With most customers gone, Altadena’s Lake Avenue businesses are slow to return

After driving through the intersection at New York Drive, traffic headed north along Altadena’s Lake Avenue toward the San Gabriel Mountains is light — always, even during rush hour.

In the year since the Eaton firestorm swept through the foothill community on Jan. 7, 2025, navigating the town is easy. The mom-and-pop businesses and restaurants that once lined the short stretch of Lake are largely gone — as are some of the fire-ravaged surrounding neighborhoods.

Christmas Tree Lane, where 20,000 lights flickered back to life on 136 towering deodar cedars along Santa Rosa Avenue last month, took 2 minutes to drive the nine blocks between East Mariposa Street and Woodbury Avenue without a hitch.

A few weeks ago, Metro Bus resumed its 662 Altadena-Pasadena shuttle, a loop route serving Lake Avenue and East Mariposa Street through Altadena, connecting to Old Town Pasadena. Shortly after the bus resumed service, there were no riders — at least, yet.

Still, the community hailed the bus route’s return.

“Thank goodness,” said Helena Davies, a clerk at McGinty’s Gallery End of the World, who sells paintings from local artists.

The passenger service that brought housekeepers, restaurant workers and others to the upper Lake stretch stopped running after Jan. 7, when the firestorm in Altadena turned more than 14,021 acres into ash, killing 19 people, destroying 9,414 structures, and badly damaging another 1,074. On Dec. 17, the head of the parent company of Southern California Edison admitted that his company’s equipment is the likely culprit in sparking the Eaton Fire.

Lake’s small business hub — called Mariposa Junction — was spared the destruction of its western neighbors Altadena Hardware and State Farm agent John Diehl’s office. Today, those businesses only have left standing the burned outer walls of their buildings, all cleared of the debris on the inside, burned wood and twisted metal left behind from the ravages of the year-ago fire. The blackened State Farm sign still hangs over the sidewalk.

The major reason why people are struggling to get their businesses back is that the residential population has not returned to anything near normal. The U.S. Census showed that Altadena had a population of 42,846. No one really knows how many people left the community after the fire. Clearly, the recovery is lopsided while the residential rebuild lurches along with the destruction of over 9,000 structures.

Mariposa Junction thriving

An estimated 300 brick-and-mortar and home-based businesses along Lake and other parts of the town were destroyed, according to figures provided by architect and urban planner Julianna Delgado.

She’s helping the Altadena Chamber of Commerce’s “Back in Business” program, and walked the area to come up with her count. The total could reach as many as 1,900 small businesses affected within the fire burn zones of Altadena, according to an estimate from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

The tiny Mariposa Junction is known for five main local shops and restaurants, like the nationally recognized Betsy’s Restaurant (Esquire magazine says it was one of the best new restaurants in America in 2025), Carciofi Design, McGinty’s, Sidecca clothing and Ms. Dragon Print & Copy.

The junction at the corner of Lake and East Mariposa Street — which escaped the conflagration that burned the neighboring hardware and State Farm businesses — hosts community events like the Mariposa Night Market, especially significant for its recovery and revival after the 2025 fires. Just before Thanksgiving, the businesses held a block party to relaunch.  Betsy’s is getting ready to open a second deli-styled eatery in the hub.

While Mariposa Junction has been the biggest comeback story on the upper Lake stretch as the businesses one-by-one reopened in recent months, others aren’t so fortunate.

A block north of the Mariposa Junction — where the 662 bus makes a stop — El Patron Mexican Food Restaurant owner Maggie Cortez said she’s “hanging in there” amid a roller-coaster of ups and downs at the eatery. Her restaurant is a strenouous walk uphill on Lake, and customers dont’ have the option to browse in shops because the Mexican eatery is sandwiched by vacant lots cleared of burned debris. The Mariposa Junction has McGinty’s gallery. Sidecca and specialty stationery boutique Carciofi Design as draws to browse in while waiting to eat grilled steaks or pork collar at the crowded Betsy’s live-fire hearth spot.

“I lost 85% of my customers,” she said. “Most were already retired, and they moved away when their houses burned down. They went to New Mexico, Las Vegas and Arizona. It’s going to be hard to stay here.”

Troubled shopping plaza

Altadena Lake Plaza — at the corner of East Altadena Drive and Lake where the old Rite Aid pharmacy and store closed at the end of July — has seen a huge drop in foot traffic, causing the handful of mom-and-pops in the shopping center’s courtyard to question whether they’re next.

“There’s 8,000 homes that are gone. They were our customers,” said Shawn Shakhmalian, co-owner of Nancy’s Greek Restaurant and Bakery. “Business went to zero. We don’t get customers like we did. They moved to other cities.”

Shakhmalian’s bakery business dried up when it lost its largest customer, the Altadena Town & Country Club. The private, member-owned club was founded in 1910.

“Now we’re like drowning in an ocean, trying to cling to anything,” said Shakhmalian of the loss of orders from the club a mile away. “It’s hard to tell what the future will be. According to our balance sheet, we should have closed down a long time ago.”

The club, which had hosted Altadena Rotary Club gatherings, church events, government meetings and local fundraisers, partially reopened its tennis courts and swimming pool in September. Construction continues on other facilities destroyed by the conflagration that destroyed the club and some of the area’s homes.

The courtyard where Shakhmalian has his restaurant and bakery also has a dentist that recently opened, a nail salon and barber shop.

Rite Aid’s adjoining business, Fly High Adventure, announced that it “temporarily” closed after the fire, but it never reopened.

While neither had major fire damage, Rite Aid’s parent filed bankruptcy, and Fly High Adventure simply lost visitors from the community for the “outdoor adventure park” with trampoline areas, zip lines and aerial obstacle courses.

The owner of the strip center, Raleigh Enterprises, a Hollywood-based commercial property investor, says it may have new tenants in the works to fill the 24,487 square feet of vacant space.

“We’ve had several inquires. I prefer to not tell you who we’re talking to,” David Sehnem, vice president of commercial properties with Raleigh, told the Southern California News Group. “I don’t want to blow a deal.”

Sehnem is negotiating with two potential tenants to fill the spots, including the possibilities of a “retail tenant,” a nonprofit and agencies of Los Angeles County government.

“As you go up the hill [on Lake] toward the mountain, it’s the closest form of civilization, because there’s nothing above us,” said Sehnem of the plaza. “Rite Aid had a lot of business since the majority of property owners above us were long-time residents, and all of them were older, requiring lots of medication. If you’re a senior, and you want to go to the pharmacy, that’s the closest to your house.”

Bank of America signed a short-term lease with Raleigh to set up a temporary mobile branch in the Rite Aid parking lot. The branch has a steady flow of customers, and hired two security guards to watch for trouble in the dying plaza.

Raleigh also owns the luxury hotel Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood, a condominium tower in Beverly Hills and a 22-acre film and television production studio in Manhattan Beach.

Sarah Cole, a resident of Altadena who lost her home in the fires, said recently that she plans to make an appointment at the branch to learn about a two-year forbearance program on mortgage loans. “My kids go to school here. This is my home,” she said. “Times are very tough.”

Marketplace center?

Some local business leaders think they may miss out on an opportunity to draw people to the community at the struggling plaza.

As examples, they cite as urban templates Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, or even Seattle-Tacoma International Airport’s central terminal that was renovated in 2020 to create an expanded dining and seating area with music — called Capitol Hill Food Hall.

“They’ve used their space wisely for vendors, and it’s a great example,” said Judy Matthews, president of the Altadena Chamber of Commerce. “It would be great for Altadena. It would be great for a smaller community, and it will help draw footsteps back into our community and business area. No one is attracted to the area now, right?”

Later this month, Delgado plans to lead a group of Altadena area architects, planners, local mom-and-pop owners, Realtors and others, on a tour of the Mercado La Paloma, a congested marketplace along the Figueroa corridor in South Los Angeles run by the Esperanza Community Housing Corp.

Similar markets have emerged as ways to grow small businesses — including in Santa Ana’s Casa Bonita Neighborhood, San Diego and Long Beach.

“The concept is to have pop-ups and startups have a place where they can go and have community events,” Delgado said. “I want to go and talk with the people of Esperanza, to get an idea whether there’s something there. We can learn from them. Now’s the time to start working to do some kind of hub community center.”

“After the fire, we got home from evacuating, and we all kind of put our heads together and said, ‘OK, we really need to figure out how to help the businesses relocate, and do something like Mercado,’” Delgado explained. “So we’re looking at kind of bigger vacant spaces in Altadena — and there are quite a few. One of them is the Rite Aid space. Of course, it’s private property, so you have to negotiate with the property owner.”