The January 2025 wildfires that swept through Pacific Palisades wreaked devastation practically beyond belief, destroying more than 5,600 homes and businesses.
On Saturday, the Westside community marked a long overdue milestone for fire-weary residents: the reopening of the Palisades Village shopping center.
The 125,000-square-foot upscale mall, featuring shops, restaurants and a movie theater, survived the blaze but required renovations that cost its owner and developer Rick Caruso more than $100 million, including major infrastructure work.
“I have been waiting 19 months to say welcome to Palisades Village,” said Caruso, executive chairman of his eponymous company. “I’m not going to be blind here. We are in the middle of a recovery, and this is one chapter. It’s a mega step, no doubt, but there’s many more mega steps to come.”
The reopening was packed with shoppers, store owners and residents, who milled about the refurbished center and enjoyed free drinks and food offered from kiosks. Hyper upscale grocer Erewhon at the center will reopen in January.
The center draws customers not just from Pacific Palisades but from Brentwood, Malibu, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and even Calabasas.
The $200-million shopping center, which first opened in 2018, is 99% leased, with one-third of the shops are new, including an Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto by chef Nancy Silverton and women’s apparel retailer LESET.
Also opening a shop in the center is Pacific Palisades fashion designer Elyse Walker, who lost her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street to the blaze.
“The past 20 months has proven to be one of the most challenging times in Los Angeles history, and yet here we are all together as a community to rally for a revival,” she said, during the grand opening event. “Today is truly a homecoming.”
Other Pacific Palisades shops that burned and relocated to the Village include K Bakery and Loomey’s Toys. Among the returning tenants is Angelini Ristorante & Bar run by prominent L.A. chef Gino Angelini.
Other businesses have been reopening outside the mall. Near the shopping center, there are homes and other businesses in various stages of reconstruction, some nearly complete, others with just framing or drywall.
Allison Holdorff Polhill, president of the Pacific Palisades Community Council, who lost her home in the blaze, said that the community is steadily rebuilding but still has a long way to go.
She figures it will take five years before much of the reconstruction is finished, with the reopening of the center signaling a major step forward, such as when Palisades Charter High School returned to its main campus in January.
“This type of activity, opening the Village, gives everyone hope that there’s businesses to patronize, all of these things that people do,” said Holdorff Polhill, 61, a 30-year resident who hopes to move back into her home in October.
The mall’s survival amid the community’s devastation was not without controversy given Caruso’s use of private firefighters to ward off the flames.
Caruso, the former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, has defended their use saying they freed up city firefighters during the catastrophic firestorm. He also has credited the mall’s use of fire-resistant construction materials.
“This town was Mayberry by the sea. I always called it like living inside a Norman Rockwell picture, and then a nuclear bomb hit,” he said, in remarks Saturday.
In reopening the mall, the billionaire real estate mogul whose company owns the Grove, the Americana at Brand and the Commons at Calabasas has taken something of a risk.
Many Pacific Palisades residents are still displaced, with an estimated 30% of the Village’s customer base affected, Caruso has said.
However, the developer surely looks to be able to count on local customers such as Julian Bostic, who moved into a home not far from the Village in 2020, only to see it burn down.
Bostic, 54, who is rebuilding the home where he lived with his wife and two children, said the Village became an “incredibly important part of our existence here in the Palisades” — and a beacon of hope.
“When the firestorm struck, we were gathered there with other community members and just friends and just sort of in shell shock and thinking about our next move and not really sure exactly what to do, “ he recalled.
“And I remember distinctly that someone said, ‘Well, the village didn’t burn, right? The village is up and running. The structure is still in place,’” Bostic said. “And I remember that that was the first moment that we, as a family, had any sort of hope that our community was going to return in the way that we once knew it.”
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