On this patch of land in Pacific Palisades, JJ Redick found heaven.
When his family would finish dinner, as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, he and his wife, Chelsea, and their sons, Knox and Kai, would leave the house they were renting on Earlham Street and walk toward the spot he loved so dearly. From these bluffs he could gaze at the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains.
He’d come back to Los Angeles looking for something exactly like this, the intersection of nature and community, a place where he could soak in the splendor while his young family could take root and become a part of the community’s fabric.
“Everybody has, whether you believe in God or not, everybody has things that make you feel like you’re closer to God, if that makes sense — where you can feel the presence of God or whatever spirit you believe in,” Redick said.
The spot reminded him of his childhood and the Blue Ridge Mountains where he grew up, and vacations at Holden Beach on the shores in North Carolina.
“Being where I can see mountains and the ocean is I’m like in heaven,” he said.
JJ Redick looks out over the Pacific Ocean above a neighborhood destroyed in the Palisades fire.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
When his parents, in-laws or friends from out of town visited, this would lead the schedule.
“This is like first day they’re here, ‘Let’s walk down to the bluffs,’” Redick said, and you could tell he’s repeatedly said that since he moved in last summer.
The plan was to make this home forever.
“I’m not moving again. I’m not moving my kids again,” Redick told The Times as he drove back toward his home for the first time since it burned down in the Palisades fire. “We’re in it for the long haul. I would love to be the Lakers coach for the next 15 to 20 years. If I’m not the Lakers coach, I’m in it for the long haul in L.A.”
As he made that walk again on a Tuesday this month, the beauty still was undeniable. The mountain peaks jetted into a cloudless Dodger-blue sky as the wind whipped and the waves beneath crested and crashed.
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“God,” he said. “This is insane.”
But this place wasn’t just heaven anymore, not with the wrath of hell surrounding it, glass and ash still on the ground, the skeletons of his friends’ and neighbors’ homes partially standing on parcels covered in the destroyed possessions people once treasured.
Redick is back to see the effects of nature’s rage, to walk through the place that was once his house, to weep at everything that he and his neighbors have lost that cannot be replaced. And to plan for rebuilding the things they can.
Because if you came to see Redick and his family here, yes, you’d walk down to the bluffs on your first day. But on Day 2 you’d head into the heart of the community, the Palisades Recreation Center, the place where Redick coached a youth basketball team, where he and Chelsea met so many of their friends, where they gathered on postcard weekends to connect. Now it’s closed because of fire damage.
JJ Redick, wearing a PALI STRONG hoody vists the fiire damaged Palisades Park & Recreation Center.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“What I think the rec center represents to the community and what it certainly …” Redick started saying but he couldn’t finish the sentence, stopping his walk to the bluffs to cry for everything this place has lost.
He swallowed his grief, took a breath and tried again, the thought of his community losing its heartbeat nearly too much to bear.
“What it certainly represented in my family, just hopeful that we can get this done in a timely fashion,” he said.
It’s why Redick’s got a plan to help this community rebuild, a foundation that will start with the rec center and burgeon into a lifeline for public facilities around Southern California. The confidence and joy he discovered in places like those in his youth, the comfort he and his wife found in them as parents, was so powerful.
They had to do what they could to rebuild that in their new community while sharing it across the Los Angeles area.
The goal, he says, is not to just rebuild the Palisades rec center and the public spaces in Altadena affected by the fires. But also to create “a perpetual, fully functioning endowment” — LA Strong Sports — for these kinds of projects around Southern California, impacting youth sports and communities.
Those gyms meant so much to him as a kid; they mean so much to him as parent.
This, he thought, is how he could help.
Redick fought back tears and stayed on his walk. There was more to see, more to do.
A glimpse of heaven was only a few steps away.
JJ Redick had finished his prep work and the blackout shades at Hotel Crescent Court in Dallas were excellent. It was the perfect recipe for a lengthy pregame nap.
Redick turned on his white noise machine, set his phone to “Do Not Disturb” and closed his eyes, hoping for one of his longest pregame rests of the season. But he couldn’t sleep so he reached for his phone.
He had what seemed like 72 missed calls from Chelsea.
Chelsea had been in Mid-City shopping when she saw the fire and beelined back to the house, grabbing an overnight bag and evacuating in a matter of minutes to pick up her children at school.
Lakers coach JJ Redick talks with guards Luka Doncic and Gabe Vincent during a game against the Nuggets.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
The Lakers played that night in Dallas with fires ripping through Redick’s neighborhood. He coached while scouts on press row stared at their screens, images of the flames taking precedence over any play calls.
The team quickly headed for the plane, players not totally sure of the scene they were flying back to. By then Redick already had gotten his family into a hotel room in Marina del Rey. The lobby soon was filled with friends and neighbors who hustled and also found a place to stay.
“People were just wailing in that lobby,” Redick said.
But instead of getting back to Los Angeles, the Lakers sat. For more than two hours, a maintenance issue kept the plane from taking off, Redick getting text alerts from his home security system that the fire alarm was going off. He tracked the fire online through Temescal Canyon Road up to Haverford Avenue, one of the boundaries of his neighborhood.
“Oh s—,” Redick thought. “I think the house is going to burn down.”
The dispatch operator from his security company called and asked if he’d like a fire truck sent to his house, a question almost too surreal to answer.
“Sure,” Redick told them. Fifteen minutes later they called and told him that one wouldn’t be able to answer the call from his home.
“Yeah,” he said, “that makes sense.”
Redick learned that the house belonging to Lakers team counsel Dan Grigsby, who had spent decades in the Palisades, completely burned down. Weeks earlier Redick and Chelsea were there for a holiday party, mingling with people who had raised their kids, and now their grandkids, in the community.
That house was totally gone, Redick now pretty certain his was too.
JJ Redick walks through an area where his rental home was destroyed in the Palisades fire. Most of the debris has been cleared.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
He finally got to the hotel in Marina del Rey a little before 3 a.m. Exhausted, Redick slept in the same clothes he coached in. By 6 a.m. he was awake and drove to Pacific Palisades to see if anything could be salvaged. He left with a note from Chelsea of some things to grab: irreplaceable jewelry, their boys’ trophies and some treasured stuffed animals.
As he drove through the winding roads into the town that he’d fallen in love with in a few short months, he couldn’t believe what he saw, and the unrelenting smell of smoke from fires burning all around his car.
“There are fires over here. This is on fire. This is on fire,” Redick remembered. “And I’m driving around flames and I’m like, ‘OK, this is not going to be good.’”
He cried when he saw the street where his sister-in-law, Kylee, had hoped to buy a home for her family was destroyed. He saw the Shell gas station that had exploded, the pharmacy that had burned. The local school was on fire.
“And then every house is gone and you’re just like, ‘OK, maybe it didn’t reach all the way down to the end of the bluff,’” he said.
But the schoolteacher’s house on the corner that signaled the start of his neighborhood was leveled.
“That’s when I just was like, ‘Yeah, it’s not going to be there. And that was when I started really weeping,” Redick said. “… It looked like there wasn’t a house left on our block.
“And I was like, ‘Oh f—.’”
He called his wife.
“He was hysterical,” Chelsea remembered. “And he was just like, ‘It’s gone. And tell everyone else theirs is gone too. No one’s house is there.’”
When Redick spoke publicly about the fires for the first time, it was briefly at the end of his pregame news conference in Dallas.
“I just want to say one thing real quick. I just want to acknowledge and send thoughts and prayers to everyone in the Palisades right now,” he said on Jan. 6. “It’s where I live. My family and my wife’s family, my wife’s twin sister, they’ve evacuated. I know that a lot of people are freaking out right now, including my family. And from the sound of things with the winds coming tonight, I know a lot of people are scared. So I just want to acknowledge that. Thoughts and prayers for sure. I hope everybody stays safe.”
Four days later Redick met with the media again, his face pale, while he worked to calmly describe what happened to him, to his family. Everything they cared about, in terms of possessions, was in that home. But it was everything the community lost that hit the Redicks hardest.
“I think that’s the part for us that we’re really struggling with is just the loss of community. And I, I recognize that people make up community, and we’re going to rebuild and we want to help lead on that. But all the churches, the schools, the library, like it’s all gone,” Redick said. “And I think the thing that hit home for us the most was Tuesday night, you know, the rec center caught on fire. … The rec center was like this, this place we were at every day. I mean, flag football, basketball, the playground, baseball, tennis courts. … And everyone we knew was there every day.
Amanda Welles walks with her dogs PupPup and Pumpkin past a structured destroyed in the Palisades fire. Welles, a longtime resident of the Palisades, came back to the community to collect a few items from her home that survived the fire, but sustained major smoke damage.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“And you just, it … just hurts to lose that.”
It was the closest he came that morning to losing his composure, the loss of the places that made his home feel special hitting the hardest. He was hardly the only person in the Palisades that felt that way.
The place the Redicks lived quickly had become incredibly important to them. While they we were renting their home, they were looking for a permanent residence in the community — a decision they came to fairly quickly.
The Palisades had become the perfect place for the Lakers coach and his family. He was able to have his privacy and enjoy a piece of land that felt like God crafted it perfectly for him. Chelsea, who was hesitant about leaving the Redicks’ home and community in Brooklyn, N.Y., to relocate across the country, had found herself deeply connected to her neighbors and new friends.
And for Kai and Knox, the transition from leaving their world behind in New York was eased by what they found in California, the nights acting as ball boys for their dad’s team and the afternoons they spent playing sports with new friends at the rec center.
“Coming from like a place where like we walked everywhere, and like things were so easy and we were so connected with sports, it just seemed it was just like the most amazing find,” Chelsea said. “We were like, ‘All right, this is great.’ And we just strolled up to the front and there was like a paper on the door that said basketball sign-ups in two weeks.
“And it just felt like ‘OK, maybe this will work.’”
And it did.
Within a week of living there, parents from around town had offered to help Chelsea manage things knowing that JJ would be on the road so much during the season. They made friends, connected with other parents and learned about their new community.
JJ Redick gives a fist bump to a DWP security officer while visiting the fire damaged Palisades recreation center.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In a short time they’d made real bonds.
As the fires first began to burn, it was neighbors and friends who offered counsel. In the scramble to evacuate, Chelsea had forgotten to lock the door and shut the gate. The family that lived behind them made sure to take care of it before they evacuated.
As the fires began to burn out of control, rumors spread through group chats and social media posts that the rec center had burnt down.
“The Palisades rec center for me and my family represents like the connective tissue of the community, if that makes sense,” JJ said.
And like everything else, they feared it too might be gone.
While JJ tried to get back from Dallas, Chelsea decided she needed to tell their sons what was happening, to prepare them for the worst-case outcomes that were becoming more and more likely with each new image on the TV and each new update on the watch duty app.
“When I had to tell them like, the house is gone, I don’t remember which kid it was, but they said, ‘What about the rec center?’” Chelsea said. “And I was like, ‘It’s also, I think it’s gone.’ And I think that to them even being like so young, like even they felt it like, that was like the biggest thing.”
The Redicks might not have known it that night, but families all around them were having the same conversations.
“A lot of these parents have told me that their kids asked to go to the park or asked about the park before they asked about their own home,” Jasmine Dowlatshahi, director of the Palisades Park and Recreation Center, said. “That’s how much they care about the park.”
The center didn’t burn down, but like so many of the structures still standing, the severe damage was hidden. The main gymnasium floor is covered in rubble and the exterior of the building has large portions of its siding barely hanging onto its frame.
JJ Redick looks at a basketball hoop left standing where a home was destroyed in the Palisades fire.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
When JJ spoke to the media days later, he said he and Chelsea vowed to find some way to help, some way to lead in the rebuilding efforts. And the collective pain everyone felt not only for what they lost, but for what the Palisades lost, led them to an obvious conclusion.
“I don’t think it was like fully crystallized, but I knew it was going to have to be something with the rec center,” Redick said.
The seedlings of the LA Strong Sports foundation were sown, the Redicks speaking with their friends in the community about the best and fastest way to get things going. Without even publicly announcing their plans, the foundation already has $10 million pledged, including a significant donation from JJ and Chelsea.
Their initial focus is on the Palisades, but the plan is for that to be the original project that can ripple around the entire Los Angeles area. They hope to raise $50 million for the foundation.
Jenna Jackson, a friend of the Redicks, was a natural fit to be the foundation board’s president. Her dad, Dan Grigsby, is the Lakers employee Redick mentioned in his emotional news conference.
“It’s almost too horrible to bear what happened,” Jackson said. “I lost my home. My parents lost their home. We lost generations of homes and memories and photographs and gathering in one day. I grew up there at the park. My parent’s house is attached to the park, and we used to just hop our fence every single day and go there. And my kids grew up there, obviously, too. And they would do the same. Everything was the park.”
So while the Lakers have made a push for the playoffs, Redick and his other team have taken on another challenge. They’ve worked with Mayor Karen Bass and her office, the local government in the Palisades and Steadfast LA, Rick Caruso’s nonprofit, to find the most efficient and expedient way to rebuild the rec center.
“There are still details to work through about how this is going to work,” Redick said. “But I think that was the biggest thing, was getting support from the mayor.”
He’s been on calls with lawyers and architects, he’s looked at renderings and studied other partnerships with public projects funded by private capital. Jackson has been speaking with her neighbors in the Palisades about ways to improve the park, to make it even safer and more functional.
“What I’ve learned the most is that everyone has sort of recognized the need for expediency,” Redick said. “And for me, I’m just hopeful, not only for L.A. but also California, that going forward when an issue is sort of identified that needs to be resolved, that we can all sort of get along and move with expediency.”
JJ Redick walks through the skeletal remains of his rental home that was destroyed in the Palisades fire.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
And there seems to be a shared recognition in the symbolism of all this for their community, a chance to show people that the places that mattered to them outside of their homes will return, so they should too.
One of those Palisades families, Brian and Lindsay Weissert, watched their family move from the playground to the small fields in front to the bigger gyms in the back. And they believe in rebuilding them.
“The rec center coming back symbolizes that the Palisades will come back,” Lindsay said. “It’ll look a little different. The homes will look a little different. But the heart and soul will come back. Because that’s what the Palisades rec center was. … If that comes back, the Palisades come back.”
As Redick parked his car outside of what used to be his house, he looked into the empty pit where his house once stood. The rubble had been hauled away while the trucks worked on the house behind his, one truck beeping as it reversed while Redick looked up.
In the backyard where his boys once played, he asked for a picture of the portable basketball hoop he and his brother-in-law erected that still stood, one of a handful in the neighborhood that somehow survived the fire.
“It’s oddly still beautiful,” he said of the town with which his family fell in love.
When they moved here, he wanted that postcard view, that slice of heaven in the bluffs. He was sure of that. But he, Chelsea, Knox and Kai also needed that rec center, the afternoons in the gym, the evenings on the fields, the mornings at the park.
“This had everything,” Redick said, “the Palisades had everything we wanted.”
It’ll have it again, Redick hopes. This is where he wants to be. When it feels like you’re living in heaven, you don’t want to leave.
“Hopeful that, we can get this done in a timely fashion,” he said. “Hopefully, we can have people back.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
