After the fire, a crisis for Altadena’s small-business owners: ‘Who is going to want to come here?’
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The blackened remains of the neighborhood pet store next to a bank untouched by the fires.
A burned-down museum of bunny memorabilia separated by red caution tape from a strip mall, all of its businesses still standing.
A longtime bike shop, reduced to a heap of twisted metal, steps away from a pristine Thai restaurant with a handwritten note taped to the door: “Sorry, we are closed due to power outage and extreme winds. Come back soon!”
Up and down Lake Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare in Altadena, are stark signs of the Eaton fire’s aftermath: the businesses it subsumed and the ones it spared. More than 9,400 residential and commercial structures were destroyed by the blaze, a catastrophic loss for the tight-knit community nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
As wildfires continue in Southern California, estimates of the total economic loss from the blazes have ballooned to more than $250 billion, making it one of the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history.
All told, estimates of the total economic loss from last month’s wildfires in and around Los Angeles have swelled to more than $250 billion, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. Nearly 1,900 small businesses were located within the fire burn zones and were probably affected, according to an estimate from the L.A. County Economic Development Corp. Those businesses supported roughly 11,400 jobs.
Now, whether their stores survived the flames or not, small-business owners say they are facing a crisis. Those who lost their businesses are wading through insurance claims and loan applications while wrestling with whether to rebuild. For owners whose stores remain, there’s damage from smoke and ash, utilities that have yet to be restored and the fear that customers won’t return for a long time, if ever.
“There’s no community anymore,” said Leo Bulgarini, whose eponymous gelateria and restaurant narrowly escaped the fire. Just on the other side of the parking lot, the neighboring Bunny Museum burned to the ground, as did his home about a mile away.
“Who is going to want to come here?” he said. “I keep hearing, ‘Bulgarini is alive!’ It’s not alive.”
Here are three stories from Altadena entrepreneurs and the businesses they built.
Burned down but not out
When he was 14, Steve Salinas got a job at Steve’s Pet and Bike, getting paid $3.75 an hour to tinker with bicycles. The combination shop was like something out of a child’s dreamland, a place where a kid could walk in to admire a shiny Schwinn and leave with a pet turtle.
Through the years, Salinas honed his skills at bending back damaged bike frames and building custom five- and six-seater bikes, but his favorite part was the connection he forged with his customers.
The pet and bike shops eventually split into two separate businesses — one right around the corner from the other — and Salinas bought the bike side in the late 1990s.
The morning after the Eaton fire started, Salinas drove to check on his mother’s house. It was safe. He then went to a friend’s house and saw the home two doors down was engulfed, so he climbed onto the adjoining roof with a hose until a water truck arrived.
The home made it, but he soon learned that his bike shop had not.
After the L.A. fires, many homeowners face a daunting challenge of trying to rebuild and recover generational wealth they have lost.
A few days later, Salinas walked through the charred ruins in disbelief, inhaling the smell of burnt tire tubes and noticing that even items made of aluminum had been destroyed. He estimated he lost about $250,000 in tools and merchandise.
Now in his mid-50s, he is determined to rebuild the shop that has been a part of his life for four decades. Since the pandemic began, Salinas said, the company had been doing very well — he estimated that business had picked up by about 30%.
Although Salinas had general liability insurance, he didn’t have fire insurance — it would have more than tripled his premium costs, he said, to around $4,000 a year.
He has one employee, a longtime bike mechanic who started a GoFundMe for the business. Salinas said he plans to use the money to reopen in a pop-up location until Steve’s Bike Shop is rebuilt.
These days he is staying busy collecting donated bikes, tuning them up and gifting them to residents who lost their homes.
“We’ve got to keep going,” he said. “Now it’s just a matter of gearing your head toward how to move forward and try to put it back together.”
Four walls and no customers
Three weeks after the Eaton fire began, Ashima Gupta unlocked the glass doors at Code Ninjas, a learning center for kids that she bought in October for $80,000.
The center had been a cheerful place where children ages 5 to 14 would come after school and on the weekends to build Legos, practice their coding skills and design and print 3D toys on site.
To help grow the franchise location, Gupta, 45, had spent $10,000 in marketing and reached out to local companies to pitch partnerships. New members were signing up in droves, and she had six part-time employees. By the end of the year, she said, she was pulling in $15,000 in revenue a month from the center and was breaking even financially.
When the fire swept through Altadena, Code Ninjas survived along with Bulgarini and eight other strip mall tenants. But Gupta said they are “silent casualties” of the inferno: technically intact, but effectively put out of business for the foreseeable future.
“Who will bring their children here? We need families, and they’re gone,” she said as she made her way through the center on a recent Tuesday morning. The utilities were still out, and a fine layer of ash coated the floor, the orange benches, the foosball table.
Scrawled in pink marker on a white board were the words, “Tuesday, January 7th. What was the spider’s New Year’s resolution?” An eerie reminder of the day everything ground to a halt.
She said 95% of her customers have already canceled. So many lost their homes and relocated to neighborhoods far from the Code Ninjas location that it didn’t make sense for them to continue paying their memberships.
Gupta herself doesn’t think the center — an untouched island in a vast landscape of wreckage — is currently suitable for young children. She wouldn’t bring her own 10-year-old daughter here, she admitted.
“I just can’t get my head around what to do,” she said.
Gupta anticipated it will take two to three years to recover. She and some of the other strip mall tenants are considering writing a letter to their landlord to ask for a reduction in their rents; an invoice just arrived for the nearly $6,000 a month she pays for the 2,500-square-foot space.
She’s also waiting on her insurance, which has been backed up with more pressing residential property claims, she said.
Since the fire, people have kept asking her: “‘Is your house burned?’ No. ‘Is your center burned?’ No,” she said. “‘Then just wait.’”
After five decades, pet shop calls it quits
Carrie Meyers started running the register of Steve’s Pet and Bike as a teenager in the 1980s.
Her uncle Steve Segner owned the shop, and she grew to appreciate the cacophonous menagerie of birds and loose crickets. In 2000, Meyers bought the pet portion of the business, officially turning what had begun as a side gig into her life’s work.
Under her ownership, Steve’s Pets sold puppies, kittens, rabbits, rodents, birds, fish — even goats and small pigs. Meyers was greeted each morning by a green parrot named Pesto, who became the shop’s mascot and would caw, “Hellllow!”
Homeowners are buying and installing private fire hydrant systems to help protect their homes during wildfires.
When Meyers’ children were young, they napped in a crib in the shop as she zipped around, tidying up and taking inventory. Grooming services became a bigger part of the business in recent years, as had selling organic chicken feed and dog food made from avocados.
Like many small-business owners, she found it harder and harder to compete with retail giants such as Target and Amazon. But she weathered those challenges, along with economic ones like the 2008 financial crisis and the recent Hollywood strikes, all of which hurt her sales.
“I’m still here,” Meyers would tell customers who called to check in. “I made it again. I’m lucky.”
Until last month, when the Eaton fire tore through Altadena, destroying both her home and her pet shop.
“There’s nothing left,” she said. “Nothing.”
When Meyers evacuated from her home in the dark of night on Jan. 7, the fire was still a good distance from the shop and she knew shoving the animals into her car would have stressed them.
The next morning, Steve’s Pets was still standing and she drove over to evacuate the animals. On the way there, she received a call saying the shop was engulfed in flames.
All the animals, including beloved Pesto, were gone.
Distraught and grieving the losses, Meyers also had to worry about the livelihoods of her seven employees. She sent a group text encouraging them to get on unemployment, and after receiving $25,000 from insurance, she issued paychecks. Her daughter, Hannah, started a GoFundMe to help the employees.
Meyers doesn’t plan to reopen. She said she needs to focus on rebuilding her home, and at 56, she’s ready for a break.
A post on the shop’s website thanking former customers now uses the past tense: “Steve’s Pets was a family-owned and operated pet store and grooming shop in business for decades.”
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