A ghost town of mansions

The hilly neighborhood next to Griffith Park looked like a ghost town early today before evacuated residents began to trickle back. Tall iron gates that normally guarded $3- to $5-million homes stood eerily open, revealing landscaped lawns and secret gardens.

Helicopters thrummed overhead, and lawn sprinklers, turned on manually when the power went out and left on overnight, hissed. Two coyotes loped across empty Vermont Avenue and disappeared into an unburned patch of park.

Tom Ford stopped in briefly to check on his house before going to work. He had been among the last to evacuate Tuesday evening. His 1923 mansion, once the home of Col. Griffith's son, backs up against the Roosevelt golf course, and Ford had been sure the expansive green would save it. But as the fire last night whipped the wind up, then down, then up again, he lost faith and fled about 10 p.m.

-Mary Engel