For the second Fourth of July since the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena, a two-block stretch of Pepper Drive will fill on Saturday morning with decorated wagons, children on scooters and the occasional horse.
The parade has no official committee, no board and no one in charge. It has run this way for decades, collaboratively powered by neighbors rather than any organizer. A few quietly take on pieces of it — corralling the crowd at the top, hosting the gathering at the end.
The procession will step off at 10 a.m. at the corner of Pepper Drive and Glen Canyon Road and head two blocks down the street. There is no registration and no lineup. Cars parked across the intersections at either end close the street to traffic, and neighbors are asked to pull and keep their own vehicles into their driveways for the morning. The street reopens by about 11:30 a.m.
“It has a hometown feel to it where there’s more people in the parade than watching the parade,” said Sylvia Vega, the Altadena Town Council representative for Census Tract 4613. Every year looks a little different, she said; the 2025 parade drew members of the 501st Legion, the “Star Wars” costuming group.
“There is no speech,” she said. The neighbors just gather at 10 o’clock and start walking.
The parade dates back decades. It was already long established when Jean Buennagel and her family moved onto the street, she wrote; a neighbor once handed her black-and-white clippings and photographs from 1959.
Neighbors have floated the idea of a committee, Buennagel wrote, but “nobody really wants that change in what happens, rather spontaneously, every year.”
The walk has gone forward even in hard years.
“Even during Covid times, we had the parade,” she wrote — that year without food, with neighbors keeping their distance. Past processions have featured former high-school musicians reunited for a few songs, readings of the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence, and a banner neighbors had made to lead the march. Children have brought pet rabbits, turtles and guinea pigs.
Even a bit of officialdom turns up. Resident Monica Hubbard wrote that “the Altadena Sheriff Station is always notified and sometimes 1-2 members of their equestrian team participate in the parade.”
The parade went on last year, too, about six months after the Eaton Fire devastated Altadena in January 2025. The neighborhood turned out as it always had.
Residents tie the parade’s do-it-yourself character to how the neighborhood behaved after the disaster.
“It was the same during the aftermath of the Eaton Fire, where everyone pitched in to do whatever had to be done,” Steve Bass, a Census Tract 4612 resident, told Pasadena Now. He put the parade and the neighborhood in the same terms: “Altadena is Mayberry and the parade has just that feeling — a makeshift, old-time, hometown get-together.”
Dr. Reginald Wilkins, the Town Council representative for Bass’s tract, has lived on the east side of Altadena for 26 years. The parade, he wrote, “means we have community-oriented people that do great things without pay or permission.” He added: “That’s America to me.”
The parade ends a few houses up from New York Drive, in Buennagel’s shaded front yard, where she sets out tables and chairs and neighbors add to a potluck spread — watermelon, hot dogs, cupcakes, coffee.
Families tend to linger for about an hour. For years, the finish was across the street, at a larger home where children were handed Kool-Aid and the hosts threw a backyard picnic with badminton and horseshoes; when that family shifted its energy to the Sierra Madre parade, the Buennagels took it on, at a smaller scale. The parade itself is brief, and then, as Hubbard put it, “neighbors bring treats to share and there’s lots of visiting.”
For Vega, who sells real estate in the area, the walk doubles as a welcome for new arrivals — a chance, she said, “to see new neighbors, to introduce the parade to new neighbors.”
The parade is free and open to anyone, with participants encouraged to decorate bikes, strollers and wagons.
The children tend to go first, racing downhill toward the food while the rest of the street follows at its own pace. What newcomers should know, Wilkins wrote, is “that we are resilient and resourceful and love our town — and are honored to share our Beautiful Altadena with them.”
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