Mall for a New Generation

It's All About the Air As the Los Angeles Area's Iconic Centers Go Back to the Great Outdoors

Brent Hopkins
Los Angeles Daily News

Forget the hills, the beach, even the Hollywood sign - Southern California's true icon is the mall.

From the novel outdoor shopping centers of the 1960s to the '80s' boxy, enclosed fortresses to the massive "lifestyle centers" of today, the mall has had many faces. It's gone from sunshine-warmed to air-conditioned and back again. It's contained movies, skate rinks, youth zones and choreographed dancing fountains. In the urban desert of Los Angeles, malls dot the landscape like modern oases, each trying to outdo the previous one with bigger stores, better parking, smoother landscapes.

Marking the latest entry into this ultracompetitive playing field is the Simi Valley Town Center, a $300 million development that will celebrate its grand opening today - a mall that blends department stores, boutiques, big-box retail outlets and apartments. Each of its key elements represents a lesson learned from the experiences of its retail forebears, resulting in 1.5 million square feet of commerce in nearly every form.

"Retail's been around for thousands of years, starting with someone selling pots in the desert," said John Gilchrist, a principal with the Corti Gilchrist Partnership, one of the Town Center's three developers. "Then he put a carpet down, then he put a tent up. But consumers have certain preferences and trends change."

The Town Center, which intends to re-create an Italian shopping district on a hillside, is a far cry from that desert pot stand, with six restaurants, two department stores, Best Buy, Lowe's and 500 apartments. While it's the first major shopping development since The Oaks in nearby Thousand Oaks went up in 1972, this new entry will add competition to an area that defined mall culture for much of the past half-century.

From the trailblazing Panorama Mall, a swanky center anchored by The Broadway when it opened in the early 1950s, to the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, the Valley served as an incubator for some of the region's most influential shopping centers and trends.

When they first came about, these huge centers aimed to pull together all the elements of a downtown shopping district in one location. Taking advantage of Southern California's good weather and ample land, they were open-air with vast asphalt parking lots.

But as shoppers became more accustomed to creature comforts, enclosed centers became in vogue, with multilevel, air-conditioned concourses linking increasingly huge department stores. Topanga Plaza started the trend in 1964, and Northridge Fashion Center cemented it seven years later, conditioning shoppers to nab all their purchases in one stop.

Fried-food court fare fed many a cranky child dragged along for the ride. This all led to the 1976 birth of the Glendale Galleria, the super-regional mall so huge it extended across several city blocks. By then, malls had little resemblance to the downtowns of old, becoming entirely self-contained and cut off from the outside world. This spawned the iconic Sherman Oaks Galleria in 1980, home of the much-mocked Valley Girls, and led the Panorama Mall and Fashion Square to cover up in coming decades.

But by 2000, the traditional mall didn't cut it anymore. Consumers suddenly remembered they liked the outdoors and turned their backs on enclosed centers. The Sherman Oaks Galleria shut down, only to reinvent itself as an outdoor "entertainment destination" mixing retail, movies and sit-down restaurants. Other centers reversed course and began playing up their natural elements, adding outdoor features and landscaping beneath skylights.

"A big part of it is that consumers are fed up with the sameness of shopping malls," said Linda Berman, vice president of branding and communications for Caruso Affiliated Holdings. "At a certain point, people will react to that. Closed-mall developers are getting more savvy about importing better entertainment, putting in outdoor elements, whatever it takes to make it warmer and friendlier."

Caruso, which owns a series of so-called lifestyle centers, including The Commons at Calabasas and the landmark The Grove in the Fairfax District, has been one of the biggest forces in the current movement back outdoors. Though at times controversial - critics say its whimsical developments are overly saccharine and rival developer General Growth Properties Inc., owner of the Glendale Galleria, set off a nasty legal battle attempting to block Caruso's plans to build an outdoor center in downtown Glendale - its malls have become a huge success with consumers.

"Here, people feel like they're on vacation," Berman said. "When you're at a resort, the shopping barriers fall away. People don't really come here to shop necessarily, but they end up buying something anyway."

The trend back to more classic, outdoor centers has led other developers to take notice. General Growth knocked down the old Fallbrook Mall to make way for a collection of big-box stores with more outdoor space, while Westfield Corp. will spend more than $300 million to bring in high-end tenants such as Neiman Marcus to Westfield Topanga.

While there are limited things a developer can do within the confines of an enclosed center, Westfield is still playing up the natural aspects of the mall.

"The centerpiece of the redeveloped center is an architectural and design marvel called The Canyon," Katy Dickey, Westfield's vice president of communications, said in a statement. "With over 30,000 square feet of glass, it will be a vast sky-filled atrium, which runs through the heart of Westfield Topanga, bringing the Southern California lifestyle indoors."

The final step in bringing shopping centers back to the way they used to be comes in the form of adding apartments. Though a relatively new trend in malls, first seen locally at Paseo Colorado in Pasadena in 2001, this hearkens back to traditional retail, in which stores operated in the heart of neighborhoods instead of on their suburban fringe. For Simi Valley Town Center, the people who will live in those apartments will add a community vibe to the shops - and built-in customers as well.

"It's the doctrine of new urbanism," said Alexander Moore, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California. "It all goes back to the importance of the street. Not only do you want the traditional things, like boutiques and department stores, but you want real, actual people there."