This past 7 January was the type of Southern California winter’s day that the Mamas and the Papas sang about. The Pacific Ocean sparkled in the bright sun below a hidden area in the hills of the Pacific Palisades; the trails looked lush, and the birds were singing. You would almost never believe that more than 6,500 structures were destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires there just a year earlier. But several chimneys stood out on the picture-postcard bluff as solemn reminders that the founders of the in-progress Palisades Fire Memorial project hope will be preserved forever.
The House Museum’s memorial aims to preserve more than a dozen chimneys from homes that burned, designed by luminary architects such as Richard Neutra, Ray Kappe and Eric Lloyd Wright (Frank’s grandson). On 7 January, champagne corks popped and neighbours chatted in a bittersweet celebration as the project’s founder, the artist Evan Curtis Charles Hall, took it all in.
“The turnout shows that people care about these structures and were willing to journey into the upper hills of the Palisades to see them, and so it’s almost like a test run for the final memorial,” Hall said at the event. “We’re listening to one another, we’re listening to the bricks and the chimneys, we’re listening to the land, we’re listening for what’s next.”
It was all a stark contrast to the smoky haze and deep uncertainty that was cast over the whole city of Los Angeles a year earlier. For many community members, this was their first time seeing any part of their lost homes since the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires.
In the year since the fires, Hall has worked tirelessly with local residents and city and state officials to reclaim the chimneys, secure a space for the memorial and raise funds. There are three current proposals for a permanent space, and Hall has the support of people like the state senator Ben Allen, who spoke at the event.
“We’re going to help find a place,” Allen said. “There’s work under way right now to find a permanent location. But I look forward to it being a place where we can come together and reflect.”
Chimneys from homes designed by Eric Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra that survived the fire Lesnic65@gmail.com
Like Roman ruins
Right now, that vision is still a work in progress. On the hill, several reconstructed fireplaces stand tall. Others are piles of bricks scattered like Roman ruins, labelled “Neutra”, “Wright” and “Mercer”. Some are so pristine you can clearly picture the room in which they stood and a family gathered around them. With others, you have to use your imagination or the digital re-creations shared by the House Museum.
Kraig Hill’s longtime family home in Malibu was destroyed in last year’s fires, and he was not sure what to expect when he arrived at the event, even though he has been working with Hall on the chimney-preservation project since he heard about it on the radio last year.
“It’s hard to put words to it. A lot of us are still living in our houses, in our minds and hearts—our brains are full of details that are now irrelevant,” Hill said. “I realise it’s analogous to an amputee feeling a phantom limb.” Hill told the crowd that he hopes the chimneys can become a “teaching monument, a place where grief transforms into knowledge, where loss becomes learning”.
Hill is a musician and former Malibu city planner. His chimney was in a house that once belonged to the screenwriter Louise Randall Pierson, and its designer may have also been significant. “We believe that this was the proto-work of Craig Ellwood,” he said. Ellwood, known as the “Cary Grant of architecture”, was responsible for numerous mid-century modern Los Angeles homes.
Hill walked along the perimeter of the bluff to identify the bricks from his former home on Seaboard Road. “They were salvaged from a building that was torn down somewhere in downtown Los Angeles in the 1940s,” he said, describing the bricks as he walked among the piles of rubble on the hillside. “Probably one in 20 of them has a white ceramic coating.”
Ean Frank, a House Museum board member based in Philadelphia and the project’s technical director, helped coordinate the masonry crew that carefully moved and organised those bricks (alongside the US Army Corps of Engineers) following the fires. Frank is a preservation specialist and runs Significant Structures, a company that restores monuments and cultural assets across the country.
“Once Evan told me this idea, it was obvious. It was such a good idea,” he said. “I come across a lot of different historic initiatives, but this one would definitely be called inspired. It just resonated, not just with me, but everybody that I talked to about it.”
The architect Jack Hillbrand of the firm Studio 1323 became involved in the project in the fires’ immediate aftermath. He was concerned, but cautiously optimistic, about getting the project to completion. At the event in January, he likened the importance of creating a fire memorial to other places of reflection, from Maya Lin’s Vietnam War veterans memorial in Washington, DC, to the high-water marks on houses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “Memorials create a public space for memory,” he said. “They mark a specific moment in time, attempting to preserve it and transmit it to the future.”
In addition to creating a place for the community, Hillbrand stressed the lessons about rebuilding that can come with preserving the chimneys. “Now we need to learn how to work and take this embedded knowledge that’s in these chimneys and what to build, where [fire-]resistant homes will carry forward this embodied wisdom.”
Hillbrand added that the Indigenous tribes in the area “negotiated, they anticipated the fires. We forgot that. And we need to get back to learning how fires are not an interruption, but they’re an inevitability. There will be another fire, so we have to prepare.”
