Pacific Palisades Summer 2026 Reopenings: What’s Open Now
July 16, 2026
July 16, 2026
There are two summers happening in the Palisades right now. One is the summer people are waiting for, the August reopening of Palisades Village with a new Erewhon, a returning elysewalker, and Nancy Silverton's Spacca Tutto on Palisades Village Lane. The other is the summer already underway, a quieter parallel version stitched together from a reopened state park, a farmers market operating out of Brentwood, a Wednesday food pickup at a Sunset Boulevard church, and the Highlands restaurants that never left.
If you live here, the second summer is the one you actually use. The first one is the reunion at the end of it. This post is a scorecard for both, written for residents who want to know where the neighborhood is functioning today, not where it will be functioning in ninety days.
The most useful thing that has already happened this year is that Will Rogers State Historic Park reopened on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2025, ten months after the Palisades Fire, welcoming visitors back to trails and open spaces for the first time since early January. It is the closest thing the neighborhood has to a functioning town park right now, and it is running on limited access rather than full operations. The park is open daily from 8 a.m. to sunset, and parking is limited.
The physical reminder of what happened is unavoidable. The 31-room ranch house within the park was burned in the fire, and just a stone chimney and small parts of the structure remain. The visitor's center is closed for a full restoration. Horseback riding is on its way back at a smaller scale, with Jigsaw Farms re-establishing operations at the park and horseback riding lessons and trail rides returning in 2026. If you want a say in what gets rebuilt, State Parks is running a public engagement process beginning in 2026 to help shape the park's future, with updates posted through State Parks channels.
For a working household this summer, Will Rogers is where the morning hike, the after-school walk, and the weekend picnic have relocated. The polo field lawn and the accessible trails are doing the work that the Rec Center lawn used to do.
The most common question I hear from clients who are back in their houses or renting nearby is some version of: where do I actually buy groceries and go to dinner. The honest answer is that the map is temporarily distributed rather than centralized, and it helps to know the pieces.
None of this looks like the old rhythm of walking to Swarthmore on a Sunday morning. It looks more like a resident's version of a supply chain, and once you have the pattern, it works.
The Village is where the story turns from parallel operations to consolidation. The signal to watch is not a ribbon cutting; it is the August cluster of anchors that all target the same window.
Erewhon will return as the anchor tenant at Caruso's Palisades Village, with the reimagined store slated to reopen in August alongside the Village itself, which sustained some minor damage during the January 2025 wildfires that devastated much of the surrounding Palisades community. The new build includes a fully rebuilt store with an expanded outdoor patio, designed for outdoor dining, seasonal events, and everyday community connections.
The retail anchor is a return, not a newcomer. Elyse Walker, whose original boutique on Antioch Street was destroyed in the January wildfires, will relocate to a 5,000-square-foot space at the entrance to the Village on Sunset Boulevard and Swarthmore Avenue, with the reimagined store continuing the brand's focus on curated designer fashion and personalized styling while serving as what Walker called a community "home base." Same operator, moved across the street, into a larger footprint.
The dining piece is genuinely new. Spacca Tutto, a new Italian American steakhouse developed in partnership with Newport Beach-based River Jetty Restaurant Group and four-time James Beard Award-winning chef Nancy Silverton, is part of the expanded dining and retail mix. The Infatuation lists the address as 15225 Palisades Village Ln, with an August 2026 opening. For a household that has spent 18 months driving to Brentwood or Santa Monica for a Friday dinner, that address matters more than the chef roster.
The scale of the reset around all of this is worth naming. Caruso announced a $50 million investment for reconstruction, including new designs for the public park and outdoor shopping mall, as well as rebuilding streetscapes around the village. The plan includes reconstruction of the public park inside the Village, the return of the annual holiday tree lighting and menorah celebration, and privately funded improvements to the surrounding streetscape covering sidewalks, trees and lighting, without relying on city money.
If the Village is the August milestone, the Rec Center is the multi-year one, and it is the piece most residents underestimate. Work crews began demolition of the Palisades Recreation Center's old gymnasium on Tuesday, May 26, ending a 76-year run for the structure, which originally opened in 1950, making way for a reimagined recreation center funded through a public-private partnership at an approximate cost of $40 million.
The partnership behind it is a specific one. Plans for the new Palisades Recreation Center were first unveiled in April 2025 at a joint announcement with Caruso, Lakers head coach JJ Redick and Mayor Karen Bass, and the Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners signed off on the plan on January 15, 2026, green-lighting the rebuild using privately donated money. The final design consolidates the old footprint: instead of two gymnasiums with a combined total of 18,000 square feet of space, a single 28,000-square-foot facility will be constructed, with an outdoor community plaza, a multipurpose sports field, and hundreds of newly planted trees throughout the park.
In the meantime, a stopgap is running. A temporary library facility is in place near the Rec Center site, and various park amenities including bocce, the baseball field, and a new playground have been or are being repaired through coordinated city and private efforts. That is the practical answer for the summer camp question and the after-school question: pieces are open, the main building is not, and the field programming is running in fragments.
If you want a concrete resident's summer, it looks something like this. Sunday morning at the Brentwood farmers market, because that is where the Palisades vendors are. A Wednesday order in with Hubstead if you want to test the new pickup at the Lutheran church. A weekday walk at Will Rogers before it heats up, with the understanding that parking fills fast and the visitor's center is closed. Dinner in the Highlands at Spruzzo, or a drive to Brentwood or Santa Monica for anything else. And a note on the August calendar for the Village reopening, which is worth treating as the neighborhood's real reunion rather than a shopping event.
The Palisades this summer is not a place waiting to come back. It is a place operating on a temporary map while the permanent one gets rebuilt around it. Knowing which pieces are already in place is the difference between feeling stuck and feeling settled.
If you are trying to make sense of what any of this means for a specific home, a specific block, or a decision you are weighing this year, I am always available for a conversation. Janet Heinzle is here to listen first, plan the details, and move at the pace that works for your family.
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