Learn More About False Claims Act Law in Altadena, California

Altadena is an unincorporated census-designated place in Los Angeles County, California, United States, approximately 14 miles (23 km) from the downtown Los Angeles Civic Center. The population was 42,610 at the 2000 census. Benjamin Eaton first developed water sources from the Arroyo Seco and Eaton Canyon from the mid-1860s from his vineyard near the edge of Eaton Canyon. This made development of Pasadena, Altadena, and South Pasadena possible. He did the work for B.D. Wilson and Dr. John Griffin, who jointly owned the Mexican land grant of the Rancho San Pasqual, about 14,000 acres that comprised the future sites of the three communities. They hoped to develop and sell part of this in a real estate scheme called the San Pasqual Plantation. It failed by 1870 despite the irrigation ditch Eaton engineered for the partners that drew water from around the site of present day JPL in the Arroyo Seco. The failure had a few causes, with the major ones being no one believed citrus or other crops could thrive so close to the mountains, and the land was too inaccessible. Eaton then tried to sell the land for the partners, and in late 1873 helped broker a deal with Daniel Berry, who represented a group of investors from Indiana to purchase 4000 acres of the rancho. Although this included the land of present day Altadena, they developed the 2,500 section further south into Pasadena. In 1881, the land that became Altadena was sold to the Woodbury brothers John and Fred, who launched the subdivision of Altadena in 1887 just as Southern California's great land boom busted. The land remained mostly agricultural, however several millionaires (mainly from Chicago) built mansions along Mariposa Street, and a small community slowly developed through the 1890s and into the new century. While Altadena long refused wholesale annexation by neighboring Pasadena, the larger community nibbled at its edges in several small annexations of neighborhoods through the 1940s. Beginning in the early 1960s redevelopment in Pasadena, the routing of extensions of 134 and 210 freeways, and lawsuits over the desegregation of Pasadena Unified School District caused white flight and convulsive racial change in Altadena. In 1960, its black population was under four percent; over the next 15 years, half the Caucasian population left and was replaced by people of color — mainly displaced by Pasadena's redevelopment and freeway projects. The name Altadena derives from the Spanish alta, meaning "upper", and dena from Pasadena; the area is adjacent to, but at a higher elevation than, Pasadena.