“It woke you up in a way where you felt your humanity and you felt the humanity of the people around you. You understood what it felt like to really love people.”
I can’t stop thinking about this line from my friend Tara Zorthian. I was interviewing her about her former home, the Zorthian Ranch, which burned down in the Eaton Canyon fire.
I was searching to capture the meaning of a place that is impossible to define.
It’s a ranch. An artist community. A homestead. A portal to a different way of life. But there’s something else going on there. A sense of magic, hidden in the mountains, that reveals itself to those who leave behind the trappings of modern urban life and surrender to the silliest, most whimsical, most open version of themselves.
I have witnessed this place transform people. It even happened to me, a journalist from New Jersey with a rather serious disposition. I only lived at the Ranch for a matter of months, but have been a visitor for much longer. And during that time, I unlocked a new version of myself that I didn’t know existed.
The first time I came to the Ranch was in 2019 for a volunteer workday. As my tiny Volkswagen rattled across the precarious bridge and up the windy dirt road, I felt nervous with anticipation. What is this place? How does it possibly exist among the dense urban sprawl of Los Angeles?
I arrived at the top of the road to find a rambling property filled with strange buildings and objects. Art was everywhere. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.
I joined a group of twenty or so people engaged in some form of toiling. I can’t remember what we did that day – probably pulled weeds or tossed some rocks into a pile or something similar. It was a sweltering summer day and by the afternoon everyone was covered in dirt and sweat.
What’s emblazoned in my memory forever is what happened after the work was done. Everyone stripped completely naked and jumped in the pool. Music turned on. Drinks appeared. A raucous party began.
The pool was perched on top of a mountain with a panoramic view of Los Angeles. As the sun began to set over the hills, brilliant shades of orange and pink blazed across the sky and I had an indescribable feeling that I tapped into something special. What was this community I had encountered, filled with such creative, brilliant people?
I came back as frequently as I could, driven by some deep impulse that what I experienced there was magic. I couldn’t quite define the feeling, but I knew I wanted more of it.
Over the next five years, I got to know the place and its people in a more intimate way. Words are a poor substitute for what I experienced there, but it involved strange art performances, puppet shows, pizza parties and surrealist dinners, costumes and music of all types, deep conversations, sleepovers with friends, staying up all night until the sunrise and a profound sense of love and belonging.
Like Tara said, it woke you up. You felt your humanity. You understood what it meant to really love people.
My experience is but a small fraction of what the Zorthian Ranch really was — and is.
The Ranch has been around for nearly a century. It was founded by Jirayr Zorthian, a refugee from the Armenian genocide, who over the years developed a unique space that was both homestead and social scene. It became a magnet for bohemian artists in the ’50s and ’60s. It hosted countless parties, shows and performances, and over the years what happened to me — the discovery of magic within myself — happened to hundreds, if not thousands of people.
The cliche is that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. But I think we did know. All of us who lived, visited and participated in the Ranch came away with a sense of how special it was.
In the course of producing this non-narrated radio piece, I set out to capture that sense of specialness. And I knew that would be a challenge from the outset.
For starters, the 20 people who used to live here are now displaced. The community has scattered. Where previously I could simply show up and find several people to talk to, now I had to go about tracking them down to the various friend’s houses (and couches) where they were staying.
Another challenge was trying to wrap my arms around such a sprawling subject. I understood that ultimately, any attempt to tell the entire story of the Zorthian Ranch in a single piece would be doomed to failure. I myself had actually tried — and failed — before. Along with a colleague of mine, I set out to uncover the fate of The Phantasmagoria of Military Intelligence Training, which is the most enduring mystery of the Zorthian Ranch.
The story goes that Jirayr Zorthian created his greatest artwork of all time — a true masterpiece — in the form of a 157-foot mural that was first installed at the Pentagon, then possibly shuffled around other military locations, before it was lost forever.
The piece depicted the training and recruitment process of the military in not uncritical terms (could that be a motivation behind its disappearance?) and while the original has never been found, there is at least a video documenting what it looked like.
Suffice it to say my documentary about this missing art piece didn’t pan out. But the particular rabbit hole it sent me down — playfully referred to as “the Zortex” by those who live here — only reinforced my enduring fascination with the place.
Several talented individuals have contributed to telling the story of the Zorthian Ranch, and while no one’s produced a truly definitive documentary about the place, there are several great attempts currently available to view (such as this one, directed by Elisabeth de LeDoulx).
In typical Zorthian fashion, it becomes not about the efforts of one individual, but rather a collective effort spanning decades to document our own community, and articulate why it matters.
In my own small way, I hope to contribute to those efforts. But where most efforts to tell this story have been celebratory, this one is a tragedy.
Interviewing members of the community in the aftermath of this fire was a difficult and emotional experience for everyone involved. But in spite of the grim circumstances, I am surprised at how much cohesion emerged from what appeared to be a rather difficult and chaotic subject.
Themes like community, friendship, and love rose to the surface.
Now, after spending the last few weeks trying to document that ethereal feeling I experienced in my first visit to the Ranch in 2019, I’ve arrived at a simpler explanation for why it all matters.
The Ranch was a space where community could gather. Where artists, musicians and performers could live for very low rent. Where humans could coexist and care for the land and the plants and animals that call it home, like our ancestors did.
In a way, life at the Ranch couldn’t be more simple. But in a city that often feels trapped in the vice of late stage capitalism, the Ranch became a radical idea.
What happens when you create a space for community to live and gather together, to be in harmony with nature and to create and cultivate our own resources, both materially and spiritually?
The answer is magic. And unfortunately, that kind of magic is not available to very many people these days.
The devastating fire that destroyed Altadena — and most of the Zorthian Ranch — exposed the fragility of so many broken systems in the Western way of life: the lack of affordable housing or any real social safety net, the way we’ve ravaged our ecosystem and ignored Indigenous knowledge around fire, the lack of access to green open spaces for city dwellers and the difficulty of sourcing local and sustainable food products.
But among the most important gaps in our current way of life is cultivating places to gather together, with the people you love, and experience what it is to be a human in communion with other humans.
In that way, the Zorthian Ranch is more than a place in Altadena. It’s an idea. And ideas cannot be destroyed by fire.
My hope is that by sharing stories about places like the Ranch, we keep alive the idea that cultivating spaces for community to gather together in love and creativity is among the most important things we will ever do in our lifetimes.
I’m excited to watch how the Zorthians choose to rebuild. If you want to help contribute to those efforts, you can support their fundraiser.
Now, this place that transformed the lives of so many people is undergoing a great transformation of its own. Jirayr’s son Alan is steadfast in his commitment to rebuilding. Cleanup efforts are ongoing, and some residents have already begun to move back to the Ranch.
And if the past is any indication, the future of the Zorthian Ranch will be something special to behold.
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