Pacific Palisades This August: The Village Reopens, But Not Everything Else Does

Every neighbor with an Instagram account already knows Palisades Village reopens on August 15. Rick Caruso posted about it himself, the local papers have run the ribbon-cutting time three times over, and the tenant list has been circulating since July. That story is not new information for anyone reading this from inside the 90272 zip code.

What most of that coverage skips is the harder, more useful story: the Village coming back is not the same thing as the Palisades coming back. One is a privately funded, $100 million restoration on a fixed August 15 date. The other, the actual commercial corner that anchored daily errands for decades, is still cleared lots and pending permits. Knowing the difference changes where you plan your Saturday.

What Actually Opens August 15

The mechanics of the day are specific enough to plan around. Caruso's own release lays out a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10:30 a.m., with stores and restaurants opening at 11 a.m., followed by a full day of entertainment, special retailer events, family activities and an evening finale scheduled for 8 p.m. Shop hours run 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., restaurants stay open until 10 p.m., and complimentary parking continues through the end of September.

The tenant list mixes the familiar with the genuinely new. Returning names include Erewhon, Blue Ribbon Sushi, Angelini Ristorante, McConnell's Fine Ice Creams, Porta Via, Alfred, Loomey's Toys, K Bakery, and Elyse Walker's flagship, relocating to a new 5,000-square-foot space at Sunset and Swarthmore after her original Antioch Street boutique was lost in the fire. New to the property: Nancy Silverton's Italian steakhouse Spacca Tutto, described in coverage as an anchor restaurant with steaks alongside seasonal vegetables, seafood and signature dishes drawn from her Chi Spacca menu, plus the first West Coast location of LESET, and Los Angeles-based labels Violet Grey and Xirena.

Opening weekend perks lean into the community angle rather than a generic ribbon-cutting. PAIGE is offering custom patch and embroidery stations with proceeds benefiting Steadfast LA, Reformation is handing out farmers-market totes and Erewhon green juices, and Diptyque and elysewalker both have branded giveaways tied specifically to the return.

The One-Third That's New

Caruso's leasing team has been direct about the math. Jackie Levy, the company's chief financial and revenue officer, put a number on it: nearly one-third of the Village's businesses are new, a figure he said reflects a deliberate leasing strategy.

"We thoughtfully curated a mix of globally recognized brands, Los Angeles-based restaurants and retailers, and beloved local favorites that reflect the character of Pacific Palisades and the broader Westside community," Levy said, adding that a major consideration was avoiding overlap with what's already in Brentwood, Malibu, or Santa Monica.

For a resident, that one-third figure is the real headline hiding under the reopening headline. Your muscle memory for the Village, which storefront had the shoe repair, which corner had the toy store, is only two-thirds accurate now. The rest is a leasing decision made over the past year by a landlord actively trying not to duplicate what already exists three miles away in Brentwood.

The Village Isn't the Town

Here is where the two-speed recovery becomes visible. Palisades Village is 99% leased and reopening on a fixed date because Caruso owns it outright and funded the restoration privately. The actual commercial core a few blocks away, the corner that had the Ralphs, the small businesses along the flats, is a different story entirely.

The Ralphs building at the heart of the Palisades burned and has not been rebuilt. Other structures nearby survived and are being re-leased, but there is no full-service supermarket back at that intersection, and a specialty grocer inside the Village does not fill that gap for daily shopping. A few blocks over, the Spanish Colonial-style Business Block has been cleared of debris and is awaiting reconstruction, a process that will be measured in years rather than months.

Scale matters here too. Cal Fire's count from the January 2025 fire puts the damage at more than 6,800 structures destroyed across Pacific Palisades, including thousands of homes. The Village surviving intact, thanks to fire-resistant construction and private firefighting crews Caruso has credited publicly, was the exception on that block, not the rule. Everything the Village represents on August 15 sits inside a neighborhood where the rest of the rebuild is still counted in years.

Trails Are Back, But Not All of Them

The parallel story unfolding a few weeks earlier is the return of Temescal Gateway Park, which reopened to the public on July 17 after eighteen months of closure. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority worked with the California Conservation Corps, the Sierra Club, and the Los Angeles Fire Department's Camp 13 hand crew to restore trails, repair visitor facilities, remove hazardous trees, and prepare the park for safe public access.

What's actually walkable now: the rebuilt Rivas Trail to two scenic overlooks, with a connection onward to Will Rogers State Historic Park, and the Sunset Trail, which continues to Topanga State Park. The Sycamore Grove and Rubell picnic areas are open again too. What isn't open is the route most people actually associate with Temescal, the Temescal Canyon Trail to the waterfall, which remains closed indefinitely due to unsafe conditions from fire damage.

There's a practical wrinkle worth knowing before you plan a loop. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has leased roughly 65,000 square feet of the park, an area north of Simon Meadow, to stage reconstruction of electric lines damaged in the fire. That lease runs up to three years. So the park is open, but a chunk of it is functioning as a utility staging ground for the foreseeable future, not the quiet grove it used to be.

The Farmers Market Comes Home

The Pacific Palisades Farmers Market runs Sundays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. across Swarthmore Avenue and Antioch Street, the same footprint it held before the fire displaced it into a temporary merger with the Brentwood Farmers Market. Its return to its own footprint, tied to the Village's broader reopening, restores one of the few weekly rituals that predates the fire entirely.

Caruso has said the Village will resume a full calendar of recurring programming after opening weekend, including weekly Kids Club activities, Mahjong and Rummikub socials, Cars & Coffee gatherings, live weekend entertainment, and a monthly Giving Tuesday benefiting local charities. None of that is new to the Palisades. What's new is that it's happening again, on a schedule, in a place that was dark for nineteen months.

A Resident's Saturday, Reassembled

Put the two recoveries next to each other and a weekend actually starts to take shape. Sunday morning still starts at the farmers market on Swarthmore and Antioch, same hours as always. A Saturday hike can run the Rivas Trail to the overlooks or push through to Will Rogers State Historic Park, just not down to the waterfall. An evening out can land at Spacca Tutto or back at Angelini, but expect to walk past storefronts that weren't there before the fire, since roughly a third of them weren't.

None of this erases what's still missing. There's no Ralphs at the corner. The Business Block is still cleared ground. But the pieces that are back, the Village, the trails, the market, are enough to reassemble something closer to a normal weekend than the neighborhood has had in a year and a half.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home you own here, a rebuild you're planning, or a purchase you're considering on the Alphabet Streets or the Riviera, Trinton Hurt works across the Palisades and the broader Westside and is always glad to talk through what the recovery timeline actually looks like on the ground. Let's Connect.