Altadena

About Altadena.

Altadena is an unincorporated foothill community founded in 1887, from Millionaire's Row and Christmas Tree Lane to Janes Village and Case Study House 20, now rebuilding after the 2025 Eaton Fire.

Altadena is an unincorporated foothill community of Los Angeles County, directly north of Pasadena, founded in 1887 by brothers John and Frederick Woodbury, where the housing stock spans an 1882 Italianate ranch house, the mansions of Millionaire’s Row, the storybook cottages of Janes Village, and a 1958 Case Study House. It covers 8.47 square miles against the San Gabriel Mountains and held 42,846 residents at the 2020 census, bounded on three sides by wilderness: the Arroyo Seco, the Angeles National Forest, and Eaton Canyon.

On the evening of January 7, 2025, the Eaton Fire came out of Eaton Canyon on Santa Ana winds and burned into Altadena. Nineteen people died, all west of Lake Avenue. More than nine thousand structures were destroyed before containment on January 31, making it the second most destructive wildfire in California history. The United States Justice Department determined the cause to be high tension power lines operated by Southern California Edison and sued for damages. This page records what Altadena built, what the fire took, what survived, and how the community is rebuilding.

The Woodbury Subdivision

Altadena began as part of Rancho San Pascual. The name came from Byron O. Clark, who coined it for his 1875 foothill nursery from the Spanish alta, upper, and the dena of Pasadena, and later let the Woodburys take it for their subdivision. Frederick and John Woodbury of Marshalltown, Iowa bought 937 acres of the highland slope around 1880. Their Pasadena Improvement Company opened the Woodbury Subdivision late in 1887, envisioning a rural suburb of millionaires above Pasadena. The land boom collapsed in 1888, and Altadena instead grew slowly and independently, declining incorporation and resisting annexation ever since. The founders’ own house still stands: the Woodbury Story House of 1882 on Madison Avenue, Altadena’s oldest surviving residence and its only Italianate, attributed to early Pasadena builder Harry Ridgway, with an 1898 music room added by Frederick L. Roehrig (NRHP 93001463). It came through the fire intact.

Millionaire’s Row

The wealthy did come. Mariposa Street west of Lake Avenue filled with the winter estates of Chicago and Eastern money: Andrew McNally of Rand McNally and Colonel G. G. Green built there in 1887, with the Scripps and Kellogg newspaper families just east of Fair Oaks. The row’s most famous address was the Zane Grey Estate at 396 East Mariposa, built in 1907 by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey for Arthur Woodward and celebrated as Altadena’s first fireproof house, its reinforced concrete specified by Edith Woodward, a survivor of Chicago’s Iroquois Theater fire. Zane Grey bought it in 1920 and wrote most of his later novels there (NRHP, October 24, 2002). The Eaton Fire destroyed the McNally House and gutted the Zane Grey Estate; the concrete walls that outlasted the flames came down during debris clearance.

Christmas Tree Lane

The deodar cedars of Santa Rosa Avenue are Altadena’s signature. John P. Woodbury admired the trees in Italy; his brother Frederick ordered seeds through the United States Department of Agriculture, germinated them on the ranch in 1883, and set the young trees out along the future avenue in the spring of 1885 as the approach to a family mansion that was never built. In December 1920, merchant Frederick C. Nash and the Pasadena Kiwanis Club strung the first lights, beginning the oldest large scale outdoor holiday lighting tradition in the United States. Christmas Tree Lane was listed in the National Register in 1990 and designated California Historical Landmark No. 990, the only botanical landmark on the state registry. Not one of the lane’s deodars was lost in the Eaton Fire, and on December 6, 2025 the lights came back on before a larger than usual crowd, with a moment of silence for the nineteen dead.

Janes Village and the Cottage Neighborhoods

In 1924 developer E. P. Janes began building small storybook cottages with steep nested gables and English detail, marketed as Homes of Distinction in Scenic Altadena. He vanished from town in 1926 ahead of his creditors, but the neighborhood he left behind matured into one of the community’s best loved districts, with about 160 cottages verified as his work, and it was designated an Altadena Heritage Area in 2002. Janes Village sat in the fire’s path west of Lake Avenue, and most of its cottages burned. The response has been character led rather than generic: local designers formed the Altadena Collective, and Los Angeles County has pre approved a catalog of rebuild plans that includes six Janes cottage designs, so the pointed roofs can return.

The Mountain Railway and the Modernists

Thaddeus Lowe’s Mount Lowe Railway opened on July 4, 1893 and carried visitors from Altadena up to Echo Mountain and the Alpine Tavern until its abandonment in 1938; its ruins were listed in the National Register on January 6, 1993 (NRHP 92001522). The railway’s brick powerhouse on Lake Avenue survived the fire and reopened in the summer of 2025. Altadena’s twentieth century closed with serious Modernism. Gregory Ain’s Park Planned Homes of the 1940s, among the first Modernist housing developments in the country, were destroyed in the fire, as were Harwell Hamilton Harris’s Pauline Lowe Residence and the home architect Calvin Straub built for himself. But Case Study House 20, the Bass House of 1958 by Buff, Straub and Hensman, built for designer Saul Bass with prefabricated plywood vaults, still stands, and it stands on Christmas Tree Lane. Wallace Neff belongs to this story too: the grandson of Andrew McNally grew up among Altadena’s estates and took his first commission here, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, dedicated in October 1926.

West Altadena

West of Lake Avenue, Altadena holds one of California’s oldest and most established middle class Black communities, rooted in the years after the Fair Housing Act opened these streets to families shut out elsewhere. Octavia E. Butler wrote here. Sidney Poitier and Eldridge Cleaver lived here. The Eaton Fire’s deaths and its heaviest losses fell on these same blocks, which is why so much of the rebuilding effort, from the Altadena Collective to Altadena Not for Sale and the community land trust work, is organized around keeping Altadena’s people in Altadena.

Rebuilding, as of Summer 2026

The first certificate of occupancy for a fully rebuilt home was signed on December 3, 2025 on East Loma Alta Drive, eleven months after the fire. By that winter the county had issued rebuilding permits by the hundreds, at a pace state officials called historic, through a like for like fast lane, pre approved plans, and streamlined review. Every new home rises under the state’s updated wildland interface building code that took effect January 1, 2026, with fire rated roofs, ember resistant vents, and ignition resistant walls. The Woodbury house is standing, the deodars are lit, the Bass House is intact, and the cottages are coming back with their pointed roofs. Altadena is not what it was in 2024, and it is not finished. It is building.

Styles Concentrated Here.

• Craftsman · American architectural style that flourished roughly 1900 to 1930 in reaction to Victorian ornament and industrial mass production. Southern California Craftsman bungalows define the SGV's earliest residential character, with the largest intact concentration in Pasadena's Bungalow Heaven Landmark District.
• Mid-Century Modern · Postwar modern style emphasizing indoor-outdoor flow, structural honesty, and integration with site. In the SGV, MCM is well-represented in Pasadena's Madison Heights and in the foothill communities, often in works by H. Roy Kelley, Buff & Hensman, and Smith and Williams.

Architects Who Practiced Here.

• Buff and Hensman · Buff and Hensman was a Pasadena-based architectural firm founded in 1948 by Conrad Buff III and Donald Hensman, both then-undergraduates at the USC School of Architecture. The firm designed roughly 200 residences across Southern California from the 1950s through the late 1990s, with the heaviest SGV concentration in Pasadena, Altadena, and San Marino. SGV anchors include Case Study House 20 (the Saul Bass House) in Altadena (1958), the Frank House in Pasadena (1957), and the Thompson Moseley House in San Marino (1959). Pasadena's Poppy Peak Historic District (NRHP 09000182, listed 2009) contains a significant cluster of firm work. The firm operated under four names across its history: Buff and Hensman (1948 to 1957), Buff, Straub and Hensman (1957 to 1961), Buff, Hensman and Associates (1962 to 1989), and Buff, Smith and Hensman (1989 to present).
• Frederick Louis Roehrig · Frederick Louis Roehrig practiced in Pasadena from 1886 until the 1930s, designing Castle Green in 1898 along with dozens of mansions and residences across Old Pasadena, Millionaire's Row, Madison Heights, Altadena, and Alhambra. He held California Architect License No. 2 and worked across Queen Anne Victorian, Mission Revival, Craftsman, and Mediterranean Revival styles within a single career.
• Garrett Van Pelt · Pasadena-based partner architect from 1913 to 1955, first as draftsman then partner with Sylvanus Marston, later with Edgar Maybury in Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury (1922 to 1927), then independent practice from June 1927, then partnership with George Lind (Van Pelt and Lind) developing Santa Anita Oaks in Arcadia. Designed or co-designed hundreds of custom homes across Pasadena, San Marino, Altadena, Arcadia, and the surrounding San Gabriel Valley over a four-decade career anchored in Pasadena.
• Joseph J. Blick · Pasadena resident from 1887, practiced from Pasadena offices c. 1900 through 1937 retirement, designed residences and civic works across Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, and Altadena, listed as one of five architects in the 1902 Pasadena city directory alongside Greene and Greene.
• Sylvanus Marston · Pasadena architect credited with creating the bungalow-court typology in 1909. His practice, later Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury and then Marston and Maybury, produced roughly a thousand projects across Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, Alhambra, and the wider SGV, spanning more style periods than any of his flagship contemporaries.