On August 15, thousands of people walked back into Palisades Village for the first time in nineteen months. There was a ribbon cutting, a drone show that spelled out "Pacific Palisades" against the evening sky, and a finale concert on a temporary bandshell built across Monument Street. Rick Caruso called it "a mega-step, no doubt, but there's many more mega-steps to come." He was right in a way that matters more than the applause suggested.
The grand reopening was a single afternoon. The actual reopening of the businesses residents used to build a week around is still happening in stages, some of which won't finish until February 2027. If you've been treating August 15 as the date the Village came back, you're planning your month around the wrong calendar.
The Day Everyone Photographed
By the time the ribbon was cut, Palisades Village was 99 percent leased, according to Caruso CEO Corinne Verdery, and more than 40 shops and restaurants were open for the crowds that showed up that Saturday. That's a real number worth sitting with for a second. The Village housed 42 businesses before the fire. A neighborhood staple that lost nearly everything came back on opening day with almost its full pre-fire tenant count already trading, plus a third of that roster made up of names that had never had a Palisades address before.
Elyse Walker, who ran her namesake store in the Palisades for 25 years before losing her Antioch Street location in the fire, moved her flagship into the Village and reopened her Towne concept alongside it. Longtime tenants Porta Via, Angelini Ristorante & Bar, K Bakery and Blue Ribbon Sushi were back on the floor. So were two names the neighborhood hadn't had before: chef Timothy Hollingsworth's Alphabet Bar & Grill and chef Nancy Silverton's Italian American steakhouse, Spacca Tutto. The renovation itself ran past $100 million, most of it remediation work to clear smoke and water damage rather than cosmetic upgrades.
None of that changes the fact that plenty of the businesses residents are waiting on weren't part of the crowd that day.
The Waves Still Rolling In
Several of the Village's highest-traffic tenants are opening on their own schedules, separate from the August event. Here's what's publicly confirmed as of mid-September:
| Target Window | Business | What It Is |
|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | Buck Mason | Menswear |
| September 2026 | Jacques Marie Mage | Eyewear |
| September 2026 | City National Bank | Banking branch |
| November 2026 | Loomey's Toys | Toy store |
| January 2027 | Erewhon | Grocery |
| January 2027 | Staud | Apparel |
| February 2027 | Mother | Apparel |
These are target dates, not guarantees. Erewhon's storefront on Sunset Boulevard still just has signage promising a January 2027 return, which tells you something about how much work is left behind that facade even with the rest of the block open and buzzing around it. If your errands run through a specific storefront rather than the Village in general, that storefront has its own timeline, and it's worth checking before you plan a trip around it.
What Never Actually Stopped Waiting for the Ribbon
While the retail roster fills in over the next several months, the parts of Village life that don't depend on square footage came back on day one, and they're arguably the bigger deal for anyone who lives here rather than visits.
The Pacific Palisades Farmers Market resumed its Wednesday run on Swarthmore Avenue, 1:30 to 5:30 p.m., the same weekly slot it held before the fire. A Mahjong Social runs Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon, and a Rummikub Social meets the first Tuesday of every month. Cars & Coffee returns the fourth Sunday of each month from 8 to 10 a.m., and live music trios play near the Bay Theater on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Free parking runs through September 30, which is a small thing until you're the one circling the block.
None of that required a tenant to finish a buildout or a bank to install a vault. It required the neighborhood to decide it was ready to gather again, and that decision happened before most of the storefronts did.
The Same Math on the Trails
The staggered pattern isn't unique to the Village. It's how the whole neighborhood has been coming back.
Temescal Gateway Park reopened to the public on July 17, 2026, after eighteen months closed. But the Temescal Canyon Trail to the waterfall, the hike most people actually associate with that trailhead, remains closed indefinitely due to unsafe trail conditions. Will Rogers State Historic Park reopened back in November 2025, though the historic ranch house was destroyed in the fire and only about half the park's trails have reopened. The Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine has stayed closed since the fire with no confirmed date to change that.
Each of these tells the same story the Village does. A property reopens, and that reopening covers part of what it used to offer, with the rest arriving on its own schedule, sometimes measured in months, sometimes with no schedule announced at all.
The Getty's New Role in the Calendar
The Getty Villa reopened on June 27, 2025, and it's about to take on more weight in the neighborhood's cultural life than it's carried in years. The Getty Center is scheduled to close for a full modernization starting March 15, 2027, with a planned reopening in spring 2028. During that closure, the Villa becomes the primary Getty venue in Los Angeles, adding a gallery of paintings pulled from the Center's own collection so visitors have somewhere to see them while the main campus is under construction.
In the meantime, the Center itself isn't idle. Joshua Reynolds' "Portrait of Mai" goes on view there starting September 15, tomorrow as of this writing, one more date on a calendar that's been filling in piece by piece since the fire rather than resetting all at once.
That's the pattern worth carrying into how you think about the rest of the recovery here. Nothing in the Palisades came back on a single date, and nothing left is coming back on one either. The ribbon cutting made the news. The individual reopening dates, the ones for Erewhon, for the waterfall trail, for the Getty Center itself, are the ones that will actually change your week when they arrive.
If you're watching this recovery closely because you own here, or because you're weighing what these next few waves of reopenings mean for a property in the neighborhood, Brendan Brown has been tracking the Palisades market through all of it. Schedule a confidential consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
