20 months after the Palisades fire took his home and the park where his kids played, JJ Redick stood in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday with a shovel in his hands.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held for the Palisades Recreation Center and its surrounding park, with the Lakers head coach joined by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Councilwoman Traci Park, Recreation and Parks general manager Jimmy Kim and developer Rick Caruso.
The event marked the start of construction on a project Redick has been attached to since the spring of 2025, when he announced a public-private partnership to rebuild the center alongside Bass and Caruso less than three months after the fire. He was there as a co-founder of LA Strong Sports, the nonprofit he formed with his wife Chelsea in the weeks after the blaze, and as a Palisades resident who lost his house in it.
The new center will bring back indoor courts and add community rooms inside, while the grounds get new play areas, sports fields and bocce courts. The city put the price tag at more than $50 million and described the project as the largest public-private partnership in the history of the Department of Recreation and Parks.
From announcement to construction in 17 months
The Palisades fire, which ignited in January 2025, damaged 975 structures and destroyed another 6,845. The recreation center was among the neighborhood’s civic anchors that burned, and it became one of the first rebuild projects with a public face attached to it.
On April 10, 2025, Bass, Caruso and Redick stood in front of the damaged park and announced the partnership between the city, LA Strong Sports and Caruso’s Steadfast LA. The Mayor’s office said at the time that LA Strong Sports had been formed weeks earlier by JJ and Chelsea Redick, Charles and Jenna Jackson and Kylee Kilgore to build and sustain sports and recreation facilities across Los Angeles after the fires.
“We visited the Pali Rec Center the same day we decided to move to the Palisades. That visit showed us not only how important the park was as a physical space, but how the people and families who took advantage of it made up the beating heart of the community,” JJ and Chelsea Redick said in that April 2025 release.
Those remain Redick’s only formal on-record words on the project through the city, and they date to the announcement rather than Tuesday’s ceremony. Bass, in the same release, framed the city’s role as removing obstacles and pointed to the fact that it had pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to prioritize debris removal at the rec center, library and playground.
What was approved, and what came down
The plan moved through the city on a timeline that would be quick for any municipal project and unusual for one of this size. The Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners approved the design on Jan. 15, 2026, and crews began tearing down the old gymnasium on May 26, closing out a 76-year run for a building that opened in 1950.
The old gym had actually survived the fire better than most of the 17-acre park, with damage largely limited to its roof, and its demolition drew objections from preservation advocates who saw it as one of the neighborhood’s earliest civic structures. The approved design replaces two gymnasiums totaling 18,000 square feet with a single 28,000-square-foot building, and adds an outdoor community plaza, a multipurpose sports field and hundreds of new trees across the park.
The Palisadian-Post reported an approximate cost of $40 million as of late May. KTLA’s figure of more than $50 million on Tuesday, attributed to the city, is the first public indication the budget has grown, and neither outlet has published a breakdown of what changed.
Caruso, whose Steadfast LA launched in February 2025 as a private-sector engine for fire recovery, described the design at the May demolition as a balance between the neighborhood’s history and its future.
“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,” Caruso told reporters that day.
Redick’s place in it
Redick did not arrive in Los Angeles as a Palisades lifer. He took the Lakers job in June 2024, moved his family to the neighborhood and, by his own account in the April 2025 release, chose it partly because of the park. The fire came seven months later.
KTLA’s coverage of Tuesday’s ceremony included a March 18, 2025 photo of Redick touring the burned park in a “PALI STRONG” hoodie, roughly two months after the fire and a month before the partnership was announced.
What he has done since has been steady rather than loud. He co-founded a nonprofit, put his name on the project, appeared at the announcement, walked the site during demolition alongside Caruso and Kim in May, and showed up Tuesday for the groundbreaking.
That is the extent of what can be said from the record, and it is enough. The rec center is the most visible rebuild in a neighborhood where thousands of homes are still at various stages of the same process, and the Lakers’ coach has been one of its two public faces from the start.
Two rebuilds on one calendar
The Lakers open training camp with Media Day on Sept. 28, which puts Tuesday’s ceremony 13 days before Redick’s second season begins in earnest with a roster that looks very little like his first.
The rec center is expected to be a construction site for more than a year, meaning it will still be going up as the Lakers play out the 2026-27 season. Redick will get asked about it at Media Day, and he has generally kept his answers on the subject brief and pointed at the community rather than himself.
That fits the arc of the project: a partnership announced in April 2025, approved in January, cleared in May and, as of Tuesday, actually being built.
For a franchise that has spent its offseason consumed by ownership uncertainty and a front office in transition, it was a rare Lakers headline this week that had nothing to do with either.
