Pacific Palisades businesses slowly return to work with ‘a lot of people gone’

Even after a year, the faint smell of burnt wood still wafts through the air along the Sunset Boulevard business district in the Pacific Palisades.

The Jan. 7, 2025, firestorm in the seaside community and in neighboring Malibu turned to ash more than 23,448 acres, killed a dozen people, destroyed 6,837 structures and damaged nearly 1,000 others before extinguished on Jan. 31.

David Tishbi lost everything in the fire: his jewelry business at 860 Via De La Paz, his home along Enchanted Way that he moved into three weeks before the fire, and a condo at the corner of Via De La Paz and Sunset.

About two months after the wildfires, Tishbi hired a truck operator with a crane to pull from the burned debris a 5,000-pound safe with important documents, molds of handcrafted jewelry and 22-karat gold pieces. The safe crackers took two days to pry open the charred safe with melted locks, handles and hinges.

“It was burning for about three days. Nobody came to put out the fire. I couldn’t touch the safe,” the 52-year-old Tishbi said. “It became like an oven, and baked everything inside.

Since the fire, he’s lived in three different homes — all in the Santa Monica area — and found a new storefront at 632 Montana Ave., Santa Monica’s hub for boutique shopping. “We went through a lot. It wasn’t easy for all of us,” he said.

“Honestly, it wasn’t like I wanted to get out of the Palisades. We were forced out of the Palisades, because of the fire,” Tishbi said. “We don’t have a 20-year lease, but we are hoping to go back to the Palisades at some point. I don’t know when that’s going to be. A lot of the people from the Palisades are gone.”

Rebuilding has begun

Maryam Zar, chief executive officer of the Pacific Palisades-Malibu Chamber of Commerce — or PaliBu for short — stepped into her job on Nov. 1. Her predecessor, Barbara Bruderlin, retired this summer after overseeing a pandemic-induced merger between the shrinking chambers in the L.A. suburbs in recent years, and stressed by the daunting efforts to rebuild from conflagrations and mudslides.

Zar came into the job with political connections and community organizing abilities. She is the founder and president of the Palisades Recovery Coalition, a community-rooted, volunteer-led coalition that is watching over the Pacific Palisades rebuild.

The chamber had 650 members before the fires. The organization was gutted afterwards, as small businesses and independent contractors who worked out of their homes were forced to find new digs. Many left the area for new work or moved out of state to find a cheaper place to live. Many couldn’t rebuild because their insurance didn’t cover the cost.

The more than 580 members today include some of the same as those before, but the ranks are now bolstered with builders, insurers, insurance adjusters and attorneys from all over Southern California who want to provide services. Courtesy memberships to the chamber were extended for a year, but that may last longer.

The business recovery has been difficult.

In September, a rebuild exposition was held at the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club on Fourth Street to bring together fire victims with about 40 general contractors, design-and-build firms, insurance adjusters, permit expediters and others. The space was tight, and with the expo planned on very short notice, it was difficult for some in the Palisades to attend.

A follow-up expo was held in November, where a few streets were closed in the heart of the Palisades to set up vendor exhibits and give locals a chance to shop around for rebuild help. This time, an estimated 500 people attended.

“We were surrounded by building burnouts and empty lots, but it was very fitting. We had over 90 exhibitors,” recalled Anthony McDemas, the chamber’s connections director for the chamber.

A third expo is planned in the Palisades on Feb. 22.

Not everyone survived the ordeal.

The Palisadian-Post, owned by Alan Smolinisky, a private investment company operator and partial owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, ceased operations on Dec. 11. “After 97 years, this pillar of our town will be no more,” Smolinisky wrote in his last column in the paper.

“This time last year, we still had a future. But it burned up in the fire, like most of the town. We lost the few businesses that still bought advertising. They were either destroyed or had no customers. Worst of all, we lost the one thing we can’t do without—our readers,” he wrote. “The Palisades became a ghost town in the wake of the fire. Subscriptions basically fell to zero. It’s completely understandable. But you can’t print a newspaper nobody reads.”

Billions in funding

There is an urgency to rebuild.

The federal government’s Small Business Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency has pumped billions into disaster assistance recovery, along with the city and county of Los Angeles, according to government sources.

Additionally, the chamber runs a grant committee that is receiving commitments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to assist local businesses — including mom and pops and the commercial property landowners who lost their properties with no tenants or renters yet.

“We are looking at a little over $500,000 in grant money, which we have not yet received or deposited, but there is a pledge, and it is coming our way,” Zar said.

“We’re planning on giving everyone a stipend, which is just a little bit of relief, but then having a grant program where we have an application process where people come up with a plan to request bigger amounts of money so that we can support the business businesses that have the ability to recover and become viable,” Zar explained. “It may be buying a new mailing list for their business, or creating a new product line, or figuring out how to have a different sort of marketing reach. We’re asking people to come up with a strategy. “

Tight-knit community

Driving north from PCH along Chautauqua Boulevard to the Sunset business district, feelings are still raw with finger-pointing on who is to blame for what was a slow response to extinguish the January 2025 wildfire.

“Karen Bass Resign Now” signs are planted along the road climbing into the hillside business district — underscoring the community’s lingering anger toward L.A.’s mayor.

On Oct. 8, federal authorities arrested a man in Florida and ultimately charged him with three felony counts of arson, alleging that he set a fire on Jan.1, 2025, that was not fully extinguished and reignited days later to become the Palisades fire.

The business district was gutted by the fires, with few buildings left standing. Those that did survive made remediation a top priority.

Elizabeth Lamont, who runs a high-end interior design and home furnishings boutique at 15231 W. Sunset, said her business had been closed most of the year until the week before Thanksgiving. She thought about following Tishbi to the mom-and-pop row along Montana Avenue — or even Venice, Brentwood or Newport Beach — but chose to stay in the Palisades. She expanded the interior design studio in her upstairs loft area, with retail furnishings offered for sale on the first floor.

“Is the business back the way it used to be? No, no, no. We’re down, like double-digits, compared to last year in our retail store, because we’ve been closed for 11 months,” Lamont said.

The interior design side of business took off. “That’s been very strong,” Lamont said. “Thank goodness we have that to sort of fall back on.”

While Lamont lost her home in the fire, her business — which goes by her name, Elizabeth Lamont, survived. The business is near where real estate mogul Rick Caruso owns the nearby Palisades Village, an outdoor, upscale shopping and dining center at 15225 Palisades Lane.

Caruso’s private fire department kept the firestorm from spreading — including to Lamont’s business, which is a two-minute walk from the Palisades Village. Neighbors Ruby Nails & Spa reopened at the end of August, and BOCA clothing reopened the following month at 970 Monument St.

Slow come back

The business community has come back slowly.

Neighbors in the Pacific Palisades say the Union 76 was the first spot to open shortly after the wildfires, followed by Anawalt’s Palisades Hardware, which helped with lumber and other supplies.

One of the first glimmers of recovery in the community came in the second week of March, when the Palisades Garden Cafe reopened along La Cruz Drive. Just around the corner, two other cafes — Caffe Luxxe and Matthew’s Garden Cafe — burned.

Before the fires, the regulars included students from Palisades Charter High School on Bowdoin Street, less than a mile away. They were relocated after the January fires to a converted Sears building in Santa Monica in August, with the plan to move them into portable classrooms starting Jan. 1, 2026.

“It was a little slow at the beginning, with mostly workers and clean up crews, but by the end of summer the restaurant began picking up,” said David Montiel, a cashier and food worker at the cafe. “It’s been hard losing so many customers after working here for 11 years. We saw their kids grow up, and we’d share stories. But they’ve not come back.”

Larry Newman, a 66-year-old regular, was one of the first customers to return to the cafe when it reopened.

“I sat down, and I just had tears coming out of my eyes because this was the one thing that was finally coming back,” said Newman, who ordered bacon and scrambled eggs at the cafe as he spoke over his breakfast. “There was nothing else open. You kind of celebrate every time a new business reopens.”