Most of the historically and architecturally significant tiles rescued from homes in the Eaton fire in Altadena were designed and produced by artist Ernest A. Batchelder, one of the leaders of the arts and crafts movement. Courtesy of Meg Pinsonneault — Weird Pixel Creative Studio
2025 February 25, Daily Breeze
Wildfire Recovery
Altadenans defend art, history tile by tile
Clock is ticking to save Batchelder gems from rubble of Eaton blaze
By Anissa Rivera
arivera@scng.com
Days after the ruinous Eaton fire swept through Altadena and Pasadena, Cliff Douglas
chanced upon a mission. The masonry contractor was checking on a job site in Altadena when he noticed the chimneys standing alone among a landscape of rubble. Rising above one otherwise leveled home was a Batchelder-tiled fireplace.
Intact.
Douglas knew the cultural and historical value of those tiles. By the time he sat down to dinner that night, he told his daughters, “I want to save the tiles. And I want to do it for free.”
Across town, third-generation Altadenan Eric Garland and his neighbor Stanley Zucker
resolved to do the same thing. The trio connected on Reddit, “and we were off to the races,” Garland said. The race? To save artistically significant tiles amid the rubble of the wildfires’ acres of devastation.
And while the wildfire recovery will take months to complete, it is indeed a race against
time. Under pressure from local leaders and the bosses in Washington, D.C., to move quickly to empower communities to rebuild, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bulldozers are on the horizon. They are tasked with the largest wildfire recovery response in modern American history.
Securing the tiles ahead of the bulldozers’ arrival called for helpers. Lots of them.
“As Mr. Rogers said, ‘Look for the helpers,’ and there are helpers everywhere,” said Amanda Garland, who said the project is helping their daughters process watching their town burn down. “It’s their whole lives, their personal history, and Lucy (who pointed out the tiles while walking with her father) said, ‘We have to save everything we can.’ And fireplaces speak of hearth and home, right? It’s the heartbeat of a home.”
Among the work the tile-hunters are trekking for are those aligning with the Pasadena
Museum of History’s Batchelder Tile Registry. The museum studies and preserves Ernest A. Batchelder’s work, which embodies the arts and crafts movement, said Iris Shih, a project archivist at the museum. Batchelder was one of the preeminent tile-makers of the early 20th century. Batchelder tiles are highly collectible due to their rarity, historical significance and artistic quality, she said. “Batchelder’s tiles encapsulate the intersection of art, history and design,” Shih said.
Most of the tiles being saved are the work of Batchelder but the styles vary wildly, his efforts influenced by the work of Japanese artists, work found in ancient Mayan sites and other sources.
The museum is compiling the registry in part because Batchelder’s company records were lost in a fire, making each surviving tile a piece of irreplaceable history, Shih said. The tile teams’ mission is a task that Valerie Elachi appreciates more in the weeks since she lost her home on Crescent Avenue in Altadena.
She and her husband, Charles Elachi, who directed NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 2001 to 2016 and is a professor emeritus at Caltech, lived a wonderful 40 years in their two-story pueblo-style home.
The one-of-a-kind house was built by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey for writer Zane Grey’s literary secretary, Mildred Smith, in 1923. Valerie Elachi, 76, said aside from a guesthouse behind the historic home, the Batchelder-tiled fireplace is one of the few things remaining of her property. The fireplace was central to the home’s living room, with its coffered ceiling and an actual stage at one end, where actor Mary Pickford performed at the many parties held there.
Smith, who was also an extramarital partner of Grey’s, welcomed guests who flew in from Hollywood to an Altadena airport established by Cecil B. DeMille near the Altadena Town and Country Club.
Irreplaceable doesn’t even begin to describe what’s been lost, Valerie Elachi said, watching tile masons chip away at the grout to free the tiles. Within days of the three men’s call to action, more than 100 volunteers have mobilized to scout the burn area, catalog and survey sites, and contact homeowners. Helpers include experts from Altadena and Pasadena historical and heritage groups, neighboring architectural preservation groups and private museums, Garland said.
“So what’s next for the tile rescue team? Well, on day two, the scope of work is already
creeping. It is now clear that we will be at this for years, and the mission is even more
ambitious than we first understood and the lift just massive in scale,” Garland wrote online, sharing information about a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for professional tile masons and repairers.
Right now, all professional work has been paid for by the campaign founders. “This is exactly what we should be doing,” said Hans Allhoff, chair of Altadena Heritage and
a Grey aficionado. “We have to do more to restore what is lost because some things are not coming back.”
When Valerie Elachi installs the tiles in her rebuilt home, the rectangles will become
individual memoirs of place, he added, a continuing homage to Grey, who immersed
himself in the mountains of Altadena, as many residents do.
For now, tiles are collected, repaired, cleaned and stored. All the homeowners the group has contacted want their tiles back, a sign that local history will continue in some form.
The group is looking for more tile masons to help, too.
For Zucker, seeing people rally around a cause that’s all about preserving art and history reflects what’s happening postfire. “A large part of the old Altadena is gone, and what will be rebuilt is a mixture of the old and the new,” Zucker said. “Eric said it best when he said, ‘Save the tiles. Save the town.’ ”
