Scenic and charming and tucked into the foothills, Altadena seemed like a secret just outside the reaches of Los Angeles.
“I felt it was like back home — peaceful and calm and a little secluded,” said Shirley Taylor, who was raised in North Carolina and arrived in 1979.
The town also offered a striking element: a flourishing community of middle-class Black families. Ms. Taylor, a manager for the Social Security Administration, knew she and her two sons would fit right in.
She purchased a three-bedroom Craftsman on Las Flores Drive for about $75,000 that offered a view of the mountains from the master bedroom.
“Oh, it was beautiful,” she said. “I called it ‘my little country home.’”
Around them, a community thrived. Everyone was an auntie or uncle or cousin. Neighborhood barbecues were lively events. Children played in the streets and hurried home when someone rang a bell at sunset. A network of artists, county employees, blue-collar workers and retirees bloomed.
Now, the future of what was historically a Black enclave within Altadena is in peril, after Ms. Taylor and many other residents lost homes in the blistering Eaton fire. Entire neighborhoods in the town of about 42,000 have become deserts of ash. The loss of homes is staggering. The loss of a unique haven, shattering.
Nearly 21 percent of the residents directly affected by the Eaton fire are Black — a high proportion, considering that Black residents account for only 8 percent of the overall population of Los Angeles County. Some of those who lost homes did not have fire insurance.
“It’s very painful, because it feels like a family of people have been destroyed, and I don’t know if that family will come together again, with property in California being as expensive as it is,” said Ms. Taylor, 75.
Neighbors have been horrified to learn the names of the dead.
Rodney Nickerson, 82, a retired aerospace engineer who loved to fish. Victor Shaw, 66, a former courier whose body was found in his front yard with a garden hose in his hand. Dalyce Curry, 95, a former actress known for the old blue Cadillac she had long vowed to restore. Erliene Kelley, 83, a retired pharmacy technician who doted on her grandchildren.
They, along with other Black victims of the fire, lived west of Lake Avenue, where many early homeowners of color were pushed because of redlining — a discriminatory bank-lending practice that effectively precluded them from buying in white neighborhoods. Even after redlining was outlawed, the practice continued informally through steering by real estate agents.
The west side of Altadena became racially diverse, home to a small number of Asian Americans, a substantial Latino population as well as Black residents. It had cheaper, more modest homes on smaller lots than the other side of town, east of Lake Avenue, a major street that bisects the community and runs from the San Gabriel Mountains south to the 210 Freeway.
Altadena was overwhelmingly white in the 1950s, at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. When Black residents slowly began to appear, they were not embraced.
Wanda Williams, 74, recalled that her father, who worked with the Union Pacific Railroad, was not allowed to buy a home in Los Angeles because of redlining. When the family settled in Altadena around 1953, they were one of two Black families in the whole neighborhood. Ms. Williams recalled how an older white woman would spray a garden hose at her when she rode by on her bike.
Around that time, a neighborhood watch group known as S.E.N.C.H., each letter standing for a street name, was started by a Black resident in part to address a strained relationship with the sheriff’s department.
In 1968, the Fair Housing Act prohibited race-based discrimination against home buyers and renters, and helped to change the racial makeup of Altadena. Black families who were pushed out of urban housing in neighboring Pasadena made their way in, and the area became sought after by families from the South.
About a decade later, the Black proportion of the Altadena population peaked at nearly 43 percent, according to census data. With the surge came additional scrutiny from the authorities, as well as white flight, according to Michele Zack, a local historian who wrote a book about Altadena, an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that lacks a city council or mayor of its own.
“Real estate agents actually scared a lot of white homeowners, especially those west of Lake Avenue, and said, ‘We can’t be responsible for your property values falling, so get out now,’” Ms. Zack said.
“They would get white owners in modest areas to sell their houses cheap, and then bring in Black people and sell to them at higher prices,” she said. “So there was a lot of land that was exchanged in a panic mode.”
A considerable number of the first-time home buyers from that period stayed in Altadena for good. These days, about a quarter of Black residents in Altadena are 65 or older.
Many of Altadena’s Black families passed their houses down from parents to children, and hoped they would be the foundation of generational wealth.
All of that made for a community where, if you didn’t know someone directly, you probably knew someone related to them. Entire blocks operated like extended families, anyway.
“My neighbor on one side, she taught me how to cheerlead, and then an older lady, Mrs. Cheatham, she’d babysit us,” said Regina Major. “But if you were in trouble, she’d tell your parents. In that whole community, you took care of each other.”
Ms. Major, 62, was a toddler when her parents purchased a home in the area. Her father was a minister who also ran a printing business; her mother was a jury services supervisor for the Los Angeles County Superior Court, and did hairdressing on the side.
“There’d always be someone over — she would press and curl their hair in the kitchen,” Ms. Major said. “She also baked a lot, so anybody that had a birthday, she made a cake for them.”
Ms. Major moved into a house around the corner from her father, who is now 101. His home did not burn, but hers did.
The camaraderie among neighbors has meant that no matter who lost what in the fire, the devastation has been shared. Group chats have been never-ending with messages of support and resources.
“Sometimes someone has a tragedy and all of us get together to support that person,” said Felita Kealing, 61. “But in this case, it’s not one or two, it’s thousands of people.
“You see Candace lost her house, or Cushon lost her house, and you know those people. You’ve been to their homes, you remember their furniture, you remember how they greeted you.”
Ms. Kealing has lived in Altadena for three decades. She and her husband were known for hosting a Christmas brunch where anyone could stop by for quiche, banana bread and waffles. The couple and their two sons were involved with the Altadena Baptist Church, which hosted an annual Black history celebration. Both their house and the church were destroyed.
More than half of Black households in Altadena earn more than $100,000 a year, a tidy sum in many places but firmly middle-class in Southern California.
“When you lose a middle-class Black community, it’s a loss of a culture, but it’s also a loss for the next generation,” said Wilberta Richardson, president of the Altadena unit of the N.A.A.C.P., which started in 1984.
Ms. Richardson, who is 75 and has lived in town for nearly four decades, pointed out that Black children who grew up in Altadena had the privilege of accessible role models.
But many residents worry that the fires will scatter neighbors and hasten gentrification. The proportion of Black residents in Altadena’s population has fallen to around 18 percent. Altadena is now considered affluent, with an average household income of $190,000.
The median sale price of a house in Altadena is now nearly $1.3 million, a figure that few longtime residents could afford. Long before the fires, many Black homeowners were capitalizing on their newfound equity by selling and moving away.
Many of those who remained had planned to stay for good.
“Even though we were kind of cordoned off, we made the best of it, and there’s a real sense of genuine community that we particularly enjoy,” said Jervey Tervalon, a novelist who was born in New Orleans and has lived in Altadena for 20 years. His own home burned, and he and his family have been staying at a nearby hotel.
“The fear of something to lose is real.”
Ken Bensinger, Robert Gebeloff and Christina Morales contributed reporting.
Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.