By Jackie Luna and Jonathan Allen
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Before one of the most destructive fires in California history swept through, the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on Los Angeles’ west side was filled with expensive homes fronted by green, well-tended landscaping and popular boutiques and cafes.
This week, the Palisades Fire leveled much of it to blackened rubble. To see what has been lost, a Reuters video journalist visited the neighborhood on Friday to retrace the path taken by a YouTube travel influencer couple who made a video last year of a walking tour, which is being reproduced with their permission.
In May 2024, when the original video was recorded under a California blue sky, a white building with ionic columns on Sunset Boulevard at the Palisades Village shopping complex was home to a Starbucks and Cafe Vida. It is now gutted, darkened with soot, the palm trees outside denuded, the sky hazy and yellowed.
On the surrounding residential streets, home after home has collapsed in charred piles topped with a scattering of terracotta roofing tiles that withstood the blaze. Still-standing concrete doorways open onto ruins.
The Palisades Fire has grown to more than 20,000 acres since breaking out on Tuesday and was still only 11% contained on Saturday, and the Palisades neighborhood remains a mandatory evacuation zone. Other fires, some nearly as vast, are destroying other parts of Los Angeles and neighboring towns, killing at least 11 people so far and destroying thousands of buildings.
The Palisades was almost devoid of life on Friday: a few Los Angeles firefighters here and there, and a few ravens watched from a road before scattering. Outside one home, what was once a wheelchair sat on the sidewalk, everything melted or burned except for its steel frame.
A scenic lookout spot from the Point at the Bluffs encompasses the ocean and curving Pacific Coast Highway. From there, what remains of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates fills the view: dozens of relatively affordable mobile homes that sloped down towards the beach are now rows of rubble.
(Reporting by Jackie Luna in Los Angeles and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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