LOS ANGELES — Just four days before a raging inferno tore through his Pacific Palisades home, Rick Citron and his wife left town to mourn the recent death of their adult daughter.
They never imagined it would be the last time they would see their 40-year-old home.
On January 7, around 5 p.m., Citron remotely turned on the camera in his Tesla car to watch the unimaginable unfold.
He saw large embers flying through the air, swirling around the Ocampo Drive home he bought in 1982. “This doesn’t look good,” he remembers thinking before forcing himself to sleep around 11 p.m.
But at 5 a.m. on January 8, a sinking feeling jolted him awake. He turned on the camera and saw firefighters running from his house, dragging a hose behind them, the trees lighting up like matchsticks. He turned on the backup camera and saw his house go up in flames. Moments later, his electric car explodes.
“I just said to myself, ‘I lost 40 years of history that the family built,’” he said. “Our three children grew up there, learned to ride bikes there and went to the local schools there. I coached my children’s sports at the park. It was a way of life: community.
The siege began on January 7 when a fire fueled by high winds and dry conditions consumed the oceanfront neighborhood. Later that day, another equally fierce fire in Los Angeles County destroyed parts of Altadena. At least 27 people were killed between the two fires which ravaged densely populated areas of the county.
Citron’s home was one of more than 3,500 structures destroyed in the Palisades Fire, which razed much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and nearby Sunset Mesa.
“He lost his sister and his home,” Sherry Citron, Rick Citron’s daughter-in-law, said of her husband, Justin. “How do you deal with this?” The house was part of our future.
Situated atop hills and bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Pacific Palisades is known as a playground for the rich and famous. But it’s also where families live who bought houses and condos generations ago, when prices were a fraction of what they are today.
For years, there was a small sporting goods store and popular deli where kids congregated after school, an ice cream shop frequented by families, and a beloved bookstore that drew locals to its cramped stores.
It was an LA version of Main Street USA that gave the Palisades a small-town feel within a sprawling metropolis. The old village of mom-and-pop boutiques was demolished years ago by billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who replaced them with high-end brands like Saint Laurent and Lululemon.
“At that time, it was just down-to-earth,” said Glenn Turner, who has lived in nearby Sunset Mesa since 1988. His house was destroyed in the fire, but he intends to rebuild it using his insurance money and his savings.
“There were people who worked at Vons who could live there,” he added, referring to the West Coast grocery chain. “You had school teachers who could live there. »
The remains of the old stockades remained even after the arrival of new developments. Many longtime residents who purchased their piece of paradise while it was still affordable had planned to pass down their homes to their children and grandchildren, many of whom could never have afforded to buy in the neighborhood. ‘Today. ruthless market.
“You could live in the Pacific Palisades with essentially working-class wages,” said Wade Graham, a historian and researcher affiliated with the University of Southern California. “It was never a place dominated by the rich until very, very recently.”
Graham described the Pacific Palisades as a series of disparate real estate ventures that grew over time into a single community.
In 1911, a movie producer established a studio called Inceville at the intersection of what is now Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway. At its peak, it spanned 18,000 acres and could accommodate 700 crew members. In 1915, a fire nearly burned down the studio, according to Hollywood tradition.
The intersection became a choke point last week as hundreds of fleeing residents tried to head toward PCH from Sunset, one of the only routes out of the neighborhood.
In the 1920s, a Methodist organization chose the Palisades Cliffs, north of Santa Monica, as a prime location to build a church and host its meetings, according to the Pacific Palisades Historical Society. Modest single-family homes began springing up in this neighborhood, later known as “Alphabet Streets,” many of which were razed in last week’s firestorm. The area also served as a refuge for Jewish creatives and intellectuals fleeing the horrors of Hitler’s Germany.
“Our parents discovered the Palisades 40 years ago when it was in the middle of nowhere,” said Birdie Bartholomew, whose sister, aunt and uncle lost their home in the fire. “They built their lives there, which gave us this community. This is what was lost.
As neighboring Santa Monica urbanized, the Palisades retained its accessible appeal for decades, Graham said. Farther north on the PCH, Sunset Mesa has become a new Shangri-la.
Sunset Mesa, a master-planned community built atop a hill overlooking the ocean and the nearby Getty Villa Museum, began as a condo development. They were followed by some 500 midcentury homes with starting prices around $38,000, according to historical records. Today, many of these homes are valued at more than $3 million.
In 1996, flames licked the hill’s west side when a wildfire ravaged Malibu to the north. Sunset Mesa was spared, but the threat of fire still loomed in the Santa Monica Mountains.
“La Mesa seemed like the safest place in the world,” said Jason Silver, whose parents moved to the neighborhood in 1988. “You could walk on the beach, surf in the ocean, then go home on foot when the street lights came back on. on.”
Separated from the Palisades by rugged terrain and the museum, Sunset Mesa was a community in its own right. Every day around 4 p.m., a group of about 16 families and their dogs would gather on the corner of Kingsport Drive and Oceanhill Way to share the day’s news. It eventually became known as “dog corner” and served as a shelter, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people were isolated from loved ones and colleagues.
“We would be outside having martinis 2 meters apart,” said Anne Salenger, who founded “doggy corner” in 1981. Her house was one of only two houses in the group in not having burned.
Jon Cherkas, who moved into the neighborhood in 2001, said he only started meeting neighbors when his wife started walking their black Labrador. He noticed that people were gathering every day a few blocks from his house and thought he would follow. Soon, a new community flourished around him.
After the fire, several members of Doggy Corner gathered in Century City for lunch. No dogs were present, he said, but it was like being with family again.
“It was so nice to hug our friends and see their faces that we haven’t seen in forever,” he said. “It’s only been about a week, but it feels like an eternity.”
Like most members of the meetup, Cherkas plans to rebuild his life. Frankly, he can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“I will stay for the rest of my life,” he said. “This will be passed down to my children.”
