The Story of Christmas Tree Lane

By Hazel Clayton Harrison

Fred Nash squinted his eyes and examined the advertising copy that his secretary had left on his desk.  It was June 1920.  The thermometer had soared to ninety degrees outside, and perspiration soaked his shirt.  But it wasn’t too soon or too hot to start planning for the biggest shopping season of the year – Christmas.  

Fred was the owner of Nash Department Store in downtown Pasadena, and sales at his store had been low in the first half of the year.  To increase the store’s sales, he would have to attract many new customers during the Christmas season.

“Mr. Nash, is there anything else I can do for you before I leave for the day?” Mrs. Winters, Mr. Nash’s secretary, poked her head through the door.

He glanced at her, then at his watch.

“My goodness! Is it five o’clock already?  I promised Mrs. Nash I would be home early for dinner.”

He wished Mrs. Winters a good evening and slipped his arm into the sleeve of his jacket.

On the way home, ideas about ways to increase sales kept popping into his head.  He took his regular route up Lake Avenue and turned left on Woodbury Road.  As he drove past the neat bungalows along the road, he decided to take a detour up Santa Rosa Avenue.  He loved to drive up Santa Rose because it was so scenic with its grove of stately deodars.

As he drove along the street, an idea struck him with such force, he almost ran into a storm rain.  Why not light the deodars on ChristmasEve?  He imagined how beautiful the cedars would look illuminated with red, yellow and green lights.

The Dead 

By Khadija Anderson  

My great-grandparents were buried in Mountain View Cemetery, May 1970
They arrived in 1909 on a ship
where the Ellis Island ledger claimed
my Besta had black hair and brown eyes
I only remember her with grey hair and glasses

In their house on Glenrose Avenue
Besta smoked small black cigars in the cool dark dining room
where the adults drank small cups of coffee
and talked for hours at a dark wood table

I don’t remember the language they spoke in their
rough 90 year old voices seeming strange
but I never understood any words they said 

When I would visit, Besta-fa would hold up a small, carved
wood tiger with a wobbly head and when I smiled shyly
he would laugh in Danish

The Boulders of The San Gabriel Mountains

(after John McPhee’s Control of Nature)
By Khadija Anderson

The boulders of the San Gabriel Mountains 
know when to roll
and when to stand still as stone 

they have felt the lizards practicing 
those masters of the
red light green light game 

When the wash dries to a trickle
the boulders of the San Gabriel Mountains 
shake together
send rattlesnake warnings 

When the rains and mudslides come 
the boulders of the San Gabriel Mountains 
laugh like mockingbirds

Altadena

By Desiree Zamorano

I love Altadena, unabashedly.  I love the light and the sky.  And the foliage, and the animals, and the people—

My introduction to Altadena was through a teaching job at what was Loma Alta Elementary, now a charter school.  Every morning as I drove up Lake Avenue I marveled every morning at the foothills, so close, so dramatic. I took my third graders to the Cobb Estate, to go exploring.   I later marched my students to Farnsworth Park for picnics, singing silly songs there and back.  I was sorrowful, later, when the state budget crisis forced the fencing off of that public park.

Those budget cuts were long ago, before I moved here.  We were fortunate enough to be able to choose where we wanted to live.  I wanted to live in a diverse and inclusive community.  Now that I’ve been living in this town for over twenty years I have an appreciation for its seasons and its rhythms.  How quiet it is as night is emphasized by the occasional roaring presence of an unmuffled motorcycle, distant fireworks, the plaintive cry of an owlet, or the distant shrieks of communicating coyotes.  I love the silence our nights bring. 

In autumn the sun slants bright, through still green leaves, casting shadows on the streets pavement, yards, and homes.  The air at last hints of coolness, the din of freeway traffic far and faint.  When the temperature dips below 70 degrees, I think, “maybe now is time to unpack my sweaters!”  Somehow, it never stays cold enough long enough for my tastes.

As we move into our Californian winter the deciduous trees drop their leaves, but we remain surrounded and shrouded by elms and deodars.  Deodars! Those magnificent imports who raise their limbs and display their holiday colors and celebrations on Christmas Tree Lane. 

Millard Canyon 

By Teresa Mei Chuc 

canyon of bay laurels
tákape kakáaka
ancestral lands of the Tongva people

before this area of running
water, ancient stones and waterfall
was called Millard Canyon 

where the newts swim in streams
and the frogs are camouflaged on rocks

and the blackberries glisten 

where the waterfall sings and the children laugh and play in the pool 

the wind speaks to me, caresses my hair 

my bare feet touches this earth and water as I stand beneath the falls watching the fern grow along the cliff 

the water clear and cold, the stones smooth beneath my toes

Altadena Love

By Jervey Tervalon

I moved to Altadena 23 years ago and it’s been a great 23 years. I’ve lived other places; I was born in New Orleans and was lucky enough to be raised in the Jefferson park area of Los Angeles. Jefferson Park at that time was largely African American with many families with a connection to the south; Texas, or Louisiana and quite a few folks from New Orleans. I graduated from Dorsey High School, near Baldwin Hills and then attended UC Santa Barbara. It all kind of makes sense. I moved from a culturally complex ethnic Gumbo like New Orleans, to a little New Orleans in the Jefferson Park area I was raised in, and then left for what I thought would be the white world of UCSB. It was certainly white but soon I began to see them not as white people so much, but as people I lived in the dorms with, ate in the commons with and studied with. Then my black girlfriend dumped me for a white guy, and I was on my own. I discover through my Latina girlfriend, Latino culture and then though my Jamaican friend another compelling and complex culture. Later I married a black woman whose family help integrate Montecito. We moved to Pasadena to a cute house on Lincoln that we didn’t know was next to a freeway. Then we moved up hill to Altadena to the new gated development, La Vina. Then we divorced and I moved down the hill to the only house in all of Altadena/Pasadena with a yard that I could afford. My daughters loved it, and we loved living in Altadena outside of a gated community.

Altadena Story

By Michele Zack

My Altadena story starts far away, in Bangkok, Thailand — where husband Mark, baby Natalie, and I, moved in 1990. Mark and I were not kids. (I was almost 40, Mark is 5 years older). We wanted “one last adventure” before settling into that scary thing we daren’t speak out loud: middle age. 

The adventure lasted eight years… Eight. Very. Long. Years. More like a lifetime. I was a journalist and wrote speeches for Prime Ministers – who change with alarming frequency in Thailand. Mark designed resorts, working in places like Bali, Lombok, Ankor Wat in Cambodia, Laos, and the Seychelles. Natalie and I sometimes tagged along. 

Life was exciting, offering us professional opportunities we never would get back home. We considered becoming permanent expats, travelling the world, raising our daughter as a citizen of that world. 

Our feelings oscillated between exuberance — and home sickness. Full of difficulties, challenges, and charming, interesting people, Bangkok is brutal. You can afford household help there, and excellent international schools and medical care. Food’s great, too. On the downside, getting the lead levels of your child’s blood tested regularly because of pollution, anxiety of being illegal aliens for four years before we got our residency papers, navigating a huge ugly city with traffic you wouldn’t believe — was exhausting. 

We often had fun, living in a foreign culture with strange politics, new friends, and frequent coup d’états, but, did I mention it was exhausting? Navigating our daily local world of Bangkok was the hardest part. There were so many things we could do nothing about. Or even comment on — it wasn’t our country. Problems we thought should be solvable, like getting street dogs fixed and vaccinated, cleaning up the filthy canal on which our daughter rode a boat to school every day, or doing something about traffic. 

Years passed. Homesickness and elderly parents won out over exuberance. We’d always told ourselves: “If we ever move back to Altadena, we will become better citizens. Because we can.” 

And so we did. We moved back to our 1920s house on Marengo Avenue in 1998, and dug into our local world. Spending two years researching and thinking about, and then writing Altadena’s history, is one of my life’s great good fortunes. Mark was soon roped in to being on the board of Altadena Heritage, then on the verge of going bust for lack of volunteers.

Altadena

By Miles Corwin

When I was covering crime for the Los Angeles Times in the 1990s, the city was beset by a murder epidemic. The epicenter was South Los Angeles, where there were more than 400 murders a year. I was so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of homicide, that I took a leave of absence from my job and wrote a book about a quiet genocide taking place south of the Santa Monica Freeway. I spent a summer trailing homicide detectives to crime scenes, watching them tell families a loved one died, attending autopsies, sitting in on suspect interviews.

My only respite from the ever-present anguish was at the end of the day, or often early the next morning – after spending all night with detectives – when I would exit the Pasadena freeway, cut over to Hill, and head up to Altadena. My days were spent in impoverished neighborhoods where the murders mounted and many of the streets were without a single tree or patch of grass, so devoid of vegetation and color they looked like black-and-white photographic negatives.

When I finally reached Altadena, however, my mood immediately was lifted by the multicolored landscapes I passed: the lavender Jacaranda blossoms, purple Mexican sage, magenta bougainvillea, and the pastel array of roses that graced so many front lawns.

Sometimes, as I traversed the side streets, I’d get out of my car and stretch – my back usually ached from standing on the sidewalk at homicide scenes for many hours – and I’d see the San Gabriel Mountains bathed in brilliant sunlight. Often the scent of orange blossoms or jasmine would waft by.

The Altadena Public Library building, designed by architect Boyd Georgi, was opened in 1967 when I was five years old, the prime time for a child to start reading. Books quickly became my time-traveling portal, transporting me from the hot strawberry fields of Florida to the historic Lower Tenement neighborhood of Manhattan to Holland where a small fishing village attached wheels to a schoolhouse and homes to entice the return of storks.

I came to the library seeking more stories and windows to the world. My appetite was insatiable. The library, with its open architecture and garden, was a placed where I felt like I belonged.

Note: Books referenced are Lois Lenski’s STRAWBERRY GIRL; Sydney Taylor’s ALL-OF-A-KIND FAMILY series; and Meindert DeJong’s THE WHEEL ON THE SCHOOL.

Animal Feeling

By Jessica Abughattas

I wanted to wake with you and the cat
in a small house at the foot of the mountain

where birds sing wildly into the dusk
and coyotes scavenge from yard to yard

stalking timid dogs and fat neighborhood cats,
but not ours.  Ours tiptoes in at the first ray

and climbs over us – a gymnast, sweet boy.
You must be there now.  The cottage

between Hen’s Tooth Plaza and the hiking trail
that leads to an abandoned train station.

They must stay doing that even without me.
Of course they do: the birds proclaiming nothing,

the cats yawning from their roofs
and drainpipes, the lawns humming 

wet with dew, the plaza sitting vacant
awaiting the keys of laborers, the rattlesnakes

hissing on the trail, early sun just hitting
their skin, the tracks collecting dust

Inevitable Altadena

By Colleen Dunn Bates

Although not as egregiously as “unique,” the word “inevitable” is all too often misused. Think about it: Only one step in any process can actually be inevitable. If, for example, you say it was inevitable that you’d end up becoming a lawyer, because everyone in your family is lawyers, lots of things would have to go a certain way for you to become a lawyer—like getting into law school, for starters. So objectively, it was not inevitable that I would end up an Altadenan, not by a longshot; my life plan at 21 called for settling in Santa Monica. Yet in retrospect, every step along the way makes it seem like Altadena was the only possible outcome.

I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in Los Angeles, and when I was a teenager, I thought Pasadena was where fun went to die. As for Altadena, I didn’t even know it existed. Cut to 1992, when my husband and I had a toddler and were worrying about the then-limited school options in our Silver Lake neighborhood, plus the fact that we lacked a child-friendly yard. Friends with young children had just bought a house in Pasadena, so I did the once-unthinkable and started looking east. Right away, I fell in love with Altadena: its architectural diversity and richness, its trees, its quiet, its quirkiness. But the extra 15 minutes’ drive up the hill would have added a half-hour a day to our already-stressful commutes, so we found a beautiful, freeway-adjacent west Pasadena home and burrowed in for 28 years.

But Altadena kept calling. First came the hikes that I’d take with my dog and my friends: Chaney Trail, Sam Merrill, Altadena Crest. Next was the lure of the Altadena Town & Country Club, which we joined in 2001 so we could play tennis and our kids could swim. When I’d drop the kids for swim-team, my dog and I would fill the hour by walking the oak- and pine-dappled streets above the club, and I’d pick a new favorite house on every walk. The next step in the path toward inevitability came in 2012, when my older daughter graduated from college and found a little rental house to share with her girlfriend in Altadena.

Ode to Altadena

By Michelle Huneven

I was born in Altadena 67 years ago.  Altadena air was the first air I breathed, her trees, sky, streets, and mountains, the first I ever knew. Our modest, integrated neighborhood was the world to me. Altadena imprinted me, body and soul, with the way things should be.

I came into consciousness in a little one-bedroom house on El Nido Drive, way over by the Arroyo Seco. My father, who had moved to Altadena with his family in 1923, had bought a quarter acre of subdivided lemon grove in 1934, when he was 19. Fourteen years later, itching to settle down, he began building a tiny house on the property. Shortly, he met my mother at a socialist meeting on Highview, in one of the Gregory Ain’s Park Planned homes. Nine months later, they married. I was the second daughter, born in 1953.

We soon outgrew the tiny house–the bedroom I shared with my sister was an enclosed front porch–so my father built a larger home on the same lot, one inspired by Ain’s modernism, with high wood beams, clerestories and a white stone roof. I went to Franklin Elementary when it was a brand new school; then to Eliot Junior High, and graduated at 15 from John Muir High, class of ’69. 

Despite early vows to live all over the world, and be as unlike my parents as possible, I did not, in fact, fall far from the tree.

Thirty-two years after I left for college, I moved back to Altadena on September 10th, 2001, the day before the world changed. Amid the ensuing national tumult, it was a glad return to the known.  Here again was the hoo-hooing of mourning doves, the cat piss menthol of eucalyptus, the same prickly oak leaves. Here were the  familiar ridgelines of Mt. Wilson and Mount Lowe; the same ambles up the Arroyo Seco past JPL into the canyon’s coolness. Past and present mingled and settled into a deep sense of home. 

A former resident of my property, the Princeton sociologist David Popenoe, claims our block is one of the most socio-economically diverse blocks in the country.  

For Lucille B. Jones

Matriarch of Marigold Street, Altadena, CA
By Elline Lipkin

The first time I saw you
you told me how your husband
had brought you, “a young bride
from North Carolina,”to be nearer the Pacific and the mountains,
their wall of shadow and compressed heat
cast against the house he built,
roots grown deep over 60 years. 

Now, he’s a ghost you talk to in odd hours,
the lilt of your accent calling him back. 

Making your way down
the drive for the daily paper,
you were always gladdened to see me
and my newborn, also at the end of our drive,
head cradled in my palm
as we also bent awkwardly to lift up the news,
his fuzz of hair edging the carrier,
uncertain feet dangling out. 

A compass of neighbors checks if your paper
is still there past 10, the mail past 4,
peeks through your east window for movement,
watches the light settle at night on the west.
We know you’re safe again when the Webster’s
pharmacy half-truck delivers its rounds.