La Mirada Mall

La Mirada Mall was a 72-acre (29 ha) regional shopping mall at the southeast corner of La Mirada Boulevard (originally named Luitwieler) and Rosecrans Avenue in La Mirada, California, in Southeast Los Angeles County a.k.a. the Gateway Cities. It is now the site of the La Mirada Theater Center, a strip mall.

Ohrbach's opened a freestanding store here, its third in the Los Angeles area after Miracle Mile and Downtown L.A., and the first one in a suburb, on November 3, 1962, measuring 100,000 square feet (9,300 m2).[1][2][3]

In the early 1970s, Canadian developer Mark Tanz invested about $7 million to turn a loosely arranged, growing collection of stores into an enclosed mall next to a renovated outdoor plaza with fountains and trees. Over the years, stores that came and went included J.J. Newberry, Woolco, Ohrbach's, Barker Bros., Lucky Stores, Market Basket, the La Mirada Theatre (cinema), and Robert's Department Store.[4][5][6] The former open-air nearly double in size in its transition to a fully-enclosed mall.[7]

In the early 1980s, failing to create a unique profile among the dozen or so malls in the Gateway Cities area, the mall shifted to profiling itself as a "discount mall" with lower rents and stores that offered discounted, but name-brand, merchandise.[8]

But by early 1988, the decision had been made to demolish the mall and reduce its size.[9] By 1990, demolition began on the old mall,[7] and this land is now the site of a UFC gym and other outbuildings. What were the outbuildings of the original mall's north side were renovated and these are now the main strip center anchored by an Albertsons supermarket, CVS Pharmacy, AMC Theatres and the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

References
  1. "Advertisement for Ohrbach's". Los Angeles Times. September 9, 1962. p. 17.
  2. "Ohrbach's To Build Department Store in Panorama City Center". Valley Times (North Hollywood, California). January 9, 1964.
  3. Mahoney, Tom, and Leonard Sloane. The Great Merchants: America's Foremost Retail Institutions and the People Who Made Them Great. Page 320. New York: Harper & Row, 1974 ISBN 0-06-012739-2
  4. "La Mirada Hopes That Small Will Be Better for Mall : Redevelopment: City officials break ground for scaled-down neighborhood shopping center to replace mall that failed". 30 September 1990 – via LA Times.
  5. "Last Days of La Mirada Mall : Developers Forgo City Help as They Plan to Clear 72-Acre Site and Rebuild". 14 January 1988 – via LA Times.
  6. "La Mirada Mall map 1976".
  7. Blume, Howard (September 30, 1990). "La Mirada Hopes That Small Will Be Better for Mall : Redevelopment: City officials break ground for scaled-down neighborhood shopping center to replace mall that failed". Los Angeles Times.
  8. "'Nouveau Poor' get a break at off-price mall". Los Angeles Times. March 6, 1983.
  9. Boxall, Bettina (January 14, 1988). "Last Days of La Mirada Mall : Developers Forgo City Help as They Plan to Clear 72-Acre Site and Rebuild". Los Angeles Times.

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