The race to save historic Altadena fireplace tiles — because they're all that’s left

 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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