After the Fires: What Remains
Cindy Olnick 00:00
Today on Save As:
Trudi Sandmeier 00:02
As much as this story of these fires is about loss, it’s also about what persists and why it’s so important that we not lose sight of that, that we can’t just focus on the things that are gone, but we have to focus on the things that remain.
Cindy Olnick 00:28
Hello, Save As listeners. Cindy Olnick here. We’re bringing you a special episode today about last month’s wildfires in Southern California. We hope you and yours are safe. We’ve had many fires in the past month; we’re going to talk about the two largest, the Palisades and the Eaton fires, which together have consumed nearly 38,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 homes and structures. At least 29 people have lost their lives. Thousands more have lost their homes, businesses, livelihoods, and neighborhoods.
Cindy Olnick 01:09
The Save As family is not immune to this loss, so the core team, myself, producer Willa Seidenberg, and co-host Trudi Sandmeier, sat down for a conversation marking this turning point in our lives, our history, and perhaps our field.
Cindy Olnick 01:30
Okay, team, we’ve all been affected by the fires and will continue to be, but I for one, have been extremely lucky. We were near the evacuation zone for the Eaton fire, but we did not ultimately need toleave our home and Willa, same for you.
Willa Seidenberg 01:51
I’m lucky. I live about, I don’t know, three, four miles outside of the evacuation zone in the Mar Vista area of Los Angeles. But I will say that I had deep ties to the Palisades because my son attended from kindergarten through high school in the Palisades. So I know that community pretty well, and have a lot of friends who lost their homes, including our dear co-host who lost her home.
Cindy Olnick 02:25
So we all know and love Trudi. She is not only the co-creator and co-host of this podcast, but she directs the Heritage Conservation Graduate programs at the University of Southern California School of Architecture. So, Trudi lost her family home in the Pacific Palisades and her neighborhood. You hear Pacific Palisades, you might think rich people, and there certainly are rich people, but it’s also a lot of multi-generational families who’ve been there for many, many decades and formed really close knit communities, and overnight, that was incinerated. Trudi’s grandparents worked for WillRogers at his nearby ranch, and Trudi co-founded the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation. The ranch is very near and dear to the entire family, and that has also been destroyed. So Trudi, this is incredibly difficult, but whatever you’d like to share, whatever you feel you should share about what you’re going through.
Trudi Sandmeier 03:35
For me, this has been obviously a terrible time. It feels like an erasure of family history. You know, I was lucky to live in this house for 24 years, and for the entire time that the house was standing, my family has been living there, and for me, I was the steward for the last 24 years of this site of memory and meaning.
Cindy Olnick 04:42
You’ve been back a few times since the fire. What’s the state of your house?
Trudi Sandmeier 04:49
It is largely just ash. There is truly very little that remains.
Cindy Olnick 05:00
Yes and you didn’t get to evacuate because you were out of town right when it happened.
Trudi Sandmeier 05:05
Yes, for me, it was hard to be away, to not have that chance to save things that were of meaning to me. I’m so grateful that my neighbor was able to go and grab, I have eight family photos from my house that he was able to grab, and what a gift, but oh my goodness, what a loss. It’s not just stuff. Because my grandparents built this house. I know the stories of, you know, the fact that I have a basement because my grandparents grew up in a place in Switzerland where you had a basement, and that’s where you put your canned goods and your wine and your whatever. And even though it wasn’t common in California to build a basement. My grandfather dug the basement himself.
06:25
The story of that house, and the pieces of it were the story of my family and their lives in a way that had great meaning. There were pieces of tile that were leftover tiles from Will Rogers house that the Rogers family said, sure, if you need some tiles for your kitchen and your service porch, you go ahead and use those. And that’s what was in my service porch were the same kitchen tiles from the ranch. And, you know now both of those places are gone. For me, as a preservationist, that resonated for me, both personally and professionally. This is why we do what we do, is because these places have stories to tell that may not be visible from their architecture, but have meaning and memory associated with them. And this house was part of the reason I became a conservationist. This was a formative place for me, both of these places.
Willa Seidenberg 07:54
You know, stepping into that house was thinking about old Palisades, because that was one of the first houses in the Palisades, right?
Trudi Sandmeier 08:04
My house was the oldest house on our street that was still standing. It was the third house that was built on Iliff Street, and the other two had been torn down, and so we were the last oldest one standing.
Willa Seidenberg 08:23
When I walked into that house, or even drove up to it, understanding that it had this role in the community was very impactful.
Cindy Olnick 08:32
It also played a big role in the Heritage Conservation program because Trudi, you know, you teach this brutal reading class, a book a week. And we’re not talking, you know, those board books or picture books.
Willa Seidenberg 08:46
These are dense theory books.
Cindy Olnick 08:47
These are real books. But the reward was, at the end of the semester, you would invite your entire class to your home and you cooked for them in your kitchen with your grandparents’ stove.
Trudi Sandmeier 09:00
Yeah, when I was in college, one of my professors invited us at the end of the class to his Neutra apartment, and it made a huge impression on me. It was an architectural history class, and we had just spent a semester learning about all of these early Southern California modernists and Neutra and Wright and Schindler and all of these folks. And it was a moment of someone sharing themselves and their experience with me in a way that was so meaningful. And when I started teaching, I realized, hey, I can do that now. I have that opportunity to share that piece of myself and of my family history with my students. And that, to me, was very meaningful to be able to do that, and I hope that I will be able to do that again at some point.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:05
And just as much as the house itself was a container of memory, so was the garden. My grandfather, in particular, was an avid gardener, and many of the plants in the garden were planted when they built the house in 1933, and he loved camellias. And there were 24 different kinds of camellias on this little, tiny plot of land. It was like camellia land.
Willa Seidenberg 10:32
Did he plant the persimmons tree?
Trudi Sandmeier 10:35
I think the persimmon tree will live. It’s a little scorched, but it looked pretty good when I was up there.
Cindy Olnick 10:41
Wow, really, amazing nature wins.
Willa Seidenberg 11:03
I think it’s also important to remember that in addition to the physical houses that were lost, there was so much inside of the houses, and in particular, Trudi, you had a lot of memorabilia and documentation about your grandfather and your grandmother and working for Will Rogers, that was also lost.
Trudi Sandmeier 11:26
Yeah, I think this was, for our entire family, a very profound loss for a lot of reasons. There were the photos and slides and letters and all kinds of pieces of my grandparents’ lives, their parents’ lives on both sides of my family, because we had stored my mom’s family’s stuff in the attic as well. And so both sides of my parents’ families were erased. Thankfully, my brother, who is our family genealogist, had scanned some of those items. Some of those things had migrated elsewhere, but all of the memorabilia related to Will Rogers and the time that my grandparents worked and lived on the ranch is gone. You know, the program from the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, which they went to. There was so much history of their lives in Southern California that is just gone.
Trudi Sandmeier 12:42
And, you know, we have lots of stories, and we have lots of memories of our own. And I think we’ve been talking as a family about trying to write some of this down before it gets too far away from us and we can’t remember the details the way we do now. I think that’s something that’s important for many families to try to do, is to think about what stories need to carry forward in terms of family history and lore, just even sitting down and doing what we’re doing, which is recording yourself on Zoom, recording yourself on your telephone, creating some sort of record of some of these thingsthat your kids and your grandkids and other people will be interested in.
Trudi Sandmeier 13:37
As much as this story of these fires is about loss. It’s also about what persists and why. It’s so important that we not lose sight of that, that we can’t just focus on the things that are gone, but we have to focus on the things that remain. If you look at what Will Rogers ranch looks like now, it’s closer than ever to what it looked like when Will Rogers was alive. When he bought that land, there was virtually nothing on it, and he shaped it with his ideas and his family and his staff, and he turned it into a place that we recognize now, but the main house is gone. The historic stable is gone. Most of the outbuildings are gone, but the trails remain, the tree lines remain, albeit somewhat battered, the stone walls, the polo field, the cultural landscape of that place persists. We can’t forget how much is still here and how important what remains has become, in light of this.
Cindy Olnick 14:58
Whatever still stands among the dozens of historic sites lost in both fires, whatever we can safely retain, restore, reuse.
Cindy Olnick 15:10
What else do you mean by what remains?
Trudi Sandmeier 15:12
Not the architectural landmarks. Those are important. I don’t in any way mean to diminish that, but it is the places of community that matter. It is the libraries, it is the grocery stores, it is the coffee shops, it’s the everyday places that create community, that will be the touchstones going forward. And I think if you ask anyone about their memories of these places, they will talk about these modest, vernacular sites as important as the architectural and cultural landmarks that we lost.
Cindy Olnick 15:56
Very understandably, there is the urge to get back and to rebuild. I’m worried that all of these tendencies, and, of course, the predatory development as well, is going to erase a lot of what still remains. I mean, with the ranch, perhaps that’s more protected.
Trudi Sandmeier 16:23
It is, because it’s a California State Park.
Cindy Olnick 16:26
Right. But what if people want to keep their chimneys?
Trudi Sandmeier 16:30
Yeah, we’ve been having a lot of conversations on my block about that, and more broadly, we have some good precedents to look towards. I mean, we have the Woolsey fire in Malibu. That’s a close, relatively recent example. And people have rebuilt, and some of my colleagues at the School of Architecture have been the architects for these reconstructions, in some cases or re-envisioning of sites where they’ve been able to reuse the foundations that were there. There’s some work for the structural engineers to determine what could be saved, but the scope of this fire and the density of the urban fabric that was lost is going to make that really challenging. I think many of our listeners will be familiar with the Lahaina, Hawaii fire and its aftermath and the loss of that historic community and the sort of scorched earth look. That is what my neighborhood looks like, and it is what Altadena looks like. It is just scorched earth.
17:45
But there are so many precedents to look at. I mean, all all around the world, there have been examples of this, just in Japan alone. Think how many times the urban fabric of Japan has gone through crisis and emerged from that, whether that is man-made or nature-made. there is a rush to move forward, and I I’ve heard it said now several times, most eloquently by Steven Lewis at a forum that I was at recently, who’s an architect and lives in Altadena and is a former head of NOMA, the National Organization of Minority Architects. And he was very eloquent in his statement that everybody’s rushing to what is step one, what is step two. What is step three. And that we should be at step zero, that everybody needs to take a deep breath and slow down and really think about what we are doing next, because we’re still in the memory and mourning phase. It is hard to wrap your head around what has just happened, much less what needs to happen next. And for those of us who are in the middle of it, it is a bewildering set of paperwork and regulations and things that I have never had to think about, that I now have to learn about. And in addition to the emotional experience that we’re all going through, and it is hard to imagine that we shouldn’t just slow down a little to try to do this one step at a time and figure it out.
19:48
The mayor has put in charge of the Palisades recovery, a developer who has long-time ties to the community, who has lived there for a long time, raised his family there and knows it. So I’m at least grateful that it’s someone who is from there, but there’s a lot of push to move things as quickly as possible towards rebuilding. There was a community meeting the other night, and he just kept saying, we want everybody to get on the bus to yes, and I feel like I want the bus to pump the brakes a little bit. Just to slow down, just for a second, and think about what we’re doing, what’s important to save, what matters going forward to us as a community. The historic business block in the heart of the Palisades burned, but the walls are still standing. And so to me, that’s an opportunity. Do I like the idea of facadomy? No. In this case, is it meaningful? Yes, keep the walls. Build a building inside those walls, stabilize them, because that’s that was the original heart of our community from the 1920s, and that’s an opportunity to not just knock it down and start fresh, but to keep a talisman of this place. There are opportunities to learn from what has been done in the past, to figure it out, and not just to rush in and fix it as fast as we can.
Willa Seidenberg 21:43
When I heard my son and his friends talking about how the Palisades of their youth is gone and the Palisades will never be the same. And I’m assuming people are having those same conversations in Altadena, and I think what you said about having a period of mourning is so important, and we’re still in that period. But how do we mark and commemorate what was there before while moving forward?
Trudi Sandmeier 22:12
I think it’s been really interesting on social media to see people sharing their memories of these places. There is a role for that to play, some sort of platform for people, to create this sort of tapestry of memories for people. But I also think there needs to be some in-person conversations. There are thousands of people that are now spread out all over the place. I think there will need to be some re-creations of community.
Trudi Sandmeier 22:52
You know, in the 1920s when so many people moved from the Midwest to California, they would have these giant picnics. Everyone from Iowa would come to the picnic, and everyone from Indiana would come to the picnic. Even though people lived all over Los Angeles, they would come together to reconnect. So I don’t know if we need to have our Pacific Palisades picnic, but I feel like there are gonna need to be moments of that where people reconnect in person. Several of the folks who live on my street or lived on my street are from a generation that where they’re not digital natives. They don’t know how to connect in the same way that you know different younger generations do, and it’s those, it’s sort of the community elders who will really get left out of the conversation if we don’t pay attention to that aspect of things.
Cindy Olnick 23:54
It does seem to be instrumental, bringing the community together, not just for mourning and healing, but also to try and make sure that you end up with the community that that people want. How can we make sure that the people most affected, the community members, have the greatest say in what happens and what about equity and housing? How many property owners would voluntarily live in a multi-family building with new neighbors?
Trudi Sandmeier 24:32
I think, especially in a place like Altadena, where generational wealth for families has been created through long-term ownership of land, particularly for communities of color, because there were no racial covenants in place. People could buy homes, buy land at a time when that was not possible in most of the rest of the L.A. area. And so those folks are going to want to build a house on that land that is a single family home again, because that is their legacy. And so there is going to be an opportunity for multi-family housing and for creating some additional things, but there is also the need to respect that long-term connection to this place that has meaning beyond the value of the land,. And that conversation in Altadena is going to be so important and challenging, and I think that’s partly what Steven Lewis was talking about. We need to just take a minute and really think about this, because the need for more housing does not necessarily overrule the right for people to be able to hold on to that generational legacy.
Willa Seidenberg 24:36
Well, and I think in the Palisades, it’s a little different conversation, because Cindy, you were mentioning at the beginning that, you know, people thought everybody in the Palisades is rich, and over the last 20, 30 years, more people with wealth have bought there. But it was a middle-class neighborhood. It was kind of a bedroom community for UCLA professors and a lot of those people really made it sort of a cohesive little village on top of the bluff, you know, overlooking the ocean. And I’ve heard many people talk about the fact that now it’s going to be just a rich enclave on the bluff overlooking the ocean.
Trudi Sandmeier 26:56
Yeah. I think a lot of those families and folks who were the remnants, like myself, of that earlier generation of Palisadians, I don’t know that they’ll be able to afford to come back, and that will be a loss of community in that way, for sure. The variety of ages and stages of people will really be different in what emerges after this fire.
Willa Seidenberg 27:36
We all get into this field and and study this for different reasons, but it is interesting how a tragedy like these fires really crystallize the role that preservationists and conservationists play in protecting our past and looking to the future.
Trudi Sandmeier 28:00
Our community has some amazing skill sets. We have the ability to document things. We have the ability to tell stories, to create oral histories, to do digital documentation, to create story maps, to talk about things in a way that helps people understand the value of the resources we still have. And we need to document what was lost. We need to tell those stories. We need to do all of that work, but we so desperately need to do it for the things that remain, so that the threat to them can be mitigated, that we need to pay attention to that.
Trudi Sandmeier 28:40
And it’s not just the things that are within the scar of the fire. It is the things that surround them that will become the touchstones of the community that emerges. Those places that matter, that still remain, will carry these stories forward. One of the things we talk about when students first start in the Heritage Conservation program is that we are futurists, because what we imagine is how the sites and places that matter to us as communities might persist into the future. What is it about them that makes it important to save them and to move forward. I think that we need to be thinking about these places as cultural landscapes, that it’s not just about the buildings, it’s about the infrastructure of a community.
Trudi Sandmeier 29:35
I think from an architecture standpoint, we have an opportunity here to create a Case Study-like program. You know, the Case Study program came out of World War Two, and the idea that a lot of these industries that were producing materials for the war — airplanes and, you know, all the different industries that relate to war — were shifting gears and creating materials that could be used for housing. And so, the Case Study house program was an opportunity to think creatively about what post-war housing might look like, marrying this group of new materials with the design ideas of the moment and of the future. We need to be thinking about new materials or different materials, or how we use the materials that we currently have in a way that creates fire resistance in a community, about all of the different aspects of how we build that will make these places more resilient, because that’s what we know is going to be the watch word of the future is resilience.
Cindy Olnick 30:56
FORT LA has a design competition going through March just to reimagine some of these places. So, if you’re interested in that, go to Fortla.org.
Willa Seidenberg 31:11
So Trudi, how can we help?
Trudi Sandmeier 31:15
Putting my professional hat on, I think getting a clear sense of the reality, getting real information, and trying to find out where the resources are. The Los Angeles Conservancy is compiling resources for people whose historic properties survived and need help with smoke damage remediation or with structural stabilization or assessment of what’s left and what’s possible going forward. They are actively connecting people with those resources, and that’s incredibly helpful. If it’s not you, then maybe it’s your neighbor or your friend or your colleague who does need that.
Cindy Olnick 32:05
We’re gonna put, you know, some resources on the episode page at SaveAs.place. If you are a member of the professional preservation conservation community and you have skills that you can donate, make available to people. Go to LAconservancy.org and let them know, please. If you are a materials conservationist and can help people restore, protect any artifacts that may have survived, please go to the Conservation Association of Los Angeles site. They are collecting that information too. We’ll put all that on our episode page at SaveAs.place. If you’re a listener who has been displaced or otherwise severely affected by these fires and we can do anything to help you. Please let us know. You can message us on Instagram at SaveAsNextGen, or just email me Cindy at olnick@usc.edu
Trudi Sandmeier 33:15
I personally have been so moved by everyone and all of the outpourings of support and offers of help, but I’m just trying to do one thing at a time, and it’s a lot. I think we’re all mourning and grieving. And in the same way that you support someone who has lost a family member, or, you know, there’s been some sort of tragedy this. That’s what this is. In some cases, that’s, you know, making a casserole and taking it over. But in other cases, it is simply being a place of refuge, and, for me calm. I have been so grateful for the sort of steady hand of my friends and family as I’ve been navigating through this. Even though I’m so in the heart of all of this, and it is very personal to me, we have earthquakes, we have fires, we have hurricanes, we have floods, we have all of these things that happen all year, all the time, where people lose their lives and their families and their homes and all of these things, and we as a community, step up in those moments. And so, thank you to everyone.
Cindy Olnick 34:41
We’re just getting started. Just getting started. So, you know, take a nap. Trudi, I want to thank you for sharing extremely painful story. I know this is extremely hard for you, and it’s one of thousands of stories.
35:02
So thank you, as always, for listening. We may have periodic special episodes like this as we progress, but we are also going to get back to the stories of our amazing students and alums and the groundbreaking work that they have done, are doing and will do. If you haven’t yet, subscribe, please tell a friend, and thank you everyone for all your support and for the amazing work that you do and the amazing people that you are. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation. For photos, transcript and links to fire recovery resources, please visit our website at saveas.place. Our original theme music is by Stephen Conley. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
