The 31-room Will Rogers Historic Ranchhouse burned in the Palisades Fire.
© California State Parks, all rights reserved.
By LAUREL BUSBY
Special to Circling the News
After 10 months of closure due to extensive damage from the Palisades Fire, Will Rogers State Historic Park will open its gates to the public Saturday morning with free coffee and ice cream, guided walks and a polo demonstration.
The new iteration of the park will be both inviting and forever changed. Will Rogers’ 31-room historic home was burnt to its foundation, although two chimneys and the stone pathways are still in evidence behind a security fence. The visitor center, which was built during Rogers’ lifetime, sustained both fire and water damage, but California State Parks is working to remediate the water damage and repair the structure, which is still sound, although currently encased in scaffolding. Three hundred trees were lost, and the nine miles of trails suffered extensive damage, including the bridge to the Backbone Trail, which may not be repaired for years, according to officials.
However, the lawn and polo field are again green and inviting. The one-mile trail to Inspiration Point still offers its enticing 360-degree views. The lower field where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers processed the debris of at least 4,400 of the Palisades properties damaged in the fire has been returned to a safe condition. The roads in the 186-acre park are repaved, and many of the burnt white wood fences have been replaced, according to park officials who gathered with media on Friday to share details of the park’s repairs.
The polo field is lush and green.
Photo: LAUREL BUSBY
“The fire had an extraordinarily horrific impact, but this fire did not extinguish the spirit of the community or the park,” said Armando Quintero, the director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation. “This [park] is central to the community and so the leadership here made a great job of getting this back on its feet.”
Senator Ben Allen, who brought 12 of his staff members to the park as part of an educational staff retreat, previously helped spur the park’s recovery with a bill allotting $3.5 million for repairs, according to Parks staff. The visitor center repairs will be the initial recipient of those funds, and any remaining amount will pay for other park projects. Long-terms plans for the park will include opportunities for community input, which is anticipated to begin early next year.
Barbara Tejada, the cultural resources manager for California State Parks, said that an assessment of water damage remediation had already been done on the visitor center, and many of the center’s graphics, which share details of the life and times of Will Rogers, a hugely popular newspaper columnist and movie star in the 1920s and ‘30s who famously never met a man he didn’t like, were able to be saved.
Unfortunately, the January 7 fire burned through the visitor center’s roof, and, while the sprinklers, which had been activated on all park buildings, saved the center, they also caused damage as water fell through the open roof onto books and other materials in the center.
According to Richard Fink, district superintendent of the Angeles District of California State Parks, the visitor center repairs are “a project that we’re starting in advance of the community engagement planning because it’s essentially the only building remaining that is repairable. We’re going to move forward with trying to get those repairs done on a quicker timeline, so hopefully we’ll get some progress on that visitor center very soon.”
In other parts of the park, new temporary facilities, including a parking kiosk and bathrooms, which were still being prepped on Friday, have replaced some of the structures that were lost in the fire. A horse and rider were enjoying the grassy polo field on Friday, and Jigsaw Farms, the horse concessionaire, installed a temporary barn to replace the historic barn that burned. Juan Lopez, a Jigsaw Farms employee, said he had just started back to work on Wednesday and hoped that horses would be returning to the park soon.
Temporary restrooms have been installed at Will Rogers Park.
Photo: LAUREL BUSBY
On Saturday, November 8, free coffee will be available from 8-11 a.m., while an ice cream truck will offer free sweets from 11-2 p.m. Guided walks will include a 9 a.m. history walk, a 10 a.m. fire recovery walk, a noon history walk, and a 2 p.m. mindfulness walk to Inspiration Point. From 12-2 p.m., a polo demo will be held. In addition, an interpretative trailer will be available to provide more information on the park’s history.
Future park hours will be from 8 a.m. to sunset all year long.
Former regular users of the park are expected to return too, including adult soccer players who typically enjoyed the fields on Sunday mornings and youth lacrosse teams, Fink said. Los Angeles Unified School District is also in discussions with the park about using the field as temporary athletic space for PaliHi students.
Rogers’ ranch house will likely not be replaced, Park Director Quintero said. However, about 150 items, including Rogers’ typewriter, paintings, and other heirlooms, were saved before the fire topped the small hill behind the house and began its descent, requiring the employees to evacuate, according to officials. Plans for again showcasing those items have yet to be formulated.
The historic farmhouse will not be rebuilt.
© California State Parks, all rights reserved.
During the debris clean up, Tejada was one of the people who donned gloves and a respirator to sift through the wreckage and find more things to salvage, including bathroom tiles, ceramics, glass, and metals, such as door hinges and bits and pieces of saddles. A third chimney was not sturdy enough to survive, but the bricks were saved and stacked on one side of the demolished house.
The 150 rescued items, such as textiles and a huge Apache grain basket, were removed to the Statewide Museum Collections Center in Sacramento, where some were frozen in quarantine for six months to ensure that they were free from bugs and other contaminants to prevent the possible spread to other museum collectibles at the facility, Tejada said.
The full list of saved items was sent to the Rogers family on Thursday, officials said, and a public records request has been initiated, which should allow the release of the list to Circling the News in 10 days.
As the park continues to recuperate, the Rogers family, who donated the property to the state in 1944, will be “actively involved in everything we do with the park,” Fink said. “They’ve been really involved in helping with the recovery. They’ve supported a lot of our staff who are displaced. They’ve provided a lot of the resources we need to recover here at the park, and they’re going to be a key voice in the planning process.”
The recovery of the park’s plant life is one aspect of that process. For example, the Parks department is investigating the best varieties of trees to replace some of the destroyed eucalyptus, which Rogers planted before his death in a 1935 plane crash. The goal is to keep the historical look of the trees while choosing varieties, such as the sugar gum, which are more resistant to pests, more drought resistant, and less prone to dropping extensive leaf litter, Tejada said.
While the park is not fully repaired—a little over half of the park’s trails remain closed—there is much for people to enjoy, and the recent rains have revived greenery on the hillsides. Rogers’ old metal carriage and the blacksmith’s shop are on display, and the park remains a sprawling and inviting nature preserve with many possibilities for its future iteration.
“We don’t have everything figured out, but I think that’s okay,” Fink said. “We want to invite the public back to really give us their ideas and opinions on it.”
As park officials, the family, and local residents consider the next phase for the park, its history—both in terms of Will Rogers’ life and residents’ personal experiences—will likely remain preeminent.
Parks Director Quintero said, “This is a place of deep memory. This is a place where there were ceremonies, weddings, all kinds of events…. This is a place where a lot of things happened for a lot of people…. It’s deeply personal and … that’s the point, right? It’s for the community of Pacific Palisades.”
A temporary barn has been erected for the horses.
Photo: LAUREL BUSBY
Laurel Busby and Sue Pascoe, thank you for your great coverage and update. One of many sad losses and consequences of the tragic and preventable fire storm. But a tremendous example of resilience and comeback. We are learning more and will never give up.