At The Gray Dragon toy store, where owner Adele Heydenrich’s long vision bloomed to life for one year in Pacific Palisades, her 9-year-old son was her head employee.

She was a single mother, and she wanted to set up young Grayson as best she could. So she hired him. Never mind that he spent six days a week tottering around Gerry Blanck’s Martial Arts Center next door; he had a W-2. He’d go to trade shows. He’d help curate toys. This was their life.

The folks nearby, nestled in a retail space on the corner of Marquez Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, became family to a family business. There was Blanck, a dojo master who called his karate kids Little Dragons, forming the Gray Dragon namesake. There was the Paws n’ Claws Grooming Salon, whose owner Leslie Buck gave Heydenrich’s 3-pound Chihuahua, named Sir Fluffsalot, what she called the “fluff-and-buff special.” There was Vittorio Ristorante & Pizzeria, whose owner’s granddaughter came running into The Gray Dragon every Friday like clockwork to find a new toy.

All of it, in the span of days, was gone, leaving Heydenrich to mourn her own loss and the loss of a community with it.

What remained, by Monday, was a heap of concrete ash, rusty metal with upturned nails, and a set of burnt metal stairs leading to nowhere. The Palisades fire had swept through their block, and left no trace. Blanck’s dojo, once filled with memorabilia of film legends from Bruce Lee to Peter Fonda, had caved in under a pile of its own foundation. A small purple-headed toy, peeking out from the pile next door, was the only reminder Heydenrich’s dream had ever existed.

“If you want to do something for that long, and you finally get a chance to do it, and then you put your life savings into this thing and it’s gone in a blink of an eye,” Heydenrich said Monday, “like — it’s weird.”

Her days now are consumed in a maze of paperwork in a temporary Airbnb in Del Mar, as she and Grayson yearn alongside thousands of others in the Palisades to figure out what exactly is next. An entire town, miles of the calm Southern California neighborhood that local Rabbi Amy Bernstein calls “a hometown feel in a very large city,” has been largely eradicated by wildfire. Vince Downey, the principal of private preschool-through-eighth-grade Calvary Christian School, said roughly a third of students’ family’s homes had been destroyed.

And beyond filing a heap of insurance claims, those thousands of residents — business owners, educators and religious leaders alike — are waiting in limbo for an answer to a question that seems impossible to solve: How can the Pacific Palisades recover?

And can it, truly, ever be the same again?

“I think we’re kind of mourning the loss of that community,” Heydenrich said of her store’s old block, “almost more than anything.”

Her sign went up, outside of that Palisades storefront, in November 2023. Just over a year later, it sat on the ground of a destroyed town, the words The Gray Dragon smeared with cracks and flecked with soot.

“I don’t think rebuilding in the Palisades in the foreseeable future is even remotely realistic,” Heydenrich said. “It’s, what, two, three, four years? How long is this going to take? It’s going to take a significant amount of time.

“But we’d love to come back to that neighborhood,” she continued. “Like, we loved it, and we’re super happy there. And when it’s safe to come back, and we can afford it, we’d love to do it. ... But I don’t know how many other families feel the same.”

For decades, Palisades synagogue Kehillat Israel has fielded local synagogue-adult-league sports teams under the name Boychiks, a Yiddish term of endearment for a young man or male friend.

In the past week, a group of Palisades Boychiks who’ve lost their homes have formed a text chat: “The Resilient Boychiks.”

“I get comfort,” said Palisades resident Christopher Heisen, who lost his home in the fire, “just from the fact that I’m a part of this group-text.”

The spectrum of messages, Heisen said, covers the gamut. Words of encouragement. Possible rentals. Insurance information. And most of the chat’s concerns, said Boychik occasional Ira Tenenbaum, revolve around when exactly their town will return: What’s the timeline for getting back in? What’s the timeline for getting downtown back up?

“People are anxious,” Tenenbaum said. “They want to get going on stuff.”

The issue: There is no timeline. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Sunday to speed up the rebuilding of the areas impacted by the Los Angeles County wildfires. But as the Southern California News Group’s Jonathan Lanser pointed out, Los Angeles construction runs almost half as slow as the national pace, and demand for contractors could be sky-high given the scope of the losses.

“For the most part, a lot of those people are going to want to rebuild, because this is a family community,” said Gregory Pawlik, a Palisades realtor who owns the building that Heydenrich rents from. “So now, are there resources available to be able to do this in an organized fashion?’

There’s also the massive problem of insurance, and how much residents will be able to recoup on their losses. State Farm said in a statement it had already received over 5,800 home and automobile claims as of Monday morning, but a March decision to slash around 30,000 property insurance policies in California will likely have ripple effects. The number of residential and commercial properties in the Palisades covered by the California Fair Plan, a last-resort, basic insurance policy, rose from 797 in 2023 to 1,467 in 2024, the plan’s data shows, an increase of nearly 85%.

It’s inevitable, as longtime Palisades real estate Michael Edlen pointed out, the area will quickly be refurbished. The Palisades, Edlen said, had been one of the “most desirable” areas in the United States since the 1950s. The neighborhood balanced a widespread celebrity and tight-knit feel, tucked at the foot of Los Angeles hills. But longtime residents could be forced out under economic strain.

“Would it be nice to rebuild? Yes,” Tenenbaum said. “But at the same time we’re going to rebuild, what’s going to go up around us? Are a bunch of developers going to buy up these properties and start putting up stuff that we don’t desire?”

On Jan. 7, as the ash began to fill the air down Palisades Drive, Downey and staff at Calvary Christian marched 450 children down West Sunset Boulevard to the local fire station.

They thought they’d have time, once making the call to evacuate, for a regular afternoon pickup. But as traffic on Sunset hit a gridlock and fire approached from the Palisades foothills, Downey and his staff had to pivot. Over the course of four hours, they moved from the fire station to a parking lot and down to the Bel-Air Bay Club until every child was safely passed off to a guardian.

In the meantime, a handful of Downey’s faculty, too busy to step away, lost their own homes without the chance to spare a few possessions.

“I think, there’s a human nature or spirit that just comes in, and we knew what we were going to do,” Downey said. “We had to get these kids home safely. And we just, we did it.”

Other than one building, Calvary Christian’s campus was left fairly undamaged, Downey said. Other local schools weren’t so lucky.

Marquez Charter Elementary School, which has an enrollment of over 300 students, was completely burned, a sign out front that read “Happy birthday Jackson Ford Ardin & Charlotte!” about the only piece of the campus left unscathed. Palisades Charter High School, a longtime staple of Los Angeles education, saw about 30% of its campus sustain “heavy fire damage,” Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvahlo told PBS.

Solutions for local students, however, are underway. The Palisades High put out a statement on its Facebook page Sunday seeking “help from our community to secure a temporary campus,” and teachers and staff met at Beverly Hills High School on Monday. Calvary Christian, meanwhile, is aiming to restart school at the beginning of February, after securing a temporary home at Water Garden in Santa Monica, an office space with three floors and more than 60,000 square feet. They’ll aim to move back to their own campus by the fall, Downey said.

“We have families that are moving and going different places, and I totally understand and respect that … but for the parents and families and people that are here, we want to be there for ‘em,” Downey said. “We want to be a light, a beacon, we want to love on them.

“And we want to finish school,” Downey added.

The only tangible structures left standing from a row of decimated houses on Muskingum Avenue, on Monday, were a few blackened brick chimneys.

And directly across the street stood Kehillat Israel, with hardly a scratch.

Bernstein, the rabbi, has had trouble making sense of it, especially when her own home in the Palisades was completely burned and her next-door neighbors’ were left perfectly intact. She’s been left, spiritually, to rationalize this.

Bernstein does not believe in a God who makes decisions about burning one house over another. We live in a physical world, as Bernstein said; we are physical beings. The laws of nature apply to everything in existence, she professed, from her home to her synagogue, where winds blew randomly and sparks caught randomly and fires burned randomly.

“That means terrible things are going to happen,” Bernstein said. “And so, we have to figure out a way to hold the tragedies — and the Jewish people know from tragedies, and devastation and destruction.

“And we have to then celebrate all the harder the things that we have to celebrate,” Bernstein added.

This is at the essence of Bernstein’s own coping, and how she and Kehillat Israel intend to help the Palisades cope. Four weeks ago, she rescued a German shepherd, naming her Luna, a companion she saved from euthanasia and who is now “saving me from so much more grief than I could say,” as Bernstein said. It’s something she’s trying to lean into amid the loss of her home. And when the community returns she hopes to host nights of song, meditation and celebration of the fact that they’re simply there.

“We have to give people the hope to rebuild,” Bernstein said, “or we all go our own separate ways. And that is just not the Palisades.”

She is about to turn 60, nearing the end of her career as a rabbi. Every bit of energy she has left, Bernstein said, will go toward rebuilding the Palisades. A fire assistance fund through the synagogue, which Bernstein said would go directly to members affected by the fires, has already raised over $175,000. The nearby Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church was destroyed; Kehillat Israel has already offered to host them for sermons, meaning local Presbyterians could soon be attending services inside a synagogue.

People chose to live in the Palisades over other wealthier areas in Los Angeles, Bernstein said, because of its small-town feel; because everyone shopped at the same grocery store; because they ran into one another at the Sunday farmers market; because of Heydenrich, and Blanck and the businesses at the heart of a quiet nook of Los Angeles.

“These people are not the kind of people,” Bernstein said, “who are going to be like, ‘We’ll just move to another neighborhood.’

“I hope,” she added.