Palisades Promising This A.M.

Before and after photos of a commercial building, a historic one no less, that sits gutted in the heart of Palisades. This is the side that faces Antioch. It was one of the most gut-wrenching sites that I saw this morning on my bus ride. These are not my photos, but screen captures from Google Earth comparing pre-Palisades Fire to it's aftermath, some 15 months after the fires were extinguished by Mother Nature.

I'd been wanting to take the Big Blue Bus 9-Line up to Sunset Blvd, which runs through the middle of Pacific Palisades, but until students returned to the high school near this site (about a block away) in late January, I wasn't sure that the bus served the heart of town. Today, with time on my hands and a free bus pass, I decided to take the bus tour through town.

The post-apocalyptic videos I watched last January just showed block after block of residential homes burnt to their foundations, sometimes only a chimney left standing. And while I did see a slice of that this morning, it wasn't the hellscape that sat smoldering with burnt out vehicles everywhere like in the 2025 videos. No, the cars are long removed, fencing has gone up around most properties and signs of life were popping up over the tops of them everywhere I looked. Rebuilt homes in every phase of completion now dot the landscape, a promising sign. For this reason, I did not get off the bus and take photos or videos. I had recently looked at satellite images that still showed block after block of foundational remains. That's not all that is there today, thankfully.

I'd heard horror stories about the impossibilities of rebuilding due to bureaucratic and insurance hurdles, and that a lot of former homeowners decided to sell and relocate, but that wasn't the story Palisades told today. It was heartening to see.

The photos below are of the Sunset Blvd. side of the building, which is the perspective I had today. I was so curious what the stately old building once housed, that I had to look it up on Google Maps satellite view, then street view.

Here's to hoping they reach some sort of new normal before the decade is out, unlike my old haunt, Fort Myers Beach, which is still a long way from there.