Up Front and Personal

In Pacific Palisades, It’s Paradise Lost

by Greg Erlandson

I have trouble talking about the loss without tearing up, as if the smoke and ash from Los Angeles traveled across the country to find me. My in-laws were French immigrants to California, proud Americans, hardworking and simple in their aspirations. Joseph Bischetti knew extreme poverty in France, and he believed the best way to take care of his family was to work hard and buy land.

In the mid-1970s, he and his wife Andrée purchased a modest house with a big yard in Pacific Palisades. He could not have known then how that area and its prices would grow, how celebrities and other wealthy elites would move there for the same reasons he did. The neighborhood he moved into was full of little stucco houses, small and cute, modestly remodeled, with lawns and flower beds. People who lived in this neighborhood expected it to be the last move they made. They weren’t rich, but they had a slice of heaven and planned to stay.

When they had to sell, the people who replaced them tore down their houses and squeezed mcmansions onto their lots. Two or three stories, with private theaters and pools and always a balcony or a roof-
top patio, pointed toward the Santa Monica Bay. Joe and Andrée did not have such grandiose plans. The house was their dream, their refuge. It was a single floor, a simple stucco house — three bedrooms, a great room, and a kitchen.

The windows were open most of the time, and no matter how hot Southern California was, the house would catch the breezes blowing from Santa Monica Bay. The wind blew in off the ocean, up the can-
yon’s edge on which the house sat, over the fava beans, tomatoes, and zucchini that Joe had planted, past Andrée’s basil plants, and into the house, where it mingled with the smells of couscous and pasta and coq au vin. Joe was a remodeling contractor who spent much more time working on other people’s houses than on his own. Yet when he was 80 years old, he single-handedly put on a new roof. Despite his age and arthritis, he carried the heavy shingles up a rickety ladder and methodically reroofed it to his standards.

“Greg,” he said proudly, “this roof will last 50 years.” He wanted my wife and me to live in the house. To pass on his property would have been a dream fulfilled. I would always nod noncommittally, having taken his daughter and his four grandchildren to the other side of the country. I am thankful that Joe did not live to see what happened on January 7, for it would have broken his heart for sure. Not just
Joe’s house was reduced to ash, but every house around it for miles.


Greg Erlandson is an award-winning Catholic publisher, editor and journalist.