By Chris Woodward
The Center Square

Many people in the Pasadena area are going to need more time to recover from last year’s devastating Eaton Fire.

Rick Cole, a Pasadena City Council member, said most of the devastation in the January 2025 blaze in Southern California occurred on the other side of the city limits in unincorporated Altadena, but the overall community shares ties in all aspects of life, including commercial, spiritual and civic.

“We definitely were impacted, and we feel the impact of what happened from an economic standpoint,” Cole told The Center Square. “We share the same school district, which is facing tremendous fiscal pressures as a result of loss of enrollment and the disruption from the fires.”

Cole said many of the area students go to schools that were burned in Altadena.

“My [council] district, for example, is hosting an Episcopal private school that was completely destroyed. And a private high school in my district made room for them to bring like 120 students into our side of the border,” Cole said. “And they’ll be there for a couple of years because the rebuilding of their school in Altadena is a very extensive process that’s going to take a long time.

“So we’re feeling this in many profound ways,” the council member said.

As Cole explained, half of Altadena was depopulated overnight.

“The folks who lived there scattered to the winds and are still struggling to come back, still struggling with economic challenges, still struggling with whether it’s safe to reoccupy even homes that weren’t damaged physically,” said Cole. “The story is not over.”

Someone who thought her story was over is Jessica Mortarotti. In 2007, she founded Carmela, an artisan handmade ice cream business that manufactures everything at its location along the Pasadena/Altadena border.

“We were shut down for about six months due to damage from the fire,” Mortarotti told The Center Square. “Our building did not burn down, but because we had like a 12-day power outage at our location, all of our ice cream melted and basically destroyed everything on the inside. So we fully gutted and rebuilt everything kind of from the inside out.”

Mortarotti called it a “destabilizing” time with a lot of stress and unknowns.

“I just keep telling people this year how grateful I am to be where I am now compared to a year ago,” she said.

When Carmela reopened, business was slow at times. Some of the regular customers that frequented the establishment were displaced. Others popped in during a return trip to the area.

Still, Mortarotti remains optimistic.

“I’m hearing people whose homes burned down are sort of done with their remediation processes or starting to move back in,” she said.

Eric Tjahyadi, owner/operator of the Asian restaurant Bone Kettle, welcomes their return.

His restaurant has been open in Pasadena for nearly a decade. While the building and neighborhood were not affected by the fire, business has been slow.

“Unfortunately, the rest of the world has moved on, but there’s still so many people that are affected in terms of getting back on their feet, and that affects our customer base,” Tjahyadi told The Center Square. “A successful restaurant relies on people traveling in and visiting, people who are exploring and trying out new food.

“But the base of the restaurant is really customers that are regulars who are living in a community,” he said. “And when that community is hampered by a crisis like this, it’s really devastating.”

Tjahyadi said he has “had to make some tough decisions” in recent months.

Business is down 30% to 40%, but he understands the situation that people are in these days.

“A huge percentage of our customer base are in between homes,” he said. “They’re in construction mode, and construction is not cheap, so they have to be very lean in terms of choices, and going out to eat is a luxury.”

Tjahyadi added that many of his customers work in the entertainment field, which has seen a lot of production move outside of the Los Angeles area. These only add to what he calls political uncertainty and tariff issues.

When asked what people can do to help businesses, Tjahyadi recommended people dine and shop on a weekday. In doing so, they would be helping the mom-and-pop businesses that are the backbone of local economies, he said.

Business owners in Malibu, a coastal Los Angeles County city hit by the Palisades Fire in January 2025, made similar comments to The Center Square.

More recently, The Center Square reported on the recovery efforts in another affected by the Palisades Fire: the coastal Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades.