by Tim Golden

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In the last years before the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, the great civic debate in my hometown was over the meaning of a shopping mall.

Some residents feared that the Palisades Village, a 3-acre archipelago of posh boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, was driving a gleaming stake through the heart of the place where we grew up. That “Old Palisades” was a mythologized, upper-middle-class community where people knew one another, raised happy families and tempered even the old, analog status-seeking of Malibu and Beverly Hills.

The Village, with its Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and its nouveau-McMansion architectural style, marked our final conquest by overly tanned, overly toned immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would stroll into the Erewhon grocery and tap down $20 for a Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie?

But plenty of people did. They liked the “bespoke, walkable village,” as the developers advertised it, seeing it as an overdue upgrade from Mort’s Deli and the family-run stores that the developer (and later mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso bulldozed away. They seemed happy to pay $27 for a seat in the Bay Theatre, a luxury multiplex that pirated its name and iconic facade from the long-closed movie house on Sunset Boulevard where my friends and I snuck into films like “Billy Jack” and “Big Wednesday.”

On either side of the mall debate, people rarely paused to note that these were rich people’s problems.

Unlike neighboring Santa Monica, an incorporated city with a spirited government, the Palisades didn’t raise its own taxes or run its own services. We call it a........

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