Before Summer Marshall headed to her bakery job on Tuesday, she dropped off her daughter at school and picked up a few supplies from Trader Joe’s in case the Santa Ana winds knocked out power. She was headed back to the mobile home she shared with her mother in Pacific Palisades when she saw a huge plume of smoke over the Santa Monica mountains.
“It looked closer than I ever remember seeing — most fires start up toward Malibu,” Ms. Marshall said.
Within the hour, she and her mother were frantically loading vital possessions into their car. As they crawled along Pacific Coast Highway surrounded by other cars packed with people, luggage and pets, Ms. Marshall turned to take a video with her phone. “You see all these cute little mobile homes and the sun going dark behind the smoke.”
Their home, along with the entire Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates, was incinerated shortly after.
“It looks like a bomb went off,” Ms. Marshall said.
News media coverage of the Palisades fire has emphasized celebrities and wealthy Angelenos mourning the loss of their houses when they burned, like Adam Brody and Leighton Meester’s $6.5 million home, and heaving sighs of gratitude when they were spared, including Ben Affleck’s recently purchased $20 million spread. But amid the mansions and millionaires, there remained pockets of working-class residents, including food service workers like Ms. Marshall.
She and her family are safe at an aunt’s house, but all of the mobile home park’s residents have been displaced.
Overlooking Will Rogers State Beach, Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates was likely one of the most scenic mobile home parks in the United States. And many of the 500-square-foot homes were bought for a fraction of the cost of the large houses studding the surrounding hills, where the median home price topped $3 million. Perhaps most important in the real estate climate of Los Angeles, the lots were rent controlled.
Ms. Marshall described the park as a close-knit mixture of retirees and working families, and the location also offered an easy commute to her job at the Petitgrain Boulangerie in nearby Santa Monica. “I need to go back to the bakery for my sanity,” Ms. Marshall said.
On Tuesday, Hannah Marschall was scheduled for an afternoon shift as a server at the Santa Monica restaurant Milo & Olive. When the evacuation orders came, she was able to get her two cats and a smattering of personal items out of her two-bedroom apartment two miles from the Palisades Village that she and her boyfriend had moved into in October.
If she had been working a morning shift, she never would have made it home. “I’m grateful. If I had been in Santa Monica, there would have been no way possible to get back to the Palisades to get my cats,” Ms. Marschall said.
“We just got our last piece of furniture about a week and a half ago — a pullout couch my mom was supposed to stay on when visiting our apartment for the first time next weekend,” she added.
On Wednesday, she found a video on X that showed the charred remains of a staircase that they recognized belonged to her building, a triplex on Sunset Boulevard.
Ms. Marschall and her boyfriend moved to a rental property owned by his family in Malibu for now. For the moment, the fires make traveling to work in Santa Monica impossible. “There are only two ways through: P.C.H. and the Palisades,” she said, referring to the highway.
In the Palisades mobile home park, Tony Kozlowski lived a few doors down from Summer Marshall and her mother, Virginia. A 72-year-old retiree, he had taken a job as a baker at the Pacific Palisades Vons grocery store to supplement his social security.
“You start at 3 a.m. and no one’s around, it smells good and you play your music in the store,” he said. “When the store opens up, customers know your name. I do like it.”
He found out about the fires as his 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. shift ended on Tuesday, and he rushed home. As he packed, planes roaring overhead scared his cat out of his arms. He searched for it, but the police told him he needed to evacuate. “I didn’t grab anything, just my brother’s ashes, and the clothes I had on my back.”
Over the past two days, Mr. Kozlowski has juggled FEMA paperwork with trips to thrift stores and charities to get an outfit and a pair of shoes so he can go back to work. He starts Saturday at a nearby Santa Monica store, until the Palisades location reopens.
He is not optimistic he will be able to live nearby, at least not in a place like he had, because of the expensive rents in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.
“It was rent controlled,” he said. “I had been there for 10 years in this trailer with an ocean view. I was so lucky.”
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