For nineteen months, an August in Pacific Palisades meant improvising. You drove to Brentwood for the grocery run that used to take four minutes. You met a friend at the Palisades Garden Cafe because it was one of the few counters open during the day. You looked at Sunset and Swarthmore and saw plywood.
This August is different, and not in the way most residents expect. The Village is coming back on Saturday, August 15, and Temescal Gateway Park quietly reopened on July 13. Will Rogers has been welcoming hikers since last November. Taken together, these dates give the neighborhood something it has not had since January 2025: a functional daily map. What that map actually looks like on the ground is a more interesting question than the reopening dates suggest.
The Day the Village Turns the Lights Back On
Nearly 19 months after the January 2025 Palisades Fire forced its closure, Palisades Village is officially coming back, and Caruso announced on July 8 that the center will reopen to the public on Saturday, August 15. That much has been on every local feed for weeks. The number worth holding onto is a different one. According to Caruso, Palisades Village is 99% leased, with most previous tenants returning alongside new retail and restaurant concepts. Jackie Levy, Caruso's chief financial and revenue officer, said nearly one-third of the businesses reopening at the Village are new to the property.
A third is not a facelift. It is a compositional shift. Returning businesses include Loomey's Toys, K Bakery, elysewalker, A.L.C., Erewhon, Zimmermann, Brunello Cucinelli, Veronica Beard and Blue Ribbon Sushi, while new additions include Spacca Tutto, an Italian steakhouse from restaurateur Nancy Silverton; the first West Coast location of LESET; and Los Angeles-based brands Violet Grey and Xirena. Blue Ribbon Sushi is set to reopen at Palisades Village in August 2026 with a redesigned outdoor patio and a new 14-seat omakase room tucked inside the restaurant.
A Silverton steakhouse changes the reservation math. A LESET flagship changes the retail draw. A dozen or so new signs, taken together, change what "meeting a neighbor at the Village" will mean by winter.
For residents who built weekend rhythms around specific counters and specific hostesses, that shift is the story. The Bay Theater marquee will look the same on August 15. The tenant list on the other side of it will not.
The Trails, Honestly
The other August milestone was quieter. On July 13, 2026, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority announced that Temescal Gateway Park had reopened to the public, marking a major milestone in the recovery of one of Pacific Palisades' most treasured public landscapes. If you have driven past the entrance at Sunset and Temescal Canyon Road in the last month and wondered whether the gates were open, they are. The trail you probably want, though, may not be.
| Trail or park | Status in August 2026 | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Temescal Gateway Park | Open | Reopened July 13 after 18 months |
| Rivas Trail | Open | Rebuilt to two overlooks; continues to Will Rogers |
| Sunset Trail | Open | Access to Temescal Ridge and Topanga State Park |
| Temescal Canyon Trail (to the waterfall) | Closed indefinitely | Fire damage created unsafe trail conditions |
| Will Rogers SHP | Open since Nov 8, 2025 | ~Half of trails open; Inspiration Loop accessible |
| Backbone / Rivas Canyon (Will Rogers side) | Partial closures | Some segments still off-limits |
The popular Temescal Canyon Trail to the waterfall will remain closed until further notice because fire damage created unsafe trail conditions. That is the sentence that most changes how a Palisadian plans a Saturday morning. For anyone whose default walk was the loop up to Skull Rock and the seasonal falls, the substitute is Rivas or Sunset, both of which are open and both of which have been rebuilt with more evidence of the fire visible along the way. Numerous fire-damaged trees throughout the park and along its trails, including several beloved mature oak trees, had to be removed to protect public safety, and although visitors will continue to see evidence of the fire, they will also witness the landscape's remarkable natural recovery.
At Will Rogers, the picture is similar in shape and different in feel. All nine miles of hiking trails were reopened except for Backbone Trail, Rivas Canyon/Temescal Trail and parts of Inspiration Point Trailhead, with current park hours set between 8 a.m. and sunset. One key feature is gone, however, serving as a permanent reminder of the Palisades Fire's devastation: the 31-room ranch house within the park was burned in the fire, and now just a stone chimney and small parts of the structure remain. The polo field is back, the lawns are back, and the ranch house is a chimney. The park reads differently than it used to. It is still a park.
The Gaps That Still Shape a Week
The Village reopening does not close every loop. Two absences will define how August feels between grocery runs. A destroyed Ralphs store at 15120 W. Sunset Blvd. is expected to return to the Palisades in coming years, but a construction timeline is unclear, and it's also not clear whether Gelson's, which previously operated a store at 15424 Sunset Blvd., will return. Erewhon returning to the Village as the anchor grocer covers a lot of ground for a lot of households. It does not cover the weekly Ralphs run.
What has come back on the daily-services side is unglamorous and important. Businesses now open in the Palisades are mainly catering to the construction workers and homeowners who visit the area during the day; the Palisades Garden Cafe serves as a hub, reopening early and serving as a meeting point for people visiting the Palisades; CVS Pharmacy was the first major retailer to reopen in Pacific Palisades, in November; and while Chase Bank, Chipotle and a couple of locally owned restaurants have reopened, the bulk of businesses remain shuttered. If you have not been down Sunset in a few weeks, that is roughly the map of open doors between the Village and the ocean.
The scale of what still is not open is easy to lose track of when a single center reopens with a $50 million refresh and a Silverton headline. Cal Fire recorded that the fire destroyed 6,822 structures, including more than 5,500 homes and about 100 commercial buildings, and roughly one hundred commercial buildings is the frame to hold against a single center reopening on August 15.
What Is Coming In Behind August
The rest of 2026 has more on it than most residents realize. After decades of resident advocacy and years of starts and stops at City Hall, the long-promised Temescal Canyon Dog Park is finally nearing construction, with Councilmember Traci Park's office confirming the project is expected to break ground this fall and construction most likely completed by the end of the year. The park is planned for the east side of Temescal Canyon Road near Pacific Coast Highway, north of the existing playground and bathrooms, and once completed, it would give Pacific Palisades a public off-leash dog park. More detailed plans call for separate areas for small and large dogs, with the small dog area expected to span roughly 7,000 square feet and the large dog area covering approximately 11,500 square feet. For a neighborhood that has never had a dedicated off-leash space, that is a real change in what a Palisades morning can look like.
The cultural cadence around the neighborhood is worth calendaring. Getty Villa remains on a limited Friday-through-Monday schedule with timed-entry reservations, which means visiting is still a plan-ahead exercise rather than a spontaneous one. On the coast, Gladstone's outdoor deck and an auxiliary kitchen have been operating with a limited menu since July 2025, and the site now has an approved full rebuild designed by Frank Gehry ahead of it. Those two facts, held together, tell you where the PCH edge of the neighborhood is heading.
A Palisades August, In Practice
If you are looking at the next four weeks and trying to reassemble a normal week, the shape is roughly this:
- Saturday, August 15: Village grand reopening. The Aug. 15 reopening will feature a full day of curated events, immersive experiences and community programming, with additional details expected in the coming weeks. Expect the walkable geometry to be crowded in a way it will not be again for months.
- Morning walks: Rivas or Sunset out of Temescal Gateway, or the Inspiration Loop at Will Rogers. Assume the waterfall loop is not an option this summer.
- The daytime coffee meet: Palisades Garden Cafe still functions as the informal hub. Village cafés will absorb some of that traffic once Erewhon and the returning restaurants are running.
- The Friday grocery: Erewhon at the Village will pick up a lot of weekly shopping. Larger household runs are still a Brentwood or Santa Monica trip.
- The reservation night: Spacca Tutto and Blue Ribbon Sushi's omakase room are the two openings most likely to be difficult to book in the first weeks.
- The dog walk: Leashed on-street or on the lower canyon paths for now. The Temescal Canyon Dog Park is a late-2026 conversation, not an August one.
The temptation is to treat August 15 as the end of the recovery story. It is more accurate to treat it as the point where the recovery becomes legible. A third of what opens that morning will be new. A trail residents grew up walking is not on the map this summer. A dog park thirty years in the making is finally going in the ground. A ranch house is a chimney. The neighborhood people are moving back into is the neighborhood they left, and it is also not. That is the version of the Palisades that comes out of this August, and it is worth walking through slowly.
If you are thinking about what any of this means for a home you already own here, a home you are watching, or a move you have been holding on since last year, Kati Cattaneo is available for a private conversation about the market as it is actually behaving right now. Work With Kati.
