I’ve never seen anything like the resolve with which Altadenans are fixing to rebuild following the devastation of the Eaton fire.

And I don’t believe that it’s only because I am close to the place, having grown up there, and so have an emotional attachment.

While we’ve all witnessed from afar the braveness and determination of residents of communities around the world after earthquakes, floods, fires, Nazi buzz bombs — for that matter, after atomic bombs — have destroyed their towns or cities.

I’m just not sure the world has ever witnessed such a widespread combination of intellect, grit and soul as we are about to witness from the people of Altadena.

Last week I was privileged to be a guest at a community meeting of preservationists, architects, Town Council members and other local leaders. Called together by new Altadena Heritage Chair Hans Allhoff, a downtown L.A. lawyer who lost his own home on Sunny Oaks Circle to the fire, it was held at the Blinn House, the gorgeous HQ of Pasadena Heritage near the Fuller Seminary campus.

I don’t even own a home in Altadena anymore — just memories of growing up there, possessed only of the sad fact that my old homes are gone. And yet during introductions at the meeting it was me getting all emotional instead of practical about what we have lost.

Whereas the planning mavens and the very small-town electeds — the Town Council has no legislative power in the unincorporated area, but it sure does have the ear of Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger — who were present were all business. They were joined by knowledgeable allies from the L.A. Conservancy to the famed, now-torched Altadena Community Garden.

So many of them, including Town Council Chair Victoria Knapp, lost everything. Yet there they were, gathering amid the tragedy not to work on their own personal way forward but rather on the communal future of their beloved, incomparable place — as the pre-eminent local historian Michele Zack calls it, “Between Wilderness and City.”

Michele and her husband Mark lost their 100-year-old home, too. But they’re all about the future now. About making sure that the small genius of Altadena is not further destroyed by bad development, real-estate vultures and a wholesale gentrification and loss of Black and Latino neighborhoods that would be the end of the town we know and love.

I can’t go into some of the details of what I heard that morning because the group needs to announce those — which it will, soon — after ironing out some of the early planning. I can say that the impassioned people behind what is being called Altadena Always will stand firm against a corporate development approach, and that because of their smart and local knowledge, they will win. Allhoff terms the effort to his team as “endeavoring, hopefully with your input, to assemble an able, dedicated, and diverse coalition to advocate for Altadena’s rehabilitation — and preservation (“Altadena Always”); (2) identifying and recruiting a chief recovery officer, empowered by L.A. County; and (3) nominating” a prominent local New Urbanist architectural and planning firm “to be at the forefront of Altadena’s urban renewal.”

And he added in a note to the group what was a common theme that morning: “We feel we must act fast.”

Wednesday at random

After the weeks of commercial shutdown in Altadena, it was a pleasure the other night to pop into the reopening of what had become the town’s premier — well, only large — watering hole, the Good Neighbor Bar on Lincoln. I got to visit, and have Happy Hour Old Fashioneds with, two Braeburn Road neighbors, Little Flower cafe owner Christine Moore and prominent realtor Gretchen Seager and her daughter Olivia, in from New York City. Early on the night of the Eaton fire, while it was merely blowing a gale, Christine was heading down the hill for burritos. But the fire engines heading up from Pasadena changed her mind. “I turned around to see Eaton Canyon explode in fire. I can’t say that I have ever screamed that loud in my life, because I just knew it was biblical,” she told Evan Kleiman on KCRW. “We are literally three blocks from Eaton Canyon, and when I saw that happen, I instantly knew, this is the beginning of the end.” After knocking on doors to get neighbors out, and evacuating eventually, she and her son snuck back in to spend all night protecting the house and the neighbors’ with a garden hose and buckets of water from the pool. Thanks to hard work and miracles, their house survived.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com