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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Julie Leopo

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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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Julie Leopo

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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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Julie Leopo

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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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Zaydee Sanchez

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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.

Watch the Video

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting agreed Monday to fulfill a $36 million, multi-year contract with NPR that it had yanked after pressure from the Trump White House.

The arrangement resolves litigation filed by NPR accusing the corporation of illegally yielding to Trump's demands that the network be financially punished for its news coverage. The argument, part of a broader lawsuit by NPR and several stations against the Trump administration, focused on CPB funding for NPR's operation of a satellite distribution system for local public radio stations. NPR announced Monday it would waive all fees for the stations associated with the satellite service.

The judge in the case had explicitly told CPB's legal team he did not find its defense credible. CPB lawyers had argued that the decision to award the contract to a new consortium of public media institutions was driven by a desire to foster digital innovations more swiftly.

"The settlement is a victory for editorial independence and a step toward upholding the First Amendment rights of NPR and the public media system in our legal challenge to [Trump's] Executive Order," Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR, said in a statement. "While we entered into this dispute with CPB reluctantly, we're glad to resolve it in a way that enables us to continue to provide for the stability of the Public Radio Satellite System, offer immediate and direct support to public radio stations across the country, and proceed with our strong and substantive claims against this illegal and unconstitutional Executive Order. We look forward to our day in court in December."

In its submission Monday evening to the court, CPB did not concede that it had acted wrongfully — nor that it had yielded to political pressure from the administration.

Instead, in a statement posted on its website, CPB asserted its side "prevails" as a result of the settlement.

"This is an important moment for public media," said Patricia Harrison, President and CEO of CPB. "We are very pleased that this costly and unnecessary litigation is over, and that our investment in the future through [Public Media Infrastructure] marks an exciting new era for public media." CPB had awarded a rival contract to PMI, a newly created consortium of public radio organizations including several major stations, to ensure the digital distribution system functions properly. That contract will continue, CPB said.

Federal subsidies for public broadcasting stopped on Oct. 1 as a result of a party-line vote over the summer by Congress, called a rescission. Only a skeleton crew remains at CPB, which was created as a nonprofit corporation more than a half-century ago to funnel federal subsidies to public media. While PBS has had layoffs and NPR is monitoring its own finances, many local stations across the country have been hit hard.

Over the course of the litigation this fall, mounting evidence appeared to demonstrate that CPB's board chair and executives had acted against NPR in what turned out to be a futile attempt to salvage the corporation's own future.

In hearings last month in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss told CPB's legal team they had not made a credible case for why the corporation reneged on the contract just a day after a top White House official warned senior CPB leaders against doing business with NPR. A trial had been set to start on Dec. 1.

CPB's change of mind — and NPR's ensuing lawsuit — sparked consternation and unease within the larger public media ecosystem. The two organizations had served as partners for decades. But that relationship frayed earlier this year, as the system came under attack from the Trump administration.

Trump's public campaign against NPR and PBS started in earnest soon after he returned to the White House. Trump kicked it into high gear in late March with a series of social media posts.

In early April, CPB leaders sought to get money out the door before Trump took action against public media. On April 2, CPB's board approved the extension of a contract with NPR to distribute public radio programs, including those not produced by NPR. The arrangement stretched back four decades. The amount included millions still due on the then-current contract.

The next day, CPB's board chair and two senior executives met with a top White House budget official who attested to her "intense dislike for NPR." The budget official told them CPB didn't have to "throw the baby out with the bathwater," according to a deposition from CPB executive Clayton Barsoum submitted as part of NPR's legal filings.

And the day after that — just 48 hours after that board vote — CPB reversed itself. CPB executive Kathy Merritt informed NPR's top official over the satellite and distribution service that it had to be spun off: it could not be part of NPR. NPR refused to do so. CPB revised the scope of the contract and solicited new bids. NPR's submission proved unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the White House was ramping up the pressure. It accused NPR and PBS of bias. On April 14, for example, it issued a formal statement that called their offerings "radical, woke propaganda disguised as 'news'." NPR and PBS's chief executives have rejected the accusations of bias.

On May 1, Trump issued an executive order that no federal money should go to the two public broadcasting networks. NPR and three Colorado public radio stations then filed suit against the White House, saying they were being unlawfully punished because the president did not like their news coverage. They contended the executive order represented a violation of First Amendment protections. Their suit names CPB as a defendant as well for, in their characterization, bending to the president's will. In Monday's legal filing, CPB agreed that the executive order was precisely the sort of government interference that Congress sought to prevent in establishing CPB as it did.

In the summer, Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress, urged on by Trump, pulled back all $1.1 billion for future public broadcasting that had already been approved and signed into law by the president.

Throughout the legal battle, NPR has said, regardless of the outcome of the case, it would work with Public Media Infrastructure.

NPR's broader constitutional case against Trump's executive order purporting to ban federal funding of public media continues. A hearing on its merits is scheduled for December.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editors Gerry Holmes and Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
Copyright 2025 NPR

A long-awaited vision for Huntington Drive is finally coming into focus. In the future, the busy corridor will have dedicated bus lanes, protected bike lanes, two lanes of vehicle traffic in each direction, a thin median and wide sidewalks.

This was the plan chosen by the City for the Huntington Drive Multi-Modal Transportation Improvement Project, which runs on an approximately four-mile stretch of the street between North Mission Road near LAC+USC Medical Center and Alhambra/South Pasadena. This had much more public support than the competing alternative, which featured a wide median rather than wide sidewalks, according to Mary Nemick, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Engineering.

Nemick said the next step is to hire a consultant to create design and engineering documents. This phase is expected to take about two years before groundbreaking can occur.

Currently, Huntington Drive has three vehicular lanes in each direction, the bike lanes are unprotected, and about 25% of the corridor lacks sidewalks. Though pedestrians and bicyclists account for only 1% of peak-hour trips, they account for 54% of severe or fatal injuries from traffic collisions, according to a project document.

The design budget is about $10.5 million, Nemick said, and the overall project cost will be determined after designs are completed.

The project is being funded by some of the money previously allocated for the construction of the 710 Freeway extension, which was abandoned in 2018 after decades of local opposition.

The Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey held a groundbreaking ceremony Monday for a roughly 40,000-square-foot expansion that will include indoor and outdoor science learning areas and space for special exhibits.

The centerpiece of the buildout will include an interactive display of the Inspiration space shuttle mockup, where visitors can go inside the cargo bay.

Built in 1972, the 35-foot-tall model made of wood, plastic and aluminum functioned as a prototype and fitting tool for all of the orbiters that launched into space.

“We’re super excited to be able to put it on display for the public, really for the first time in forever,” Ben Dickow, president and executive director of the Columbia Memorial Space Center, told LAist.

The expansion will also allow for educational areas, where students can learn about the pioneering engineering and design work that went into building the model at Rockwell International in Downey.

The backstory

Last fall, after sitting in storage for more than a decade, the full-scale model was moved a few blocks to a temporary home.

The Inspiration space shuttle mockup was moved in sections to a temporary home last fall

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The Space Center said renovation work on the mock up will take months and include rehabs of its 60-foot cargo bay and flight deck.

Dickow said Downey is where all of the Apollo capsules that went to the moon and all of the space shuttles were designed and built.

“This is part of the L.A. story as much as entertainment or anything like that,” Dickow said, adding that it’s a legacy he feels like Angelenos sometimes forget. “The space craft that took humanity to the moon, the space craft that brought humanity into lower earth orbit and built the international space station, these are human firsts... and they all happened right here.”

What’s next? 

The Space Center is looking to raise $50 million that would go toward building plans, special exhibits and more.

Dickow said the new building that will house the space shuttle mockup should be open to the public in about two years.

By early next year, he said the plan is to have the shuttle model available for bi-monthly public visits as it undergoes renovation.