The neighborhood bar, what role does it play in a city with as many neighborhoods as greater Los Angeles? And how does that change when the neighborhood that it serves is in a crisis?
Randy Clement and his wife, April Langford, are the co-owners of Good Neighbor Bar West Altadena Wine & Spirits, both in Altadena. After being closed for several weeks, Good Neighbor reopened on Tuesday, January 28. The couple also co-owns Everson Royce bar in Downtown LA and Silverlake Wine.
In the hours and days following the Eaton Fire, Randy took on the role of surveyor, driving through Altadena in his pickup truck, answering countless texts and DMs asking, "Is my house still there?" Randy shares his story in our latest installment of In The Weeds.
The Good Neighbor Bar, located on Lincoln Avenue in Altadena, reopened on January 28. Photo by Jacob Layman.
Randy Clement: As Americans, or maybe us as Earth residents, but definitely as Americans, we get told our entire life about the Grand Canyon. You get told Grand Canyon this, Grand Canyon that, big Grand Canyon, massive Grand Canyon. All of us, to a certain degree, feel that we have a handle on this concept known as "the Grand Canyon." But once you go to the Grand Canyon for the first time and you see the Grand Canyon, you're like, "Oh, I had no idea that this is what they were talking about." You could have the most brilliant, gifted storyteller in the world tell you your whole life about the Grand Canyon, and you might think you get it, but then you go there and you're like, "Oh, I had no idea it was this big." And that's kind of what these fires are, right?
These things are so big, it's almost hard to understand without seeing it. And then when you do see it, it's still too big to fit in your head. It's like all of us, once you see the Grand Canyon, you try to fit it in there, but it really doesn't fit. This is the same concept
I'm Randy Clement, and I am one of the owners of Good Neighbor Bar in Altadena. We opened Good Neighbor Bar about five months ago, and Good Neighbor Bar here in Altadena is the first new cocktail bar to open in Altadena in over 40 years. It's on the west side of Altadena. It's on Lincoln Avenue, and it's something that when my wife, April and I, we moved to Altadena back in 2017, it's in a building that we drove by sometimes six times a day. We just thought to ourselves that that building could be a wine store, it could be a bar, or maybe it could be both. Ultimately, we were able to get both open, and here we are.
The reason we named Good Neighbor Bar Good Neighbor is because when we were demoing the building, and we were unearthing aspects of the building, there was a sign in it that said "good neighbor." So we were like, you know what? I think we're just going to name this Good Neighbor Bar, and we're going to make this bar kind of emblematic and have all of the attributes that you would hope a good neighbor would have.
As part of the menu design, we had a giant white board session brainstorming all of the different things that one would hope for if they were to have a good neighbor. Good Neighbor Bar is a place that is built underneath the mindset of "come as you are." There's no pretense, there's no attitude. We are just emphatically happy for all people to come.
I think that a good neighbor or a good neighbor bar is a bar that's immersed in the community, a place where people come for wants, needs, aspirations, dreams, thoughts, wants, whatever. We have a saying in our family which is "help the people." And I think that with Good Neighbor Bar, it's essentially just, "How can we help you?"
When the fire broke out, I was actually at our house with April and my two sons, Everson and Royce. We have dear friends that live in the Palisades, and they are an older couple. I remember April, my wife was texting with them, and I was like, "Oh, I'll go pick them up right now. Just tell them that I will leave Altadena right now, and I'll go to the Palisades. I'll pick them up right now, and they can stay at our house."
As I was on the phone with them, our house shook. We live on a canyon, and our house shook. I was like, "Oh, the wind is so strong that the house shook." Five minutes later, our friends in the Palisades politely declined. Someone else came, picked them up, and one of my son's friends texted him and said, "There's a fire in Eaton Canyon." And I was like, oh, that wasn't the wind. That was a helicopter that was flying really low over our house and I bet you they were going to look at that fire.
I cannot tell you how windy it was that day. It was windy all day. Two hours earlier, we had to close Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine because the roof started to blow off. As soon as our son said, "There's a fire in Eaton Canyon," and we turned on the news and there was a fire in Eaton Canyon, I just went outside, and I started to hose off our house.
I hosed off our house from 6 A.M. till 3 A.M. At 3 A.M., they came to our house and said, the fire's here, get out. We then drove to Silver Lake Wine, one of our other businesses. We got there probably at fourish in the morning. Our sons slept in this back room where it's all this artwork that they've drawn their entire lives, because they grew up in that store.
I went to the computer and literally just watched the fire. Right around nine o'clock in the morning after the sun came up, the wind kind of died down, and they started to fly the helicopters, and essentially the fire kind of stopped what it was doing.
A friend of ours was under the assumption that they had lost their home, and he called us very frustrated that he could not get to where his home was. I knew this side street, one-way thing that we could drive in, kind of like covert operations, behind the scenes, whatever. We ultimately made it up to his house. We stood there, and that was the first house that I visited that was gone where I knew the person. It was crazy, crushing. Where he lives, all the houses are gone. Not some of the houses, all of them.
Then, I realized there's a lot of people that are totally following the rules, and they have no idea, especially those first few days, that their house is gone. I was like, we should put out on Instagram that we are going to drive around and if you send us your address, we'll let you know if your house is there. It turned out that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people wanted to find out if their house was there or not, so we made a decision to go in.
We were going to send you a message with a picture of your home, and it was going to say either "It's here" or "I'm so sorry." It was one of those things where even the people who had lost their home were very appreciative that they knew now that they had lost their home.
Then, we decided to really get good at this, and we used the same software that we used to do all the deliveries through all of our wine stores to map out the day's [plan] to look for the houses. We would enter all the addresses into the software. It would plan our route. I would drive. April would ride shotgun. We'd pull up to the house or where the house was. We'd take a picture. We'd click "finish delivery." When it clicked "finish delivery," it would update the software. That software was being viewed in real time by someone at Silver Lake Wine. They would then take that image and they would message the person on Instagram and it would just say, "It's here" or "I'm so sorry."
I know we went to hundreds of houses, and remember, we don't know, for the most part, any of these people, right? People were sending us requests, "Can you go to my grandma's house?" "Can you go to my neighbor's house?" "Can you go to my friend's house? My friend is too distraught. They can't ask themselves. This is their address."
On the last day, we started hiking in, and they had all these people up on the ridge with binoculars and they told us to go back. That was a crushing day because obviously we're respectful of the authority those people had but at the same time, I still really regret that we stopped. But we helped a lot of people figure out what was going on. Then, they had the satellite imagery and then as time went on, the county had its website or the city had its website. If I could go back and do it again, I would have started with the software, figured out how to sneak in a lot of our drivers, and I bet you we could have done thousands of houses.
I'm sitting here talking to you about reopening Good Neighbor Bar. By the time people hear this, Good Neighbor Bar will have reopened, and I have no idea what it's going to be like to reopen Good Neighbor Bar except for I know it's going to be super heavy.
I'm going to give a speech to the Good Neighbor Bar staff when they all get here in a little bit. None of us know how to do this, right? None of us know how to deal with what we're about to see with all the emotions or whatever. But for me, I'm going to approach this like a car crash. If there's a car crash and you're the first one to come to the aid of someone that was just involved with the car crash, you come to them, you're like, "Hey, how are you? Just relax. You're okay. I'm here with you. What's your name? How do you feel? Tell me how you're feeling. Don't try to get up. Just sit here. It's okay. You have nowhere to go. You sit here and just relax for a second because we're all here to help you and right now, you don't have to do anything. You can just sit here, and if you want to say something, we can talk. If you want to just be quiet, let's be quiet. Whatever you want to do, we're here for you." And, yeah, we're just going to be here to help the people.