Downtown Newhall’s fire early Monday was many things, all incongruous. How can a raging fire destroy our heritage in this SciFi-sounding year of 2026? Shouldn’t this be an issue of a distant past? Shouldn’t it be Mrs. Leary’s cow kicking over a kerosene lantern in a Chicago barn? And yet, with all the modern technology, state-of-the-art firefighting equipment and instant communication, stubborn flames roared well into mid-morning along Main Street. Familiar buildings, a century-plus, seemed they’d stand a thousand years. They didn’t. The loss tugs at heart, soul and identity. 

We’re courageous creatures. We won’t rebuild. We’ll build something new. I pray a true artist’s heart will inspire that fresh design, sculpt it into something unique, filled with the right dash of mirth, the perfect splash welcome and coziness with more than enough of what zen calls, in appropriate lower case, “…suchness.” I hope the lesser PR gods of Bureaucracy and Suits won’t bedevil the process and con us into accepting that an imagination-less beige cube with Christmas tree lights belongs on the cover of Architectural Digest Magazine. This is Santa Clarita. We shouldn’t (but — curse our fatal indifference — we so often do) settle. We settle for paint-by-numbers mediocrity, then call it the Mona Lisa. 

I know a little of local history. It’s eerie how fire has visited that one particular tiny corner. Henry Mayo Newhall once owned most of Santa Clarita. His vision was to build this valley into the Paris of the West Coast. Hank........

© Santa Clarita Valley Signal