The sky over Altadena was a curve of robin’s egg blue the other day, cruelly perfect above the devastation as photographer Janet Grey and I set off on a chimney safari.
She says, “The entire fire experience was very emotional for me. I had so many feelings, sadness, anger, disbelief…I felt like I was seeing close friends dying. I am just so involved with residential architecture. I care about neighborhoods so much. And when I was able to stop crying, I noticed the chimneys and it just instantly struck me that I needed to document them.”
And now, with The Eaton Fire Chimney Project, Grey is like a woman possessed. Every day finds her in the burn zone, sometimes summoned by homeowners who want a photograph of their chimney before the bulldozers take everything to the landfill, other times simply documenting what still stands because in her view, doing so is a cultural and civic necessity. Grey supplies photos of chimneys to homeowners at no charge, and hopes to compile the Eaton Fire images into a book in the months to come.
Chimneys have a deeper symbolic and mythic pull upon us than do mere buildings, and it has to do with the Promethean gift and undeniable magic of fire. Our first ancestors used fire as a shield to keep predators at bay during long nights. This protective power became abstracted into the burnt sacrifice, and to the lighting of lamps and candles for sacred times. A powerful virgin goddess named Hestia by the Greeks, Vesta by the Romans, presided over the hearth which was considered not only the blazing heart of a private home, but also the radiant center of the community. Many city-states maintained a civic hearth where the flames were tended around the clock. The Latin word for hearth is focus, confirming the fireplace and the chimney as an expression of civic identity in public life as well as a cozy spot for making s’mores.
Grey moves through the Pyrocene Era debris as a lone, Ninja-like figure dressed in protective layers, gloved and doubled-masked, from the ER-style elastic-top plastic boot covers on her feet to the black knit cap which cannot contain her crown of springy silver ringlets.
Altadena’s Thunderdome landscape is silent except for the occasional vroom-vroom of a chainsaw or the call of a perhaps-confused peacock across the fields of blackened, bleached waste. There are few signs of life, even fewer signs of human activity with the exception of a pair of Army Corps of Engineers dudes in ventilators and white bunny-suits taking soil samples. One supposes that by now the looters have taken whatever there was to take, and the exhausted homeowners have retreated offsite to wrangle that hissing Hydra’s-head of agencies in hopes of re-establishing residence and some sense of normalcy.
Grey’s a Firebird-Cinderella photographer with a love for historic architecture and a passion for preserving past glories, an appetite whetted by student years in Paris with a camera and a storyteller’s drive to uncover the hidden narratives within the inanimate. Back in the States, her pop-punk-baroque aesthetic led to a career in interior design, where she created unique spaces for musicians and fellow artists, and then to real estate investing.
She also packs her bag of tricks with innovative playlists and evocative music compilations, often themed to houses not only in the structural sense, but also to notions of home. Music’s in Grey’s blood: her grandfather, Bill Lava, conducted orchestras and composed music for film and television, and Grey herself worked in sales and marketing for Jem Records, Rhino Records and Capitol Records among her many other creative adventures.
Grey says that during COVID, she began walking Los Angeles with new eyes, exploring neighborhoods far afield from her San Fernando Valley roots and her current Silver Lake digs. Her obsession: to protect the dignity, beauty, history of our local architecture. In keeping with our musical theme, she viscerally opposes the Little Boxes: “I don’t want to see older homes go to developers who consider everything a tear-down, to be replaced by modern monstrosities.” When asked, Grey said that she has shot about 250,000 images of more than 6,000 homes.
“One lady screamed, ‘DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW THIS FEELS?’ and what could I say?“
Grey may obtain explicit permission from the property owners to photograph the remains. In other cases, she keeps her distance but manages to capture the standing structures, gingerly entering private property. She says “I am very careful and respectful about this. I do a lot of shooting from the street. There is a lot to see there. But a lot of the properties are now very open. I never, ever touch or move anything. I am always happy to explain what I am doing if anyone asks me. I am also now connected with the Save the Tiles people so some of what I am doing is documenting the chimneys before the tile is removed.”
Occasionally, there is push back. “I just don’t like it when someone comes out guns a-blazing and won’t even listen to an explanation. One lady screamed, ‘DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW THIS FEELS?’ and what could I say? I told her I was so sorry about what she’s going through and got out of her way,” says Grey.
Fortunately, thus far those guns a-blazing have been purely metaphorical.
She says, “I am so driven. I am on a mission, because the bulldozers are there and then all will be gone. I feel people need a bridge between the before and the after, and that’s what I’m providing. Because this in-between phase matters, too, and in the future, it will be something for them to look back on and realize how far they’ve come. This is a milestone, too.”
The light is fading as we make our way back to the car. We could be war correspondents, picking our way through the ruins of Dresden, Bakhmut, or Gaza, or the incinerated World Trade Center, or maybe the surface of a dead moon where a grand civilization once flourished. The only sound now is made by our boots as we crunch slowly across mounds of loss, the sprawl of scarred memory, crushed sheet rock and broken glass, dodging loose bricks and snarls of wire, a mother’s nightmare of rusty nails and worse. What appear to be billions of mosquito larvae twitch at the surface of a huge, rectangular swimming pool filled with bubbling black water.
My eyes were drawn to a sea-foam trail of blue and green glass pebbles and delicate seashells playfully embedded in the pavement of one shattered property, suggesting the fluted shapes carved into signposts along Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Although this especially grueling pilgrimage honors the relics of Spain’s Patron Saint James, the scallop, pagan symbol of Venus, is everywhere.
At that moment, I looked up to see a sculpture of Aphrodite of Melos still atop her pedestal, framed by what looks like a mature, twisting arch of deeply charred wistaria. A cosmic confrontation, followed by another: Just then, a welcome human face popped into view over the fence.
With a friendly smile, the woman asked, “Whatcha doin’?”
Grey explained, and within minutes we were whisked into the lady’s gracious home, untouched by the flames, to admire the century-old tilework inside.
As we drove down the hill, Grey said “This happens all the time. I’ve met so many amazing people doing this. One lady even invited me in for fresh cherry pie, warm from the oven.”
Local News Pasadena reporting on natural disasters is supported, in part, by generous grants from the Institute for Nonprofit News and PEN America.
Glorious to read the sense of the writer’s
heartfelt expression of this remainder of peace.