The Village Reopened in August. The Rec Center Broke Ground in September. Ralphs Still Doesn't Have a Date.

Where do you buy milk in the Palisades right now?

It's not a rhetorical question. The Ralphs at 15120 W. Sunset Blvd. burned in January 2025 and has no construction timeline. The Gelson's that used to sit at 15424 Sunset is an open question too, with no confirmation it's coming back at all. Erewhon reopened inside Palisades Village on August 15, and it is a very good specialty grocer, but it was never built to replace a weekday supermarket run. Nineteen months after the fire, the neighborhood has its town square back. It still doesn't have a place to buy eggs.

That gap is the story. Not because the Village reopening wasn't real progress, it clearly was, but because the order things came back in tells you something about how this recovery actually works, and it's not the order most people would have guessed.

What Actually Opened On August 15

Palisades Village held its grand reopening on Saturday, August 15, with a ribbon cutting led by Rick Caruso, Caruso CEO Corinne Verdery, and retailer Elyse Walker, followed by an evening concert on a temporary bandshell built across the street on Monument Street. Honorary co-mayors Ted McGinley and Gigi Rice welcomed guests. Actor Anthony Hopkins, a former honorary mayor himself, spoke at the finale.

The property is 99% leased, and roughly a third of those tenants are new to the property. That's a meaningful number for anyone who shopped or ate there before the fire. A dozen or so of the counters and hostess stands that used to shape a Palisades weekend now carry names most residents have never used. Palisades General Store opened September 19, reviving Amy Russo's Obsessed jewelry line inside a new shop built from the wreckage of a business the fire wiped out completely. Silverton, a steakhouse from the chef behind Mozza, is drawing dinner reservations from well outside the 90272 zip code. Spacca Tutto and LESET, the latter opening its first West Coast storefront in the Palisades of all places, round out a new-tenant list that reads less like a replacement and more like a repositioning.

The businesses that did come back are the ones that defined the pre-fire village: Elyse Walker's flagship, relocated from her old Antioch Street shop after 25 years there, along with Loomey's Toys, K Bakery, A.L.C., Erewhon, Zimmermann, Brunello Cucinelli, Veronica Beard, Blue Ribbon Sushi and Porta Via. The center survived the fire largely intact, something Caruso has credited to private firefighters and fire-resistant construction, and it took roughly $100 million and 19 months to restore and remediate before it could reopen.

The Errand Nobody Solved Yet

None of that touches the supermarket problem. Erewhon covers specialty shopping. It does not cover the routine grocery list a household actually needs seven days a week. Ralphs has no rebuild date. Gelson's status is unresolved. For a neighborhood that just got its dining and retail anchor back, the most basic daily errand still requires a drive out of the Palisades entirely.

This is worth sitting with, because it's easy to read "Palisades Village reopened" as shorthand for "the Palisades is back," and that shorthand skips over what residents actually do on a Tuesday afternoon. The Village solved dinner reservations and gift shopping before it solved the grocery run.

The Other Anchor Just Broke Ground

The second piece of the recovery started moving this month, and it's still measured in years, not months. The city broke ground on a new Palisades Recreation Center, a more than $50 million rebuild of the 17-acre site that Councilmember Traci Park called "the heart of the Palisades." The project is fully philanthropically funded and described by organizers as the largest public-private partnership in the history of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. Steadfast LA, LA Strong Sports and the city formed the partnership in April 2025 to fund, redesign and rebuild the site after the fire destroyed it. Mayor Karen Bass, Caruso, Los Angeles Lakers head coach and LA Strong Sports co-founder JJ Redick, and Recreation and Parks officials attended the groundbreaking.

Construction is expected to take 14 to 16 months. Count forward from a September 2026 groundbreak and the Rec Center likely doesn't open until sometime in late 2027 or early 2028, nearly three years after the fire took it out. Park pointed to other signs of normalcy returning in the meantime, including the reopening of Palisades Village and Friday night football at Palisades High School, but the actual building where generations of Palisades kids played pickup games is still a construction zone and will be for well over a year.

The Corner That's Still A Shell

The most visible unfinished business sits across from the Village at what locals know as the Business Block, the historic Spanish Colonial Revival mixed-use center that once housed Cosa Nostra Trattoria and a Starbucks. It burned completely and remains a shell behind construction barricades, with no public timeline for rebuilding.

Chef Gino Angelini has said he plans to reopen Angelini Ristorante & Bar at the site, but he's framed it as a quiet return rather than a reopening event, out of respect for residents who are still rebuilding their own homes. The Village marked its return with a full day of programming, and the Business Block is expected to follow a quieter path, with the restaurant coming back at a measured pace while neighbors continue their own rebuilding. Both approaches have a place in the Palisades recovery, and the Business Block's reopening is the next milestone to watch on that corner of Sunset.

The Palisades Recovery Scorecard

Reading The Order

Line these up and a pattern shows up that isn't about optimism or pessimism, it's about sequencing. The fastest thing to come back was the discretionary economic engine, the shopping and dining destination that generates foot traffic and headlines. The slowest things to come back are the pieces of daily infrastructure nobody photographs for a press release: the supermarket, the rec center where kids actually play, the neighborhood restaurant that doesn't need a ribbon cutting to matter.

That's not a criticism of anyone doing the rebuilding. Caruso called the Village reopening "one megastep" with "many more to go," and the Rec Center groundbreaking is exactly that next step. But if you live in the Palisades right now, the practical takeaway is that your weekend dinner options improved dramatically in August while your weekday grocery run and your kid's rec league schedule are still running on borrowed routines from other neighborhoods. The Village came back first because it was the easiest thing to finance and build. The rest of what makes a place actually livable, day to day, is still measured in months and years, not one triumphant Saturday.

If you're trying to make sense of what the Palisades' recovery timeline means for a property you own here, or one you're watching, Larry Calemine is a phone call away for a private conversation about what these milestones actually change on the ground.