the burned cars in an art project, and a stone Buddha in the garden survived unscathed.

And she’s grateful to still have her fireplace tiles.

“ There's still beauty and hope here,” she adds.

A community determined to rebuild

Back on Palm Street, Gandsey and the Douglases are loading the truck with boxes of tile. Zucker is talking to a new recruit, a librarian who will help to track and catalog the growing tile archive.

Garland says it could be years before people are ready to reclaim their tiles — and the team is preparing to store them for as long as it takes. 

Homeowners Carie Lewis and Christophe Basset arrive, and tell Garland they plan to rebuild. They already have the blueprints for their original craftsman, the couple says.

“We're probably going to talk to Cliff to restore a fireplace in the new building. With the same tiles, of course,” says Basset.

Like Richie, they were surprised to see the surviving tiles become so much more vibrant and colorful. “So maybe it'll be a bit of new and a bit of really ancient coming back together,” Basset says.

“Which is what all of Altadena is going to be,” Zucker adds.

Save The Tiles is running a GoFundMe campaign, with proceeds going to the Altadena Historical Society.

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Facing federal funding cuts that could strip health coverage from hundreds of thousands of Angelenos, clinic leaders, union members and patients gathered in Inglewood last Wednesday to boost a stop-gap proposal they want to put in front of voters: a county sales tax to stave off service cuts and keep more sick people from seeking primary care in emergency rooms.

A newly formed coalition, Restore Healthcare for Angelenos, is asking the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to place a five-year, half-cent sales tax measure on the June ballot in Los Angeles County.

“The ballot measure that we are proposing is an urgent and necessary step to stop the damage, to protect access to life-saving care,” said Louise McCarthy, president and CEO of the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County, one of the organizations in the coalition. “The stakes right now could not be higher.”

As the federal spending plan, H.R. 1, starts to take effect, Medi-Cal cuts and eligibility changes will affect millions of Californians. The state estimates it could lose tens of billions of dollars a year in federal funding.

According to the coalition, their proposal would raise about $1 billion annually for health care in Los Angeles County. The revenue would help create a local coverage program that would pay for primary and emergency care as well as behavioral health needs for people who fall off their Medi-Cal insurance and have no other coverage options, according to the coalition. When people are uninsured, uncompensated care at clinics and hospitals grow, threatening the availability of services for everyone, coalition leaders say.

The coalition is working with Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose office on Wednesday presented the motion to the county — an initial step before public debate. The board is expected to vote next month; the deadline for placing a board-sponsored measure on the June ballot is March 6.

“I do not take lightly asking fellow residents to consider imposing a ½ percent retail tax,” Mitchell said in an emailed statement. “This option is on the table because what’s at stake are safety net services unraveling for millions of residents — which would come at an even greater cost for the largest county in the nation.”

She added that if the measure passed it would sunset on Oct. 1, 2031 and would be subject to public oversight and audits. “This is a last resort option for the times we’re facing and for voters to make the final call on,” Mitchell said.

If the board of supervisors does not approve the measure for a June vote, the coalition will gather signatures toward qualifying the initiative for the November ballot, said Jim Mangia, CEO of St. John’s Community Health, another coalition member.

Efforts to shore up health care access for poor Californians aren’t unique to Los Angeles. Pressure is building for state and county leaders to find new revenue streams to make up at least in part for the federal losses. In a legislative hearing Tuesday, health providers and advocates also urged state lawmakers to seek creative funding solutions.

Last November, voters in Santa Clara County approved a tax similar to the one proposed in Los Angeles County. Santa Clara’s Measure A will raise the local sales tax by five-eights of a cent for five years. The county projects that it will provide $330 million annually for local hospitals and clinics.

Both local proposals are separate from the push led by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West for a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of the state’s approximately 200 billionaires, which would generate an estimated $100 billion to fund  medical care and other social services at the state level. Gov. Gavin Newsom opposes the initiative, arguing that such a tax would drive wealthy people — who pay a significant portion of the state’s income taxes — from the state. That measure has not yet qualified for the November ballot.

Local and state tax proposals could seemingly compete for the attention of voters, since both are responses to the issue of federal funding cuts. And in L.A., voters may have to consider a number of other tax measures this election year from a city hotel tax in June to a sales tax to support the Los Angeles Fire Department in November.

Mangia sees the tax initiatives to fund health care as complementary. He said the state tax on billionaires would help restore some of federal cuts to Medi-Cal at the state level, while the L.A County measure would help shore up the local safety net.

“We’re doing this to make sure that no matter what happens federally, statewide, residents of L.A. County will have access to health care,” Mangia said.

Among the most prominent changes and cuts made in Trump’s major budget reconciliation law are a new requirement for enrollees to log 80 hours per month of school, work or volunteering starting in 2027; a rule that requires people to renew coverage every six months rather than annually; restrictions on taxes that the state places on insurers to help pay for the Medi-Cal program; and a reduction in how much the feds will pay for the emergency care of non-citizens.

State health officials estimate 2 million Californians could lose their Medi-Cal coverage over the next several years.

Under its own growing budget pressures, the state has also rolled back coverage for certain groups. Starting earlier this month state health officials froze Medi-Cal enrollment for undocumented people — the state foots most of the cost for this group because with the exception of emergency care, federal dollars cannot be used to cover individuals who are in the country illegally. This summer the state will also cut non-emergency dental care for undocumented adults already enrolled in the program.

If you’re up for a drive out to the desert, the annual Death Valley Dark Sky festival is happening Feb. 6 to 8.

Kind of like the Coachella of star gazing, the weekend is packed with opportunities to spot celestial bodies through telescopes and hear scientists talk about everything from black holes to cutting edge radio telescopes.

Cameron Hummels, a research scientist and director of astrophysics outreach at Caltech, said he’s headed out to this convening of star gazers in Death Valley for five years.

He said it’s one thing to go to public science talks or watch them on YouTube, “but to have a visceral experience of looking through a telescope at a dark night sky is like something you have to go to a place to do."

Friday and Saturday will include outdoor star parties, where attendees can get access to the dozens of telescopes they’ll have set up.

The weekend’s programming will include talks from NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists, space-themed pub trivia at the Badwater Saloon and guided walks of the Death Valley spots that helped experts design missions off our planet.

“Because [Death Valley is] such an exposed landscape, it makes a really good planetary analog for a lot of the other locations in our solar system. Whether it’s the moon or Mars or some of the other objects in our solar system,” Hummels told LAist.

On Saturday, Hummels will lead a presentation on the “formation and evolution of galaxies.”

These dark sky events — known as astro-tourism — are becoming more popular, Hummels said. People seem to be increasingly interested in space in the last five years or so. And there are other pluses of laying out under the stars with a friend.

“I think anytime you get into the great outdoors you’re gonna have mental health benefits... I can highly recommend this to people as both an educational opportunity but [also] a place to see our place in the universe and have a fun chill weekend,” Hummels said.

And if you need a more terrestrial reason to make the trip out to Death Valley? All that rain we had is making for good wildflower conditions.

“Death Valley is poised for a better-than-average bloom, and with a little luck, it could even be better than that,” David Blacker, Death Valley National History Association executive director, wrote in his Wildflower Report earlier this month.

Organized by the National Park Service, the festival is a collaboration between NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ames Research Center, Caltech and other institutions.

How to go

Death Valley Dark Sky Festival 2026

Friday, Feb. 6 to Sunday, Feb. 8.

All locations and times for talks, tours and star parties are listed on the National Park Service’s website.

All public events are free with entry to Death Valley National Park.

According to the Recording Academy itself, the Grammy for best new artist is for musicians who are having "a breakthrough into the public consciousness."

What did it look like to have a breakthrough moment in 2025? More often than not, it meant having a hit song on TikTok. At this weekend's Grammys, all eight best new artist nominees are musicians whose popularity skyrocketed thanks to the app.

"If there's anything that speaks to TikTok's power right now, I think it's this category in particular," says Robert Steiner, a media analyst at the music and entertainment insights company Luminate.

Last year, Luminate partnered with TikTok on a Music Impact report. It found what many powerbrokers in the music industry have known for awhile: The app is not only a large source of music discovery, but also a leading driver of chart success. According to the report, 84% of songs that entered Billboard's Global 200 chart went viral on TikTok first.

And music, in turn, is essential to the app as well. Steiner says going all the way back to its roots in Musically — a platform for lip-syncing videos — songs have been the currency for TikTok's biggest memes and dances.

"A lot of the trends that we see on TikTok are audio-based. Obviously video is part of it, but the sound is a huge aspect of it as well," Steiner says. "It was set up to really capitalize on audio becoming a key driver to the app, and I think as a result, it does seem like they created at least a segment of their user base that is very musically inclined."

Looking at this year's Grammy nominations, the best new artist contenders run the gamut from indie darlings who started making music a decade ago to former Hype House TikTok creators who launched recording careers in 2025. All eight nominees used the app in their ascent to pop stardom — but did they rise through the music industry into TikTok virality? Or the other way around?

Olivia Dean

The English singer is not a newcomer; as she told NPR's Morning Edition in September, she's been recording and releasing music for nearly a decade. In 2023, her album Messy was shortlisted for the U.K.'s Mercury Prize. But in 2025, the warm soul-pop melodies of her album The Art of Loving put her on the map in a major way. The single "Man I Need" became a hit on TikTok — it's been used in 1.7 million videos so far, according to the app — and quickly climbed the charts.

Did Olivia Dean come from TikTok or the music industry: The music industry. 

KATSEYE

Born out of a reality television competition show in 2023, KATSEYE is a global girl group seemingly created for TikTok virality — and so far, the sextet has delivered. In 2025, singles like "Gnarly" and "Gabriela" steadily climbed the charts; but perhaps more importantly, they soundtracked millions of videos on TikTok. Choreography from KATSEYE's Gap commercial (set to "Milkshake" by Kelis, not their own song) became a dance trend too, heralded as a clap back to Sydney Sweeney's controversial American Eagle jeans ad. In December, TikTok officially crowned KATSEYE its Global Artist of 2025.

Did KATSEYE come from TikTok or the music industry? Both.

The Marías

The indie pop band started releasing synth-driven, bilingual songs nearly a decade ago and collaborated with Bad Bunny on his 2022 album Un Verano Sin Ti. But it was a demo of their song "No One Noticed," which lead singer María Zardoya released unofficially on her TikTok account, that would become the band's biggest song to date, and was later officially released on their 2024 album Submarine. Zardoya told podcast host Zach Sang that despite being a slower, introspective song — the opposite of what the band's label wanted at the time — fans gravitated towards it on social media.

Did The Marías come from TikTok or the music industry? The industry via the independent route — they built a fanbase and eventually landed a record deal with Atlantic, then hit big on the app. 

Addison Rae

Originally from Lafayette, La. — cue the Britney Spears comparisons — Addison Rae became a TikTok sensation in 2019 by posting videos of herself dancing to viral songs. She moved to Los Angeles, joined the Hype House and amassed millions of followers, all of which then helped build momentum for a music career. After a co-sign from Charli XCX on the "Von Dutch" remix, she released her effervescent debut album Addison in June.

Did Addison Rae come from TikTok or the music industry? TikTok. 

sombr

Hailing from New York City's Lower East Side, the Gen Z rocker sombr has had his share of viral TikTok songs. His 2022 single "Caroline" was the first, helping him get signed to Warner Records when he was still 17 years old. Two more followed in 2025; his singles "Back to Friends" and "Undressed" were used on hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos and both steadily climbed Billboard's Hot 100 chart, months before sombr released his debut album I Barely Know Her.

Did sombr come from TikTok or the music industry? Both. 

Leon Thomas

A child Broadway star and former Nickelodeon actor, it's safe to say Leon Thomas has been grinding for decades. After being mentored by Babyface for years, the 32-year-old has produced for artists ranging from his Victorious co-star Ariana Grande to Rick Ross. In 2024, he won a Grammy for best R&B song for his contributions to SZA's "Snooze." But Thomas' sophomore album, MUTT, landed him directly in the spotlight — its lead single took off on TikTok and climbed Billboard's Hot 100 chart. Of this year's best new artist contenders, Thomas is the most widely recognized by the Recording Academy; he landed five additional nominations, including for album of the year.

Did Leon Thomas come from TikTok or the music industry? The music industry. 

Alex Warren

Another member of the Hype House collective, Alex Warren went from posting massively popular pranking videos online to releasing a romantic ballad — and instant wedding playlist staple — that spent months climbing Billboard's Hot 100 chart. "Ordinary" became one of the biggest hits of the summer, and earned Warren an invitation to perform with country superstar Luke Combs at Lollapalooza.

Did Alex Warren come from TikTok or the music industry? TikTok.

Lola Young 

Often drawing comparisons to previous best new artist winner Amy Winehouse, the 25-year-old had already released several albums before her 2024 single "Messy" went viral on TikTok. Young's songs had already been gaining traction on the app for a while — videos of her performing "Don't Hate Me" on a playground in 2023 racked up millions of views — but "Messy" became a different kind of phenomenon. Before performing at Coachella last spring, Young told NPR's Morning Edition that she does not identify as a TikToker, but recognized the massive impact the app has had on her career.

Did Lola Young come from TikTok or the music industry? The music industry.

More than a century after it first opened its doors, the Vermont Square Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library still is operating out of its original building, nestled among the homes on West 48th Street.

It’s not just a library. For generations, it’s been considered a safe place and gathering spot for people who otherwise may have no place to go. Today, the neighborhood council uses the room in the library’s basement for meetings, the grassy area out back is a place to relax, and for some, the building is a refuge from hot- and cold-weather days.

Of course, people also go there to read books, for free access to the internet and for children’s programming. But they also go there to find peace and quiet amid the hustle and bustle of inner-city Los Angeles.

“It feels safe. It’s pretty big. It’s nice inside and comfortable. There are people to talk to, and I can meet friends,” resident Moses Rogers told The LA Local.

The Vermont Square Branch was built in 1913 on what had been park land donated by the city of Los Angeles. It was funded with a Carnegie Foundation grant, the philanthropy of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who funded the arts, higher education and public libraries after making his fortune in steel in the late 19th century.

The library is not the oldest branch in the city system, but it’s the first library building owned by the city. All other city libraries and facilities were housed in rented spaces.

It was designed in the architectural style of the Italian Renaissance, and you still can find the original circulation desk, windows that allow in natural light, old furniture and marble fixtures inside the library.

Branch manager Martha Sherod has worked at the library for 13 ½ years and calls the Vermont Square Branch a hidden treasure that some in the neighborhood can overlook. She said some people think it’s a government building, but for the people who grew up using the library, it symbolizes being home.

“People come here for a purpose, they want to be here. We really like serving them,” Sherod told The LA Local. “Now that I’ve been here so long, I’ve seen kids grow up from being little kids to college students. So, it’s really been a joy for me.”

Sherod said the branch holds about 24,000 items and has 4,500 visitors a month on average. The library also offers adult and teen programming, including free legal advice, health screenings, arts and crafts and book club activities.

“The library isn’t just for quietly sitting and reading. There’s usually a lot of good activities happening. There are resources that you can use at home by downloading or just coming in here,” Sherod said.

The Vermont Square Branch was designated by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission in 1983 after the community rallied to keep the building from being replaced. The exterior of the building remains the same, although the library was retrofitted for earthquake safety in 1990, a process that caused the branch to close to the public for six years.

Longtime Vermont Square resident Fletcher Fair told The LA Local she’s been going to the branch since the late 1960s, and the library will always be a cornerstone of the community.

“It’s the neighborhood library, and that’s where everyone went and prospered. We hung out, studied and partied,” she said. “There were a lot of events here.”