"It's all about respecting the history of this community and what was dear to them, and at the same time, building something for the next 100 years." Rick Caruso told the Palisadian-Post in late May, standing near a partially cleared lot where the Palisades Recreation Center's old gymnasium had stood a few days earlier. By the time he said it, the building was already coming down.
Not every cleared foundation in the Palisades traces directly to the January 2025 fire, and this one has its own specific story. The gym that crews took down over four days in late May had come through the fire with damage largely limited to the roof. It was demolished sixteen months later as part of a city-approved plan for a larger facility.
For anyone with a kid in Pali basketball, a standing tennis reservation, or a weekly habit of walking the dog past the ball fields, that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. It also explains why the facility that returns will be larger than the two buildings it replaces.
The building that made it through
The old gymnasium opened in 1950, making it the first post-World War II civic building constructed in Pacific Palisades, according to the Palisadian-Post. It ran for 76 years before crews began tearing it down on May 26, 2026. Preservation advocates raised objections to the demolition. The city's Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners had already signed off on a different outcome on January 15, 2026, approving a plan that called for demolishing both existing recreation center buildings rather than repairing them individually.
The math behind that decision is straightforward once you see it laid out. The two existing buildings had a combined footprint of 18,000 square feet. The approved replacement is a single 28,000-square-foot facility, about 55 percent more indoor space than what stood there before. The approved plan is an expansion of indoor space, developed with local groups and funded entirely through philanthropy.
Who is funding the replacement
The project is a public-private partnership between the City of Los Angeles, Rick Caruso's nonprofit Steadfast LA, and LA Strong Sports, a foundation formed in the weeks after the fire by JJ and Chelsea Redick along with Charles and Jenna Jackson and Kylee Kilgore. JJ Redick, the Lakers' head coach, is a Palisades resident who lost his own house in the fire. He and Chelsea have said the decision to found LA Strong Sports traces back to a visit to the Rec Center the same day they decided to move to the neighborhood.
The price tag has moved as the project has progressed. The Palisadian-Post reported an approximate cost of $40 million as of late May, around the time demolition began. By the September groundbreaking, city officials were describing it as a more than $50 million project, still fully philanthropically funded, and calling it the largest public-private partnership in the history of the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. The two figures come from different reports at different stages, so the September number is the more current one.
Where your league actually is right now
None of this happened in a vacuum for the families who used the park every week. Programs didn't pause. They moved, and they moved to different places depending on age group and sport:
- Recreation center staff and the main phone line relocated to a satellite office at Rustic Canyon, which also hosted Bantam and Rookie division basketball over the summer.
- Minor division and older basketball players shifted to Palisades High School for the fall season.
- Flag football moved to Penmar Recreation Center.
- Tennis courts, the baseball field, and the bocce courts stayed open throughout, while the playground and outdoor basketball courts were closed during the demolition and early construction phase.
- Library services set up in a temporary facility near the old gym in 2025, with computers, study space, Wi-Fi, printing, and community rooms, and that setup has continued to operate through the construction disruption.
If you've been wondering why the Minor division suddenly plays home games at the high school instead of walking distance from Sunset, that's why. The recreation center's programming didn't disappear. It got redistributed across three other sites while the physical building goes through a rebuild that's bigger than a repair.
What actually gets built
The new complex, designed by Gensler with landscape architecture by SWA Group, replaces the two old buildings with the single 28,000-square-foot facility: two high-school-size basketball courts that double as volleyball courts, two indoor pickleball courts, an enlarged lobby, and community rooms sized for birthday parties, ceremonies, and meetings. Steve Chung, the Gensler principal leading the design, has described the goal as building a facility for both sports and social interaction, not just athletics.
Outdoors, the plans call for a two-level playground built into the site's natural slope and connected by embankment slides, a new U10 soccer field, two lighted outdoor basketball courts, terraced spectator seating, and shaded seating pods arranged around a central gathering space the design team is calling the Pali Hub. The bocce courts and an enhanced Veterans Garden are part of the plan too, along with hundreds of newly planted trees across the 17-acre site.
The Veterans Garden detail isn't incidental. Jimmy Dunne of Veterans Gardens was one of the community stakeholders who worked directly with the design coalition, alongside Bob Benton of the Pacific Palisades Baseball Association and members of the neighborhood's Park Advisory Board. That's also why the baseball field made the list of things that stayed open through construction rather than the list of things getting rebuilt from scratch. The people who'd used specific corners of that park for decades had a hand in which corners got touched and which didn't.
"This is really a family town, young and old, and that's what we're celebrating here." Rick Caruso, quoted by the Palisadian-Post at the site of the old gym's demolition, late May 2026
The timeline math
The groundbreaking for actual construction happened in mid-September 2026, bringing together Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Traci Park, Caruso, Redick, Recreation and Parks General Manager Jimmy Kim, and Gensler global co-chair Andy Cohen. City officials put the construction timeline at 14 to 16 months from that point.
Run the arithmetic and the new Rec Center's likely opening window lands somewhere between November 2027 and January 2028. Bass said at the groundbreaking that she hopes to return next year for the ribbon cutting. That's technically possible at the low end of the estimate, but it's a tight fit against a 14-to-16-month window that started in September 2026, and anyone planning around a firm 2027 reopening should treat it as the optimistic end of the range rather than the expected one.
For a family whose kids have been shuttling to Rustic Canyon or Palisades High School for practices, that's the real planning horizon: at least one more full school year, possibly stretching into a second winter, before the recreation center reopens with about 55 percent more indoor space than it had before and a plaza that didn't exist before the fire at all.
If you're trying to make sense of how the Palisades is coming back together, block by block and program by program, that's the kind of ground-level read Derrick Smith and the team at The Smith Associates track closely, not because it's a listing detail, but because it's what daily life here actually looks like right now.
