The North Hollywood icon sprawls across 17 acres and is set to be demolished
The Los Angeles Board of Building and Safety voted this week to declare the Valley Plaza shopping center in North Hollywood, a “public nuisance” in the hopes of demolishing the buildings and redeveloping the site. The iconic outdoor mall, one of the first of its kind in Southern California, sprawled and expanded throughout the 1950s and 60s and eventually filled a reported 100 acres. Today, the site encompasses some 17 acres along Laurel Canyon and Victory Boulevards. Some elements, including the 9-story Wells Fargo bank tower (built by architects Honnold and Rex in 1960) will remain.
Efforts to modify and update the center’s vast array of disparate properties have risen and fallen for decades. Today, the mishmash of abandoned, forlorn and barely hanging on storefronts attract the poor and homeless – and film crews looking for post-apocalyptic landscapes. Only six properties on the site were identified by the councilmember in his testimony, but it appears that the entire site is set to be revamped.
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It was a great big, beautiful tomorrow 75 years ago when a new Sears store was proposed for the San Fernando Valley. The new “Valley Plaza” shopping center would grow to become one of the largest of its kind in the west, eventually adding more department stores, multiple supermarkets, a movie theater, and amenities like its own helicopter station. An automotive repair shop once boasted that it alone could accommodate 4000 vehicles. When future president John F. Kennedy made his whistle stop campaign tour through Los Angeles in 1960, he cruised by Valley Plaza in his convertible Ford Skyliner.
The heart and soul of the center was always Sears. The massive, modernist retail giant dwarfed the mom-and-pop retailers that had long clung to the rural roads of the agricultural version of the San Fernando Valley. This one provided parking for thousands of shiny tailfinned cars that had come to consume! consume! consume! The roaring economic boom of the decade after World War II that transformed American cities and saw the rise of suburbs took place largely at brand new shopping centers.
Valley Plaza was one of the myriad of entirely new suburban designs that were auto-oriented, sanitized and corporatized. These stores were brand names you might have seen on television – or at least they took out lavish advertising spreads in the newspaper. McDaniel’s market even had a little Scottish character chiding you to save money. The corner market could never offer that.
If you squint hard enough, you can still see the sleek lines of Stiles O. Clements 1951 Sears store hiding behind the Ross Dress for Less that has occupied its hollow husk for the last half decade. Gone are the modernist lines and flat planes of Sears. The Utah stone, marble panels and Roman brick are all hiding under beige stucco. Clements’ signature twin Sears palm trees still blow in the wind, in scale with the original façade, now about three sizes too big for little Ross. They have a little help from Target in trying to fill out the north wing. The long, sad downfall of Sears deserves its own eulogy, just as the iconic store’s Burbank location, the chain’s final outpost in Southern California, closes at the end of this month.
“We are ready, willing and able to go forward and demolish these buildings,” Fred Gaines, an attorney for property owner Charles Co. said at the city meeting. The Los Angeles Times reports that Charles Co. is owned by Mark and Arman Gabaee, the paper noted that Arman Gabaee was sentenced to four years in prison for a bribery case in 2022.
City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, who represents the neighborhood, blamed the owners for the deterioration and indicated that would like to see new housing and retail replace the aging shopping center.
For the moment, there are a few old-time holdouts at the mall. Tandy Leather still attracts crafters, folks drop off mail at the post office, and the North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has an office next to the abandoned movie house. I wonder if they still have all those groundbreaking golden shovels and grand opening oversized scissors from Valley Plaza?
Chris Nichols
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