How One L.A. Fire Decimated ‘Magical’ Community of Creatives
When Max Baumgarten and Penelope Gazin first learned the catastrophic Eaton fire had gutted their 1940s adobe brick home on the edge of the San Gabriel mountains in Altadena, California, they couldn’t fully absorb it. A neighbor sent them a video of their ravaged cul-de-sac, but they watched it in a numb, fugue-like state.
“It was such an abstract thing,” Gazin tells Rolling Stone. “It was like my brain flatlined.” Baumgarten had to see the destruction himself. The actor, comedian, and musician, 39, jumped in a truck with his uncle and drove 30 miles back from a relative’s home on Wednesday. The fire that first erupted Tuesday evening was still blazing.
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“I just thought, if there was anything to be saved, that would be the only chance, because it would all keep burning,” he recalls. “The sun was a smokey, red, ominous, Armageddon sun. We could hear things just exploding all around us in the neighborhood.”
A day earlier, Baumgarten had visited the home and found it untouched as he retrieved two coolers full of breast milk for the couple’s infant daughter. (As a precaution, they’d gone to stay with the relative in West Los Angeles to avoid what forecasters warned would be a life-threatening windstorm.) Now, Baumgarten was walking through the hull of his charred house, flames active on some nearby logs, feeling like he stepped into a “surreal dream.”
“There were all these dead birds that had just fallen out of the sky. One of my son’s swings melted. It looked like taffy dripping from two chains,” he recalls. “I was just amazed there was nothing there. Our brass bed frame was, like, melted. I was trying to open an old safe, the only thing that survived, and it was almost too hot to touch.”
Weirdly, some nearby citrus trees were still green and full of tangerines. He also noticed a shed on the property was still standing. Inside, he found the crib that the couple’s three-and-a half-year-old son had recently outgrown. Baumgarten had carved it by hand, while Gazin had painted it. “It’s honestly one of the most beautiful things. And it was perfect. I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls. “I welled up. It’s such a relic now of a whole life.”
Gazin, a musician and designer known for her avant garde, often absurdist apparel label Fashion Brand Company, was pregnant when she and Baumgarten found the distinctive house in late 2020. It became the backdrop for their creative domesticity and parenting videos shared with a combined 276,000 followers on Instagram. (Gazin is also a dancer and a drummer. As a member of the band Slut Island, she’s known for performing with one leg behind her head.)
The couple’s beloved cul-de-sac also became home to New York Times bestselling cookbook author and chef Molly Baz and her architect husband Ben Willett, as well as composer Meara O’Reilly and her filmmaker husband Isaiah Saxon. Amelia Sedano McDonald helped anchor the block with her organic urban farm, barn full of dwarf goats, communal swimming pool and the raging parties she threw with one of Suge Knight’s former lawyers, Thaddeus Culpepper, acting as DJ. They all lost their homes to the devastating fire.
Since it was first reported around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 7, the Eaton fire has scorched more than 14,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,200 structures and killed at least eight civilians, officials said. Fueled by drought-stricken brush, low humidity, and hurricane-force winds, it exploded from 10 to 1,000 acres in hours, tearing through the unincorporated community northeast of downtown Los Angeles known for its unique blend of racial and economic diversity, close-to-nature atmosphere and independent, artistic vibe.
An overwhelmingly white suburb after World War II, Altadena became a haven for Black residents after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 began to legally dismantle the “red-lining” policies that had denied many homebuyers financial services in the area. By 1990, 39 percent of Altadena residents were Black. Today, about 18 percent are Black, 43 percent are white and 27 percent are Hispanic or Latino, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
McDonald, who is biracial, said her grandfather’s family were itinerant citrus pickers working camp to camp before her grandfather became a mechanic at Norton Air Force Base. Her father, who is Mexican American and Native American, was living with her when the fire struck. Their prized Chicano art collection, including a piece by Diego Rivera, was lost, she says.
Gazin and Baumgarten spoke to Rolling Stone by phone on Friday, saying they’re heartbroken over the loss of their idyllic community. They said their son, Skip, attended Village Playgarden, a preschool just behind their property started by local civil rights leader Kikanza Ramsey. Actor John C. Reilly was another close neighbor from around the block. “He just pops into our house sometimes,” Gazin says. “He lost his house too.”
“We have a really close-knit street of really special people,” Gazin says. She recalls filming a music video for Baumgarten’s single “Lizard Girl” in McDonald’s orchard. Willetts, meanwhile, had free rein to enter their yard unannounced to pick fruit off their trees. Skip regularly visited McDonald’s goats. They attended each other’s parties and exchanged stories about the local wildlife, including the bears that casually passed through and ate avocados.
“I can’t believe this magical community burned to the ground,” Gazin says. “I really thought we were going to have grandkids in that house. Max and I were literally married in the back yard. I found out I had cancer and found out I beat cancer while living in that house. It was so special.”
On Friday, McDonald was back at her property, surveying the damage. She had just buried two of her goats who didn’t survive the siege: Butter and Ladybug. She tore the sleeves on her shirt to fashion makeshift wood crosses for their graves. With soot and dirt covering her hands, McDonald recalled being at home with her dad, Michael Sedano, on Tuesday when the winds started building. The sun went down, she put her goats in the barn, and then she got a text from a friend asking, “Are you okay?”
McDonald said her 18-year-old daughter called from another location and reported seeing flames. She recalled thinking her daughter was in danger, not her. She told her daughter to get out, grabbed a few valuables and hopped in her Bronco with one of her goats, Mel. She had yet to receive a formal evacuation notice.
“There was a red glow in the sky but no visible flame. I really thought we were going to be okay,” she recalls. “We wanted to see what was going on.” She stopped for food and kept her eye on the mountain with some binoculars. When she tried to return a few hours later, first responders blocked her.
“It was chaos,” she says. “I wanted to get back to the animals. I couldn’t. In this world where we’re so used to knowing everything all the time, it was so weird having no information until it was too late. I did the best I could.” (She later recovered two more goats with help from a neighbor and was reunited with yet another two at the Pasadena Humane Society on Saturday.)
As she returned to a motel room Friday to check on Mel, McDonald said she wasn’t sure what the future holds, but she’s worried. “There’s no power. It’s desolate. When the mudslides come, that whole mountain is coming down,” she fears. But nearly in the same breath, she voiced some hope. “I love these people. I love this land. I am this land,” she says. “This place is amazing. It grows amazing people. We have resilience.”
Gazin says her family’s future remains unclear. She’s about to host her first showroom for buyers at New York Fashion Week. If it’s successful, she’ll have more options, she says. “My instant reaction was that I’m not sure I want to rebuild. It was such a special old house. I don’t know how it would ever be as cool as it was before,” Gazin says. But she knows her town is worth fighting for. “It was like a little paradise,” she says. “I really hope Altadena will return and not just be bought up by developers and be any random town with Chipotle [restaurants] on every corner.”
In an Instagram story posted Friday, Baz included a photo of her baby sitting in the kitchen of her now-destroyed home. “The last photo I took before we lost it all,” she wrote. “We’ll recover someday. Thank you to the village.”
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