Living Legacy of Black Altadena and Pasadena

Year: 2025

In the aftermath of the devastating 2025 Eaton Fire, cityLAB-UCLA launched a collaborative initiative to support community-led recovery efforts in Altadena and Pasadena. Since January 2025, we have worked alongside local organizers, including Community Women Vital Voices, to contribute to long-term rebuilding rooted in memory, justice, and cultural resilience.

As part of this initiative, cityLAB supported two Senior Summit events designed to connect affected residents—especially seniors—with essential resources and healing spaces. At the first summit in April, our team hosted a participatory mapping session, inviting elders to share emotional and spatial memories of the fire and their neighborhoods. These reflections formed the foundation for an exhibition we presented at the second Senior Summit on August 2.

Titled We Were Here: Honoring the Living Legacy of Black Altadena and Pasadena, the exhibition weaves together more than a century of Black history, creativity, and civic leadership through archival research, oral histories, family photographs, and site-based storytelling. Anchored by a Legacy Wall and the interactive Weaving Altadena Back Together Participatory Table, the installation invited residents to contribute their stories to a growing map of resilience, grief, and care.

The collaboration also shaped our academic programming. Inspired by the partnership, Prof. Dana Cuff and Dr. Yang Yang guided students in AUD 133/289: Spatial Justice and the City to explore community-based mapping and cultural memory in post-disaster contexts. Together, the exhibition, coursework, and participatory practices form an ongoing effort to uplift place-based knowledge, support community healing, and reimagine recovery through spatial justice and shared legacy.

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the generosity of Community Women Vital Voices and its President and CEO, Lena Louise Kennedy, as well as Drs. Diane Favro and Fikret Yegul, whose lifelong commitment to the histories of lived places has guided and inspired this work.

We are deeply grateful to the cityLAB team, the cityLAB-Coalition (a student-led volunteer group initiated by UCLA Architecture and Urban Design students and alumni), and the students of AUD 133/289: Spatial Justice and the City for their tireless efforts and creativity.

Special thanks to Altadena Heritage and the Altadena Historical Society, whose dedication to preserving and sharing local history provided essential archival resources for this research.