“It’s time to go home now; it’s time to go back,” Eric Garland said. “I wake up from a fugue state sometimes having driven to Altadena after work … and I’ll realize … Oh my gosh, I did it again.”
When Garland and his family left for Spain for a family wedding in January, they didn’t know they’d still be living out of their suitcases for the months to come. They didn’t know that they would come home to their entire town gone.
The feeling didn’t hit Garland until he arrived back at Los Angeles International Airport and had nowhere to go. While Garland was on his flight home, he and his kids consistently watched the burn line grow closer to their house. Once they touched down in L.A., Garland and his family had to sleep in the airport hotel. While Garland’s house survived, there was no way to return home to Altadena.
“The total devastation was, you know, you never get over that,” he said. “It was beyond comprehension. It just puts you back into a state of shock and dissociation.”
Garland and his family walked around their town, shocked by the houses still standing and the ones no longer there.
“We stopped at my neighbor Fred’s house, which is kind of a hyper-locally famous house because it was just the most impeccable, immaculately kept, perfect house and garden on the block, you know, the one that everybody admires,” he said. “We arrived at that house, and it was just so absolutely gone. There was just nothing. The beautiful garden gone, that historic home gone, and in the middle of this field of debris, there was this perfect Batchelder fireplace that just looked like nothing had ever happened. It was just like completely unaware of the damage and the devastation.”
Eric Garland’s daughter, Lucy, asked her dad how these fireplaces would be saved and took a picture of one. Later, she sent the picture to Garland’s neighborhood block group chat and asked about the plan to preserve the tiles.
That’s when Save the Tiles began.
While the fires burned almost everything, the Batchelder tiles survived because they were kiln-fired at high temperatures. After Eric Garland sent a picture of the tile he found amid the ashes, his neighbor, Stanley Zucker, replied that he had also seen a picture of these tiles posted by a stonemason’s daughter who was reaching out to the Altadena community, explaining that her father would help save the tiles for free.
In 1910, Ernest Batchelder began hand-making tiles in his backyard in the Arroyo Seco with various designs, and he eventually established Batchelder & Brown, Inc. He continued to create these tiles until they were installed in many homes throughout Pasadena and Altadena, according to the Pasadena Museum of History. The tiles have a distinct look: engraved illustrations.
Zucker and Garland hopped on a Zoom call to find licensed professionals to rescue the tiles. A couple days later, they posted a blog message to other neighbors, announcing they would walk around Altadena and find these tiles.
“By the time we showed up … we’re standing in this Aldi parking lot, Stanley, Lucy and I, and 50 people pull up into that Aldi parking lot,” Garland said.
The neighbors worked together to take videos and pictures of these tiles, locating them with GPS because the street signs had burned down. Save the Tiles continued to grow, with more and more people coming together to help and volunteer.
While Garland co-founded this organization, it is a team effort involving volunteers, local Altadena residents and stonemasons.
Silverlake Conservation, an organization that preserves sculptures and architectural finishes, specializing in historic tile, partnered with Save the Tiles to help their cause.
Amy Green, one of the conservation firm’s principals, said they have a relationship with the Tile Heritage Foundation, which called them to get involved with Save the Tiles. Green was also a potter before joining Silverlake Conservation, which she said made her understand the process of rescuing and restoring these tiles more.
Additionally, Green said that the fires actually improved the condition of the Batchelder tiles because “the higher you fire, the more the particles fuse together. There is a tipping point … but in the case of the Batchelder, the best-case scenario is [the fires] actually sharpen them.”
Save the Tiles said they have now rescued an estimated 45,000 individual tiles from around 190 homes. The ultimate goal is to clean the tiles and eventually restore them to Altadena homes when the town is rebuilt.
In early May, Batchelder tiles were extracted by stonemasons with Maura Hudson, Save the Tiles’ COO. As Hudson walked through the remains of the home, she described how the house had belonged to two doctors who had lived there for multiple decades. They are both avid collectors of artwork and have made their own pieces.
The stonemasons who worked to extract the Batchelder tiles also found other art pieces, like a ceramic dragon.
Ricardo Delgado was one of the working masons who found these pieces, and he said that a neighbor had told him that this house used to be the “Disneyland” of the street because of all the art that had been displayed there.
“It’s been interesting knowing people’s stories,” Delgado said. “They come up and they tell us their stories about their homes … we try to find artifacts for them … so they can have a little piece of their home.”
After the organization saves as many tiles as possible, it will focus on the second part of the process: cleaning the tiles. Currently, volunteers help wrap the extracted tiles and store them in boxes labeled with different addresses. Garland said they are now having conversations about using the tiles for an art exhibit before eventually restoring them to rebuilt homes in Altadena.
However, the Army Corps of Engineers is clearing out the lots in Altadena after homeowners sign off, which would knock down the fireplaces.
“That’s always been our race against time. Any tiles that we don’t remove timely could end up in a landfill,” Garland said.
Hudson said she had become frustrated that the Army Corps had information about the Altadena homeowners and that Save the Tiles did not, making it hard to gain permission to extract the tiles. From there, she said she reached out to politicians and went to community events to raise awareness.
“Eventually, I went to this community event … and they had the head of the Army Corps for this mission, Colonel Avichal there … they had all these bigwigs there,” she said. “I taped the flyer to the back of my clipboard … and one of the volunteers for the Army Corps said she was a tile fanatic and that [they had to] help these homeowners.”
Felicia Ford is an Altadena resident who lost her home in the fires. She moved into Rodney King’s Altadena residence last July, and she said the home was beautiful. She said she was always attracted to the house because of its tiles.
“It was only the second home I looked at, but I was like, this home has good bones. This has been here for a long time,” Ford said.
While Ford thought the tiles were beautiful, she had considered painting over them when she bought the house, but a maintenance worker told her to keep them. After the house burned down, Ford received a postcard from Save the Tiles, and said she was so happy that she hadn’t painted over them.
“Mine were indestructible. Not one chip, and the artisan that removed them was just so meticulous in the way that he even handled them,” she said.
Ford had evacuated in January with her children and is planning to rebuild in Altadena and reinstall the Batchelder tiles in her new home. She said that she was so excited to see the pieces of the tiles after they were extracted from her home.
“Even when I saw someone with bright colors on, it just lifted my spirit because everything was so ash and gray and black and white, and it was so refreshing to see colors,” she said. “So, when I saw those tiles and the colors really stood out, it just lifted my spirit.”
As the organization continues its work, Garland said he now stands where generations of Altadena residents looked up into the canyons and decided to build a home.
“Because of a natural disaster, we’re standing once again in a field of empty lots of future, and we’re thinking deeply about why we’re here and what we can dream up and make real,” he said. “Save the Tiles has given me a glimpse of how much work there is to be done, how much the place is going to need … and how much of a place there is for me and all of us in that. It’s taught me a lot.”