West Valley Firsts: Southern California's First Enclosed Mall Was Right Here

Before Westfield Topanga, before The Village, before any of the shopping centers that define Warner Center today, there was Topanga Plaza. Its first two anchors opened on February 10, 1964, on a 58-acre parcel that had been part of Harry Warner's horse ranch, and it was the first enclosed shopping mall in Southern California.

It nearly had a different name. Through planning it was promoted as West Valley Center, and only became Topanga Plaza by the time ground was broken in February 1963.

That the enclosure mattered is easy to underrate now. In 1964 the norm was open-air. You parked, you walked outside between stores, and in August you did that in Valley heat. Topanga Plaza's fully enclosed, climate-controlled format was a real bet at the time, and it paid off well enough that the format spread across the region over the following two decades.

The architect was Victor Gruen, who had essentially invented the modern enclosed mall eight years earlier and is still routinely called the father of the American shopping mall. The mall opened across two levels with 83 retailers, developed by May Centers of St. Louis. May Company and Montgomery Ward opened first, a Food Fair supermarket followed in April, and The Broadway rounded out the anchors.

Gruen gave it the flourishes to match. A "Rain Fountain," nicknamed the Wonderfall and designed by Vic Chaten of Torrance, stood in the South Court, creating the illusion of falling rain with droplets of recirculated glycerine descending along vertical monofilament lines. The North Court had bird aviaries, planters, and a gazebo. A Terrace Restaurant looked out over it all from above the May Company. An ice arena opened on the lower level in March 1965 and became, for a generation of Valley kids, the thing you actually went there for.

The mall anchored what became the Warner Center commercial district, arriving years before the office towers and nearly a decade before the Promenade opened in 1973.

So Was It Really the First?

Worth being careful here, because "first" claims get repeated far more confidently than they deserve, and we would rather be right than impressive.

It was not the first in the country. That is Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened on October 8, 1956, cost $20 million to build, and drew 75,000 people to its gala opening. It is credited as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States. Gruen designed that one too, around a skylit atrium he called the Garden Court of Perpetual Spring, meant to work as an indoor town square.

Was it the first in California? We spent real time on that question and came back without an answer, which turns out to be the interesting part.

At least three California malls opened in 1964, and the "first in the state" title has been attached to each of them by somebody. Topanga Plaza's first anchors opened February 10. Escondido Village, near San Diego, is commonly described as California's first enclosed and first fully air-conditioned mall, though its own anchor store opened April 6 and its formal dedication came August 6, both after Topanga. Those dates come from a retail-history reference and from a contemporaneous local newspaper account recorded in a reference list. And Wikipedia's entry on Visalia Mall, in the Central Valley, states flatly that Visalia was the first enclosed shopping mall in California when it opened that same year. We have not independently verified Visalia's opening date or its original configuration. We are citing that claim as evidence that the title is contested, not as a fact about Visalia.

Three malls, one year, and no agreement. Nobody is necessarily lying. The category itself was new enough in 1964 that "enclosed mall" had no settled definition. Escondido advertised itself as a shopping center with an "enclosed sidewalk," because the word "mall" still meant a long planted green space rather than a building. When the thing being counted has no agreed definition, first-place claims multiply.

Here is the tell. The most reliable sources in this whole question make regional claims rather than state ones. Gruen Associates says Topanga was the first enclosed mall to open in southern California. Mall Hall of Fame, the retail-history reference, calls it the first major enclosed shopping center in Southern California. That same reference calls Escondido Village greater San Diego's first fully enclosed shopping center, not California's, and a separate account describes it as the region's first fully enclosed complex. The state-level claims come from the thinner sources. That is usually what it looks like when a claim has been inflated in the retelling.

So we are not going to tell you Topanga Plaza was California's first, and we would gently suggest not believing anyone who does without showing their work.

What is documented is narrower and holds up: Topanga Plaza was Southern California's first enclosed shopping mall.

Two sources say so. One is Gruen Associates, the architect, on its own project page, which makes it primary and also promotional. The other is a retail-history reference with no commercial stake in the answer. We cannot establish that the second is independent of the first. A 2008 write-up of a 1964 mall gets its details from somewhere, and the architect's own materials are the obvious place. So: two accounts, not demonstrably two origins. We think the claim is right. We are telling you what it rests on, and every source is linked below.

That is still a real claim. The man who invented the enclosed mall brought the idea to the West Valley before almost anywhere else in this half of the state, and he built it on a horse ranch. That ranch was one turn in a longer sequence, and our Economic Evolution piece follows the same ground from cattle range through wheat, citrus, and rocket engines to the office towers standing on it now.

Sixty-two years later the building is still standing, renovated and rebranded more than once. Whether the bet still holds is a question for a different piece.