Why Pacific Palisades will never be the same after the California fires

“It’s ok, you can just rebuild.”

“At least not that many people died.”

These are the things people say to try to make it better.

The truth is, Pacific Palisades will never be the same after the deadly January 2025 wildfires that destroyed entire neighborhoods this past week. The latest official update says as many as 10,000 structures have been destroyed in the Palisades Fire, which is expected to be the costliest in U.S. history.

Pacific Palisades as we know it is gone. It’s like a death, but I’ve never experienced losing an entire town. An entire community erased.

Pacific Palisades, the small ocean community wedged between Santa Monica to the south and Malibu to the north, is a little slice of heaven. Our family was only lucky enough to have a home there because my grandparents bought property decades before the area was discovered by Hollywood. According to my dad, they purchased the home in the 1100 block of Hartzell Street in 1951 for $25,000. The neighborhood has since been home to some of the highest property values in the country, but this week’s unprecedented fires have left it unrecognizable, and its future is suddenly uncertain.

It wasn’t just super wealthy people who lost everything.

My family’s history in Pacific Palisades runs deep. My great-grandparents were Irish immigrants who settled in California. My grandpa Joseph McCloy was a fire captain at LA City Fire, and my grandma Mary Margaret McCloy was a stay-at-home mom of five. Grandpa picked Pacific Palisades because he loved the beach with every ounce of his being. When my grandparents first settled down in Pacific Palisades, there wasn’t much built there. By the time my dad (now in his 70s) got to high school, his peers were driving luxury vehicles, and he was working at Safeway in the Palisades. He was driving a Volkswagen with a surfboard poking through the sunroof. He would go surfing with his brothers during lunchtime at high school. My grandpa would swim laps in the ocean to stay in shape for his work as a firefighter. These are the stories I grew up with.

When I was a kid in the 1990s, my grandma would pick strawberries in the backyard, planted on the side of the Hartzell Street house. My grandpa would build model firetrucks and tell stories about the war and losing fellow firemen to California fires. He warned me about how it was common for firemen to lose their lives falling through the roof. He would get distressed about those experiences even in his old age. He explained to me about how the house on Hartzell Street was in a fire evacuation zone, but my entire life, nothing major happened until this week.

This week my family watched in horror as flames engulfed my grandparents' entire neighborhood including businesses, schools, grocery stores and iconic buildings. What’s left looks like remnants of a war zone. The unstoppable fires were fueled by high winds, and dried vegetation due to months without rain. The wind crippled efforts for an overhead response. Destruction was made worse by an apparently inadequate and flawed emergency response, fire hydrants couldn’t  provide water. The cause of the Palisades Fire is still under investigation, but how the fire ignited doesn’t seem to matter now that the damage is done. It was perfect weather for a firestorm. The story that truly matters is about what’s suddenly gone.

After a long career at the fire station in the Palisades, grandpa was able to retire comfortably in the same modest house on Hartzell that he helped build. When my grandpa died in his 80s, while I was in high school, the men from the fire station came by and offered the grandkids a ride in the fire truck around the block. Let’s just say the McCloy family has a huge piece of our heart that lives on Hartzell Street. These are memories that are imprinted on your life. They are the moments that help make you who you are.

My dad and his four siblings would go on from high school (the four eldest attended Saint Monica Prep and the youngest went to Palisades High School) to college and became successful in their careers, but no one in the family would grow to have the kind of money where they could afford to buy the house on Hartzell Street to keep it in the family when my grandparents passed away (grandpa died in 2003 and grandma in 2007). Keeping the house was more important to my family than inheritance money, but despite a great effort they couldn’t find a way to keep it that made sense for everyone. Losing the house on Hartzell was horrible. They knew if they sold it, our family would never be able to own property again in Pacific Palisades, unless we won the lottery. The property values were already some of the highest in the country. I had a pipe dream of becoming very successful and getting it back. After my grandparents died, the house sold in 2007 for about $2 million.

The buyer promised my family they wouldn’t tear down the house grandpa built, but the next year they bulldozed it anyway and flipped it. The next person bought it for $3.5 million in 2010. According to Zillow, the property was valued at $6 million as of last week, but this week the house was destroyed in the massive Palisades Fire, along with the rest of Hartzell Street and the entirety of the iconic Alphabet Streets. Among those burned structures were homes still owned by my grandparents' old neighbors who bought homes when they were more affordable. It wasn’t just super wealthy people who lost everything. Hartzell Street and everything around it looks like a third world country from the photos and videos posted to Instagram. The vastness of the loss takes your breath away and makes you sick to your stomach.

It could be years before the area has the infrastructure to support rebuilding at all. No one knows what will happen.

I can’t help but think of the latest owner of the Hartzell Street property (the one who paid $3.5 million) who is now a victim of this disaster. A lot of people don’t have sympathy for the rich in California, but what if that person invested all they have in that property? It’s still their livelihood. It's still a horrible tragedy. I don’t know them or their circumstances, so I’m playing out all the possible scenarios in my mind. If they spent everything they had to buy that home, they may have just lost their biggest investment. They may or may not have insurance. There are reports about insurance companies canceling policies in the Palisades just before the fires. Maybe the insurance companies will go bankrupt? If they have a lot of money, they may be able to rebuild it with cash. But with all the destruction, all of this is up in the air. It could be years before the area has the infrastructure to support rebuilding at all. No one knows what will happen.

Up until my grandparents died when I was age 21, my grandparents house on Hartzell Street was a getaway from the heat of Phoenix, AZ where my mom and I had moved when my parents split. Mom’s clothing store in Eagle Rock, CA near Pasadena (where I was born and where other fires are currently burning) got robbed, so we moved to Arizona sometime around 1991 when I was about 5-years-old. We still visited LA regularly to see family and because my mom would travel to downtown LA to purchase merchandise for the boutique once she moved it to Tempe, AZ. I never liked Arizona much and longed to live back in California my entire childhood.

Pacific Palisades really felt like heaven on earth.

I loved the ocean air in Pacific Palisades, mixed with a beautiful smell (my dad says it was the Chaparral, a group of plants, that only grows in coastal regions). I loved that smell in the morning and the eggs only my grandma could make. I loved that you could walk into town from their house in the Alphabet Streets (Hartzell was H in the Alphabets). I loved the excitement I would get when I would walk to the Starbucks on Sunset and Swarthmore, because I thought maybe I’d catch a glimpse of a celebrity. I loved the surf shop (that had overpriced swimsuits), Mort’s Deli (the Jewish deli had the world’s best pastrami sandwiches) and I loved going to the grocery store with my grandma. We would go to Ralph’s and Gelson’s and I just loved the flow and the vibe. As my dad says, everything in Pacific Palisades was just set-up so perfectly. It was a walkable place that felt like a small town, which is not too common in Los Angeles.

Pacific Palisades really felt like heaven on earth. It was everything you could want in a place. It had beautiful tree-lined streets, you could walk to the beach, the high school overlooked the ocean. But sadly, by the time I was born it was unaffordable to live there unless you had at least a million in the bank.

My cousin told me, my story is the story of modern California. Everyone wants to live there and this is what happens. He said it’s either the rich taking over or a disaster that moves people out, on repeat.

Once I asked my mom if we could move to the Palisades by grandma and grandpa and she said, “no.” When I asked why, she said, “Because you have to be a millionaire to live there.” I asked her, “How do you become a millionaire?” She said, “Hard work.”

I can credit Pacific Palisades for putting a dream in my heart that caused me to work hard and to be successful in life, because from that point on, I made it my mission to become successful so I could live in Pacific Palisades too.

When I got older, I realized that the Palisades wasn’t my dream anymore, and that made it easier to let go of. My journey to try and make it big led me to other happy times. I met my husband during my career as a television journalist and found a new happy place in New York. When I would visit Pacific Palisades, I would park in front of my grandparents’ old property on Hartzell (occupied by the McMansion from the new owner) and do the walk down to Starbucks. It was a much different walk from before. A big high-end outdoor shopping mall called Palisades Village, laced with designer stores, replaced the old hometown staples like Mort’s, Benton’s Sporting Goods and the surf shop in recent years. Palisades Village is owned by billionaire Rick Caruso, and ironically reports say it is one of the only structures still standing in Pacific Palisades after the fires.

Instead of sadness about the rich moving in and replacing the mom and pop shops downtown, I tried to look at the bright side. The stores were nice. I shopped at Palisades Village on my last visits to the area in 2022 and 2023. While it was beautiful and luxurious, it just wasn’t the same.

At least I could visit the neighborhood and remember my childhood with my grandparents. The fires this week took that away.

My last visit to the Palisades was in August 2023, shortly before I got pregnant with twins and had to stop traveling for a while. I remember thinking, at least I can come here and walk the place, see the old markets like Gelson’s. At least I can visit the old Starbucks where I had my first fancy coffee and would dream of casually running into a movie star as a teenager. At least I could visit the neighborhood and remember my childhood with my grandparents. The fires this week took that away.

Pacific Palisades as we know it is gone. It’s like a death, but I’ve never experienced losing an entire town. An entire community erased. Yes, they can rebuild, but it will never look the same. It will never have the same old buildings or the same people. It will never be the same again. The only thing I can do is pray that my little slice of heaven does not get bought up by billionaires like Oprah and that the regular middleclass people like my grandparents don’t get shutout forever.

My cousin told me, my story is the story of modern California. Everyone wants to live there and this is what happens. He said it’s either the rich taking over or a disaster that moves people out, on repeat. In hindsight, we may have been spared by losing the Hartzell Street house back in 2007 when my grandparents passed. Maybe if we had found a way to hold on, we would have lost it all in this week’s fire.

All I can do now is thank God I experienced Pacific Palisades at all. I am one of the luckiest people to have been there in its golden age.

I am praying for everyone mourning this loss. I am praying for the families of those who lost their lives in this horror movie and for those traumatized and injured. I am praying for those who lost their assets, investments and valuables. For those who lost family photos, heirlooms and keepsakes.

Thoughts and prayers don’t change what happened, but at least those of us who experienced the beauty of Pacific Palisades have each other. At least we have our memories. Pacific Palisades will be apart of us forever.

Sending all my love to those hurting. I am with you.

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