“It was an enchanted geodome,” says longtime Pacific Palisades resident Tamara Rawitt, of the area she called home. “It was enchanted.” Rawitt, an Emmy winner and cocreator and producer of In Living Color, lost her home in the catastrophic fire that devastated around 75% of the Pacific Palisades. “Everyone knew how lucky we were to be there,” she says. “We knew we were a Fabergé egg, and you want to get up close because it’s so precious-looking and so special and fragile, as was proven.”
The Pacific Palisades, a sun-kissed enclave of around 23,000 artists, cinematographers, actors, and lawyers, nestled between Malibu and Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean, is now a burned-out shell. Thousands of people have lost homes and businesses, including celebrities like Anthony Hopkins, Mel Gibson, Eugene Levy, Billy Crystal, Cary Elwes, Melissa Rivers, Lakers coach JJ Redick, Jeff Bridges, Paris Hilton, and Adam Brody and Leighton Meester.
Cultural and architectural wonders have been lost as well. A postwar haven for architects, structures destroyed include a home by modernist master Richard Neutra, the brutalist Robert Bridges’ house that once towered over Sunset Blvd., and modernist Ray Kappe’s iconic Keeler House.
But more than 1,000 other structures, homes, and community centers that pointed to the Palisades layered history are also gone. “It’s not just about beautifully architecturally designed places, but also really lovely more vernacular houses from the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s and ’50s that also are part of the story of what the Palisades were,” says Adrian Scott Fine of the LA Conservancy.
Long the home of the Indigenous Tongva people, the Palisades’s modern history began in 1911, when pioneering director Thomas Ince founded his studio Inceville in the lush open hills that are now home to the iconic Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine (which miraculously survived). Silent stars paraded on massive outdoor sets, including sprawling Wild West sets, a Japanese village, and a Swiss village, cooled by the temperate breezes of the Pacific Ocean.
