Paul Rosenbluh was in Vancouver, Washington, finalizing a restaurant purchase when he learned that his existing eatery in Altadena, California, had been incinerated.
He and his wife, Monique King, had run Fox’s Restaurant, a “gem on the hill” of the Los Angeles-area community, since 2017. The diner was a local staple dating back to 1955, and Rosenbluh first laid eyes on its charred husk this week through a Facebook video that was sent to him after the Eaton Fire swept through the area.
Fox’s Restaurant co-owners Paul Rosenbluh and Monique King lost the iconic Altadena, Calif., diner to the Eaton Fire last week.
“I don’t want to say [we’re] exchanging one restaurant for another, but that’s kind of how it’s going to transpire,” Rosenbluh recalled thinking on the 14-hour drive back to Altadena. “We literally just closed escrow on Tuesday when all this stuff started to go down.”
He’s one of many small-business owners across greater Los Angeles who are just beginning to reckon with the devastating wildfires that have raged across the region, turning decades of history and years of entrepreneurial effort to ashes within hours.
Destroyed buildings along the coast near Topanga Beach.
Business had been steady at Fox’s, Rosenbluh said — it always had been. The diverse neighborhood is full of older residents who retired there and never left, ensuring there were always “tons and tons of regulars.”
“They came into the restaurant, [I] talked to them back in the alley. We knew these people,” he said. Now, many of their homes are “just gone.”
The couple is now figuring out how the other restaurants they own in the area — Cindy’s and Little Beast, both in Eagle Rock — can absorb Fox’s 15 or so employees into their operations, which are also on alert as responders continue to battle the evolving conflagrations. Although Fox’s was insured, Rosenbluh said he has little hope of rebuilding it.
A charred and leafless tree; damp sand. (Wray Sinclair for NBC News)
“If all the infrastructure is gone, well, you can’t rebuild a building if you have no power or gas or water,” he said. “Or customers.”
Others who lost their buildings, like Candace Frazee, co-founder of the Bunny Museum, are defiant.
“We will rebuild,” she vowed, even though the property’s insurance won’t cover construction costs. In an Instagram story announcing the end of the location’s 27-year run, Frazee asked if anyone wanted to donate a building to the organization, a 501(c)(3).
The Guinness World Records-certified site was an Altadena fixture displaying a panoply of rabbit-related memorabilia, from handmade antiques to pop-culture characters. It burned down on Wednesday morning after an all-night effort in which Frazee said she and her husband tried to tame the fire by hosing down the building.
A firefighter walks past a charred topiary at the site of the destroyed Bunny Museum in Altadena on Thurs.
“Feeling still in shock,” she said Friday. “It was standing, and then it wasn’t.”
Unlike longtime establishments, Aether was just starting to develop a loyal clientele when it was swallowed in flames, said owner Kristina Adam.
She opened the wellness studio just over a year ago, two blocks from the rental home she shared with her husband and 2-year-old daughter in the Pacific Palisades. By Thursday afternoon, they’d evacuated to a friend’s place in the West L.A. neighborhood — in time to get to safety but unable to save either property from destruction.
Utensils litter the ground near a restaurant in Topanga Beach.
Adam said she’d built Aether’s customer base from scratch into the hundreds, offering retreats, energy readings and yoga classes. Like Rosenbluh, she witnessed all that work reduced to cinders from miles away on her phone screen, via texted video footage.
“The roof was gone, the walls were burning, the staircase in front was burning,” she said. “That was a very heartbreaking moment.”
Picnic tables and a portion of a guest list survived the flames in Topanga Beach.
Adam said she’d recently started collaborating with other businesses in Topanga Beach to host group wellness events. She suspects those partners’ studios are likely gone, too. “I don’t know if anybody’s thinking about what comes from here on out, because the Palisades are pretty much wiped out,” she said.
It may be some time before Adam or others in the local business community are fully apprised of each other’s plans or predicaments. Recent days have brought harrowing experiences for some residents who’ve struggled to track down family members during the crisis.
On Thursday, James Benjamin posted a notice on the Instagram account of Wylie’s Bait Shop, a Topanga Beach institution since 1946: “If anyone has any contact with Ginny or knows her whereabouts, please DM this account. She doesn’t have a cell phone.”
Benjamin, 23, runs the store’s social media and was referring to his great aunt, Ginny Wylie. The bait shop proprietor, whom Benjamin said is in her 80s, hadn’t been heard from in more than 24 hours.
Charred cans on a melted metal shelf and a destroyed bar stool sat among the debris of burned-down businesses in Topanga Beach.
“We’ve been posting on NextDoor, and we’ve also been calling the Red Cross and different shelters,” he said Thursday afternoon. “I know she was escorted by a sheriff, but I don’t know exactly who.”
Wylie, who couldn’t be reached by NBC News, had inherited the shop from her grandparents, the original owners, and became known as the local authority on Malibu surf fishing. “Be ready to spend some time and share some stories,” one Yelp reviewer wrote in 2018. “She always helps you feel like you’re a kid about to go fishing with grandpa. Not many places like this in the world.”
Wylie’s Bait and Tackle, an institution frequented by surf fishing aficionados since 1946, was destroyed by the Palisades Fire.
Wylie’s was “a huge hub of the Topanga-Malibu surf fishing community,” Benjamin said, adding that his great aunt is “definitely like a legend.”
Wylie had been seen leaving the store on Wednesday morning and tried to call her family from a shelter, he said. Since then, customers had reported on social media that the shop was engulfed in flames along with other nearby properties.
By Thursday afternoon, Benjamin said authorities had found his great aunt at a makeshift shelter set up in a Ralph’s supermarket. “She’s still there and in good spirits,” he said late Friday.
A few miles away in the Palisades, another Ralph’s location had already burned to the ground.
A sign reads “Joy to All” amongst rubble on the ground. (Wray Sinclair for NBC News)
A sunset through a charred and destroyed building. (Wray Sinclair for NBC News)
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com