About 300 construction workers last month milled around Palisades Village, an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles, one of the few structures that didn’t completely burn down during the wildfire last year.
Rick J. Caruso, the billionaire owner of the property and several other upscale malls across the city, greeted the workers with a smile as they placed brick paths and installed doorways.
“Everything was gutted, and everything was built back the way it was,” Mr. Caruso, in sunglasses and a suit, said as he walked down an outdoor pathway that runs through the mall with his impeccably groomed golden retriever, Hudson, in tow. “It’s going to feel alive and full and busy.”
The surrounding neighborhood looked starkly different from his vision. It bore the scars of blazes that killed 31 people, burned over 38,000 acres and destroyed more than 16,000 structures across Southern California in January 2025.
Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood of about 23,000 on the western edge of Los Angeles with a median household income of about $190,000, was one of the worst-hit areas. Tucked in canyons between the Santa Monica Mountains and the ocean, it remains full of burned-out lots, vacant storefronts and the wood frames of homes in various stages of construction, a year and a half later. Many residents have yet to move back.
In a landscape where so many are still struggling to rebound, however, the short stretch of clean sidewalk, with its upscale boutiques and restaurants, is offering a long-yearned-for burst of evidence that the fire zones are finally poised for a comeback. It also is offering Mr. Caruso a victory lap of sorts.
Since the fires, Mr. Caruso, 67, a longtime civic and business leader who in 2022 ran unsuccessfully for mayor, has been among the most vehement voices demanding a speedy recovery, and among the most vocal critics of Mayor Karen Bass, who is running for re-election.
As Pacific Palisades burned, he was among the first to assail Ms. Bass for having been out of the country when the flames erupted. But he also faced criticism himself, for paying a private firefighting force to set up a perimeter around Palisades Village.
The private force, he later argued, freed city firefighters to better protect homes and other buildings, but some anguished property owners accused him of saving his own property while hundreds of others, including some just across the street, succumbed to the inferno.
With the refurbished mall set to reopen on Aug. 15, however, criticism on both sides has receded. Mr. Caruso and Ms. Bass have become partners on a host of rebuilding issues, and Ms. Bass — who has lobbied state legislators and the Trump administration aggressively for reforms in insurance and mortgage forbearance — has applauded the mall’s swift resurrection.
“The reopening of Palisades Village is very important, because it is imperative that residents have commercial spaces within close range — places to eat, shop, and come together so that they don’t have to leave their community,” the mayor said in a statement on Monday.
“The restoration of these essential commercial spaces is about more than a return to normalcy, it’s about restoring the places that make up a community and directly serve the people who live there.”
The Palisades in flames
Mr. Caruso was at the gym near his home in Brentwood, a neighborhood adjacent to the Palisades, when he heard on Jan. 7, 2025, that the Palisades fire had erupted. Two of his children, Justin and Gianna, lived there.
“‘Dad, there’s smoke I can see in my rearview mirror,’” his son, Justin, told him over the phone as he drove away from the growing calamity.
Mr. Caruso called his head of security to get an update on the mall. He had built his fortune on commercial and residential real estate as the founder of Caruso, his development company.
Shopping malls are his specialty, and he has a portfolio that includes California properties such as the Grove in Los Angeles, the Commons in Calabasas, the Americana in Glendale, and the Promenade in Thousand Oaks. But he has long been especially proud of Palisades Village, which is near his home.
“I made a big investment when I built this seven years ago and bet on the Palisades community,” Mr. Caruso said. “And it worked.”
The threat of fire was familiar to him, however.
One of Mr. Caruso’s properties, the Rosewood Miramar Beach resort, in Montecito, had its own wildfire scare in 2018 when Santa Barbara County was besieged by flames that tore through nearly 300,000 acres of land. That fire never reached the resort.
That close call prompted management to devise an emergency plan for Palisades Village: hire a private fire brigade. In the days before the fires reached the Palisades last year, Mr. Caruso mobilized about 35 firefighters.They brought water trucks to the mall, sprayed the area with fire retardant and stood sentry.
Those efforts paid off, and Mr. Caruso’s business was saved. But it wasn’t all good news. His son and daughter each tried to return to their houses to retrieve some valuables before the flames began to singe their walls. Both lost their homes.
“It became very personal, very quickly,” Mr. Caruso said.
In the aftermath, some residents and business owners bristled at the sight of the intact shopping mall sitting within a residential grid blanketed in ash and rubble, and the firefighters who guarded it for two more weeks.
Looking back, Mr. Caruso said, he understood their anger and insisted that the sentiment has shifted over time as crews reconstruct the neighborhood and residents trickle into new homes on old lots.
“I’ve never been part of losing a town,” Mr. Caruso said. “It’s like, holy God, what more can happen to you?”
Until early this year, he had seriously considered challenging Ms. Bass’s re-election. A centrist Democrat and former Republican in a deeply liberal city, he abandoned his effort after polls showed that, while she was politically weakened by the fire, his prospects were uncertain too.
He said he was still interested in running for office at some point, though he would not say for what seat. “If I could serve in an official capacity, great. If I can’t, it’s not going to change my commitment to the city,” he said.
A decision to rebuild
Although it looked unharmed on the outside, Palisades Village had underlying problems caused by smoke and toxins in the air.
Mr. Caruso and his staff considered closing down the mall. He said that would have been the easier and more financially prudent decision. But he wanted to bring the mall, which opened in 2018, back to life.
“So we took everything down to the studs,” Mr. Caruso said. “We treated the wood, retested the wood, and then we rebuilt everything all over again.”
The mall needed tenants, and it was unclear which of the stores would want to stay in the Palisades after such a crisis.
Mr. Caruso’s first call was to Elyse Walker, a New York fashion designer and boutique owner who lost one of her stores in the Palisades to the flames, to ask for her commitment to return and her help in convincing others to join them.
Ms. Walker said she decided soon after the fire that she would revive her shop, rather than move to another town. It will return just feet away from its old spot on opening day.
“You’re trying to balance putting your business back together, but also being respectful of the healing times,” Ms. Walker said. “There’s no place we would rather be.”
Palisades Village lost about 30 percent of its customers because of the fires. The rest, he said, remained in range. Most shoppers came from less-affected areas, like Santa Monica and Brentwood, and he expected those people to come back.
The scarred landscape also presents an odd atmosphere for a high-end mall. The Grove, Mr. Caruso’s mall just south of Beverly Hills — and consistently among the most productive shopping centers in the United States — is surrounded by tidily trimmed sports fields, a historic ranch and a farmer’s market. Palisades Village, for now, is encompassed by barren lots of dirt.
Mr. Caruso said Palisades Village would have a 99 percent occupancy rate when it opens. Fashion labels that have agreed to rent space include Zimmermann, Toteme and Anine Bing. Erewhon, the high-end grocery store, has also decided to return. Nancy Silverton, the chef known for Osteria Mozza, her Michelin-star restaurant, will open an eatery with an all-new concept: Spacca Tutto, an Italian steakhouse.
Ms. Silverton said she found the Palisades “eerie” on her first visit after the disaster, but it didn’t take much convincing from Mr. Caruso to get her on board.
“It’s still going to have that feeling, but having that focal point, that center, open again, it’s just going to be very emotional,” she said.
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