The Cultural Loss No One Talks About: The Eaton Fire and John Outterbridge
Eaton Canyon/Altadena Fire Aftermath, 2025. Photograph by Ivan and Robyn Migel, neighbors of the Outterbridge family, documenting the destruction of their own home and that of the Outterbridge family. Courtesy of Tami Outterbridge.
I spent the first 14 years of my life in the same house in Altadena, California. Due to divorce and my gang membership, I was relocated to live with my father in Monrovia, California. When I heard the news about the Eaton Fire in Altadena, I wondered—what the Hell was that? Where exactly was it burning? I knew Altadena was highly forested and assumed the fire must have been in those dense areas. But when I heard the mandatory evacuation orders covered a square where I once lived, I thought, how was that possible?
The Eaton Fire evacuation area stretched from Loma Alta in the north to Woodbury in the south, from Fair Oaks to Lake, which is east of Fair Oaks. My preteen childhood, and I want to say collective, revolved around my ten-speed bike. This fire evacuation zone was where I spent my time riding.
My grandparents on my mother's side lived on Woodbury. That wasn't forest area, so how could this be part of the evacuation zone? They lived in a little cove off Marengo. My childhood revolved around three key north-south streets: Fair Oaks, Marengo, and Lake. I lived at the Fair Oaks end.
I would hop the shared backyard fence of my neighbor, then hop their front yard fence, and I'd be on Fair Oaks. Marengo felt like the little stepchild of the two, while Lake Avenue was the big dog. It was thoroughly a commercial street. It was a four-lane street, and I guess, I reveled in the secret that Pasadena's great street was a dead-end street. And I knew where it ended.
Lake Avenue in Altadena with the Charles W. Eliot Middle School prominent on the left. Photo by Weedwhacker128
It was a ten-speed bike ride from my home, not that far—north to where Lake Avenue met the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.
I never really tried this on Marengo or Fair Oaks because those streets weren't four-lane roads and didn't have the broad width of Lake Avenue. But I would ride my ten-speed bike to the top of Lake, and without a single pedal stroke, just coast down the hill—what a ride that was. Without pedaling even once, I would hit speeds of—who knows—35 miles per hour, 50, maybe even 70 on a ten-speed? It was some real Evil Knievel daredevil stuff, something that couldn't be attempted on those other two streets. The broad width of Lake Avenue gave me enough space to maneuver around cars turning onto the street.
Looking down Lake Avenue towards Altadena Drive. Photo by Dean Musgrove, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG.
As my childhood generation was replaced by the next, I started hearing stories of Child Protection Services being called on parents just for letting their kids ride bikes on streets other than the one they lived on. That saddened me—for the parents, but especially for the kids.
Altadena is in the hills, and traveling up those various streets into the hills was hell on a car. Looking back, I'm shocked that so many cars back then didn't have engine troubles—guess they don't make them like they used to.
I didn't know where I lived. I did not know, I lived in the ghetto. I knew I lived right down the street from the projects. The King Manor projects in Pasadena were right by Fair Oaks Avenue. They were on a hill too—I just lived a little further up.
Woodbury, the east-west street where my grandparents lived, was like the middle ground between Altadena Drive going north and Washington Avenue going south. The King Manors abutted Washington too, and we lived just a little above Altadena Drive.
I never could understand when growing up—why does Altadena have so many Black musicians, actors, and others in the entertainment industry?
My father was the trash man, a sanitation worker for the City of Pasadena. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for most of my life. My father would take janitorial gigs for various well-known companies, and sometimes, he'd take me and my brother along on these jobs, teaching us how to clean toilets.
I never knew a day of hunger in my life, and I was astonished to learn that in 2023, my childhood home was on the market for over a million dollars.
My brag used to be, "I grew up in a million-dollar home on the sole salary of a trash man." But the Eaton Fire has forced me to reconsider that idyllic image of my childhood—our childhood.
The Black children of my generation, unbeknownst to us, lived under the shadow of white supremacy, and in reality, we were victims of racial segregation. Our Black lives were confined to a certain segment of Pasadena-Altadena. I found it peculiar as I roamed these streets—this general area had a distinct feel to it, whether you were on one end of the hill or the other.
Now, for the first time, I am learning about these racial covenants. I had studied them in relation to South Central Los Angeles—now rebranded as South Los Angeles—a historically Black enclave. But I had no idea they existed in the Pasadena area.
What frustrates me most is how mainstream, dominant writers brush this off with a laissez-faire attitude, as if saying:
"Oh, this is just how things were in Black communities. This was the norm in every city in the United States."
So, is that the excuse? Is that why we were living on top of each other? Where's the accountability?
I went to school during the era of mandatory busing. Imagine my chagrin when our local PBS station did a 2022, special on John Muir High School—the school nearest to my home—and treated it like a piece of excrement, "Can We All Get Along? The Segregation of John Muir High School," by filmmaker and John Muir High School alumnus (1982), Pablo Miralles. I was 1984.
John Muir? Hell no!
Yes, our beloved Mustangs, in their blue and gold, were labeled an abject failure of a school—at least, that's what many outsiders thought. But to us, to the Black and Brown kids who went there, that was not the perception of our school back in my day.
But hey, we had mandatory school busing too.
When our local news stations began discussing the historical and cultural loss caused by the fires, they weren't talking about our community. The Eaton Fire in the San Gabriels was barely mentioned. Instead, they focused on another fire in the Santa Monica's, the Pacific Palisades.
There was no way I was going to stand by and let the contributions of Black Los Angeles County be ignored.
Los Angeles is a mosaic of neighborhoods—but even more so when you learn how these neighborhoods were formed.
When Tami Outterbridge and her mother lost their homes on the same property, that was a cultural and historical loss far greater than just the City of Los Angeles.
It was a global loss.
Tami and I were grade school crushes, and her father, unbeknownst to me, was the great John Outterbridge.
Who Was John Outterbridge?
The Outterbridges, Beverly, Tami, and John Outterbridge.
John Outterbridge was more than an artist—he was a storyteller, an educator, and a keeper of history, who had righteously earned the nickname, "The Griot."
Born in 1933 in Greenville, North Carolina, Outterbridge was the son of a janitor and a foundry worker. His early years were shaped by the racial segregation of the South, but it was also where he first saw the beauty in discarded materials. His father, like many Black men of his time, was a laborer—someone who worked with his hands, who made use of what others deemed worthless.
That lesson stayed with Outterbridge for life.
When he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, he became a pioneer of assemblage art, creating sculptures and mixed-media works from scraps of metal, wood, fabric, and found objects. But these weren't just random materials—they were pieces of history, fragments of stories that mainstream America tried to throw away.
The Artist Who Gave Voice to the Forgotten
Outterbridge wasn't just creating art—he was documenting Black existence in America.
His works often reflected themes of migration, labor, oppression, and resilience. His "Containment Series" spoke directly to the Black experience, symbolizing the physical and psychological barriers placed on Black communities. His "Rag Man" series turned discarded clothing and fabrics into tributes to Black working-class people.
His work was collected by major museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and LACMA—but Outterbridge himself never sought fame.
His real impact was in his community.
A Cultural Leader in Los Angeles
John Outterbridge outside the Watts Towers Art Center in Los Angeles, 1991. Photo by Bart Bartholomew for The New York Times.
In 1975, Outterbridge became the director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, a position he held for nearly two decades. Under his leadership, the center became a hub for Black and Brown artists, a space where young creatives could explore their craft without the limitations of traditional art institutions.
He wasn't just an artist—he was an educator, a mentor, and an advocate for Black artistic expression.
His influence wasn't confined to galleries; his presence could be felt in every corner of the Black art scene in Los Angeles.
The Connection to Zorthian Ranch and Altadena
Outterbridge was also deeply connected to Zorthian Ranch, an artist's enclave in Altadena founded by Armenian-American artist Jirayr Zorthian. The ranch was a meeting ground for creatives, intellectuals, and free thinkers, and Outterbridge was one of the few Black artists who had a presence there.
His conversations with Zorthian about art, culture, and race were legendary. They spoke about the meaning of artistic labor, about the role of art in social change, and about how Black and immigrant artists had been historically sidelined.
But when the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena in January 2025, Zorthian Ranch was destroyed.
It's unknown whether any of Outterbridge's works were lost in the fire, but what is certain is that a piece of the artistic history he helped build was erased.
Why His Legacy Matters
Photo by Photographer Mel Melcon, Tami with her father. Tami is the keeper of her father's legacy, whose home was laid barren as a result of the Eaton Fire.
John Outterbridge passed away in 2020 at the age of 87.
He never saw the Eaton Fire. He never saw the destruction of Zorthian Ranch.
But what he spent his life fighting against—the erasure of Black artistic contributions, the neglect of Black cultural spaces, the destruction of Black communities—happened again.
His legacy wasn't just in the sculptures he left behind. It was in the way he made people rethink what is valuable, what is worth preserving, and who gets remembered.
But here's the question—when Black art burns, does anyone care enough to save it?
John Outterbridge spent his life making sure that Black history didn't get thrown away.
But now that the flames have erased part of that history, who will fight to remember it? I damn sure will pick up that mantel for Tami and her family, while they try and manage the day-to-day of rebuilding their lives from such a devastating loss.
It befuddles the mind, that John Outterbridge, the Director of the Watts Tower Arts Center for nearly twenty years has not been mentioned as a cultural and historical loss, as a result of the Eaton Fire, let alone in the same breath, with the great and devastating loss culturally and historically of the combined mountain fires.
The Watts Tower is a cultural Los Angeles landmark, on par with Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the Coliseum, Griffith Observatory, and Hollywood Sign. We in Black Los Angeles had a deep concern, we would not be included in the cultural and historical loss of Los Angeles, and by proxy a global loss, but I resolve to reverse this unpublicized tragedy.
"My use of materials has everything to do with that -- with the choices we were forced to make. In the lack of one thing, there is an abundance of some other. In cast-offs, there are profound treasures. You choose from what you have and you choose from what you find within a reality that is forced upon you. That's what soul food is about. Chitterlings and pig feet are all about the notion that, as a people, we've taken the scraps, the cast-offs, and made them into something so tasty that one can't help but suck right down to the bones." Words taken from the fantastic Artbound article on "John Outterbridge: Assembling a Movement," done by Shana Nys Dambeot for KCET.
John Outterbridge, Captive Image, from the Ethnic Heritage Series, c. 1978–82. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Tilton. Source: PBS SoCal (Artbound).
In 1980, the Black population in Altadena peaked at 43%, establishing the area as a stronghold of Black middle-class homeownership (BlackPast). By 2020, that number had declined to 18%, reflecting broader trends of displacement and gentrification (BlackPast). Despite this decline, Black homeownership in Altadena remained remarkably high, with 81% of Black residents owning their homes in 2023—nearly double the national Black homeownership rate of 44% (Voice of Black LA). This stability allowed Black families to build generational wealth in a region where discriminatory housing policies had once sought to exclude them. However, the Eaton Fire in January 2025 dealt a catastrophic blow to this legacy, destroying or significantly damaging nearly half of Black-owned homes in Altadena (The Guardian). This disaster, combined with decades of demographic shifts, has intensified fears that the historic Black presence in Altadena—once defined by resilience, homeownership, and cultural contributions—may be permanently erased.
Altadena, California | BlackPast https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/altadena-california/
Before the Eaton Fire, Black Homeownership in Altadena Was 81% | Voice of Black LA https://voiceofblackla.com/before-the-eaton-fire-black-homeownership-in-altadena-was-81/
California fires destroyed or damaged nearly half of Black homes in Altadena | California wildfires | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/altadena-wildfires-black-households