Gagging Over the Galleria: An Oral History of the Sherman Oaks Galleria

The untold story of California's most culturally influential shopping mall

AIR GUITAR #2 🤘🏻

As they glimmered along the American landscape of the 1980s like “pyramids to the boom years,”[1] roughly 2,000 shopping malls were operating in the U.S. — not just “complexes” or “centers,” but, as others have noted, these were temples of consumption, cathedrals of commerce, domes of pleasure, and citadels of consumerism (not to be confused with The Citadel, a shopping mall in Colorado Springs, Colorado).

For a variety of depressing reasons that require a separate essay to explain, none of these structures have been preserved as architecturally or culturally significant sites, including (and especially) Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956 and stands today (in its vandalized state) as the first climate-controlled shopping mall in history — a revolution in terms of architectural ingenuity and engineering.

Gruen’s golden box, his marvel of urban planning that is now as ubiquitous as the automobile, was described by Consumer Reports as one of the 50 inventions that revolutionized consumer life, alongside antibiotics and birth control pills. However, as of this writing, no 20th-century shopping mall has been designated a historical landmark, i.e., they can be bulldozed, renovated, reimagined, or mutilated at any time — purely for profit, of course. And the name Victor Gruen, the “Father of the Shopping Mall,” is as invisible to the Western eye as the hyper-Americanized version of his utopian mall: the joyfully obnoxious and juvenile Sherman Oaks Galleria, a windowless fortress with garish casino carpets, faux-brick tiles, and retro-futuristic Star Wars-coded architecture that hovered over the corner of Ventura and Sepulveda from 1980 to 1999, breeding an indigenous population of gum-snapping shopaholics (aka “Valley Girls”), co-starring in innumerable films and TV shows, and transforming the mall into a pleasure palace for teenagers.

The Galleria (the one in Sherman Oaks, not Glendale) can never be a historical landmark because it’s gone — stripped down and mutilated like Persepolis, or “renovated,” if you ask the tacky pillagers who desecrated its walls into a hideous “mixed-use” open-air spectacle of cultural decline. When they excavate the ruins of America, they will have zero physical evidence that the Sherman Oaks Galleria existed; there isn’t a museum exhibit, bronze plaque, or monument — nothing but blurry social media posts that will soon evaporate into digital dust.

The following is an oral history of what the L.A. Times once described as the “invisible mall,” a mall with no architect to speak of, i.e., we don’t know the name of the architect behind the most culturally influential shopping mall in California history.

Please leave comments (especially if you know the architect's name).

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I – There’s, like, the Galleria

Sherman Oaks Galleria (promo, 1980): Enjoy the Valley’s new classy, contemporary, and compact three-tiered, high-tech shopping center. It’s what’s inside that’s wonderful…an atrium skylight, a crystal lift, a garden of trees and flowers. We built it just for you.

Joan Didion (writer): They are toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes, profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal.

Vera Bader (author): Such illusionistic designs carry the visitor off to an idealized world—a kind of hyperreality—that is free of filth, chaos, and garbage, where it never rains, storms, or snows.

Bob Greene (journalist and author): When you’re without wheels, you have nothing to cruise but the mall.

Cher Horowitz (Clueless, 1995): I felt important and out of control, which I really hate. I needed to find sanctuary in a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.

Alexandra Lange (author and critic): Commercial imperatives accidentally created an architecture that accommodates those who often have the least societal power.

Moon Unit Zappa (musician and author): Encino is, like, so bitchin’ (Valley Girl), there’s, like, the Galleria (Valley Girl).

John Schwada (journalist, Los Angeles Times): If the Valley had no national identity before, after the [Frank and Moon] Zappas’ 1982 hit song “Valley Girl,” the fashion and social mores of middle-class, white, teen-age girls suddenly captured the nation’s imagination.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1995): [Frank] Zappa finally infiltrated the Top Forty in 1982 with "Valley Girl," a keenly observed satire of California ‘airhead’ culture, complete with slang-driven repartee from daughter Moon Unit. This song's title subsequently became a national catchphrase.

Kevin Starr (professor and author): Valley Girls are nobody's saps. They're not seduced and abandoned. They're not sitting around waiting for someone to give them a life. She's done rather well for herself. She represents the triumph of the middle class.

Joshua Beroukhim (journalist, Behind the Deals): The movie, Valley Girl (1983), which is credited with the creation of the socioeconomic stereotype of the “Valley Girl,” became synonymous with the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which solidified the mall’s position as the epicenter of teenage mall culture.

Molly Lambert (journalist): As a Valley Girl hanging out aimlessly at the mall in the ‘80s, I didn’t see the mall as a cultural wasteland. It was just a place to observe human beings in a habitat, to check out an endless carnival of faces. To, like, y’know, hang out?

Ashley Gordon (journalist, Los Angeles Daily News): The three-level mall was built on the site of Moses Sherman's original 1911 thousand-acre investment in the area, at the present-day intersection of Ventura and Sepulveda boulevards.

Sherman Oaks Galleria (promo, 1983): The original Valley Girls are here every day at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. See some of the most beautiful women and hear some of the most outrageous language being used today.

Jared Cowan (journalist, Los Angeles Magazine): The Sherman Oaks Galleria had it all: Licorice Pizza, the Mall Arcade, Pacific 4 Theatres, Perry’s Pizza, and the suspended walkways spanning the center of the mall suggested a never-ending shopping playground.

Anne McDermott (journalist, CNN): There was a time when the Sherman Oaks Galleria was the most famous mall in America, at least among those of a certain age. They loved the Galleria and loved that it was mentioned in the 1982 Frank and Moon Unit Zappa hit single, “Valley Girl.”

John Schwada (journalist, Los Angeles Times): In 1988, the Los Angeles City Planning Department said the Valley had grown faster during the ‘80s than the rest of the city.

Dave Wharton (journalist, Los Angeles Times): This tremendous hall of concrete and glass [Sherman Oaks Galleria] is probably the best-known edifice in the San Fernando Valley.

Chris Eggersten (journalist, Curbed LA): Between 1945 and 1980, the [San Fernando Valley’s] population more than quintupled, rising from 228,000 to over one million. Shopping malls such as the Northridge Fashion Center, Sherman Oaks Fashion Square, The Promenade in Woodland Hills, Topanga Plaza, and the Glendale and Sherman Oaks gallerias anchored towns from Canoga Park in the West Valley to Glendale in the east, and they had become watering holes for the region’s teenage residents.

Patricia Ward Biederman (journalist, Los Angeles Times): Opened in 1964, Topanga Plaza in Canoga Park was the first enclosed shopping mall west of the Mississippi. The mall represented a breakthrough in America’s obsession with shopping.

Avery Hartmans (journalist, Business Insider): By 1986, there were 25,000 shopping malls worldwide and they’d become de facto town squares. The mall was where teens hung out and where single people met for dates.

Elena Gooray (journalist, Pacific Standard): Between 1970 and 2015, the number of malls in the United States grew by more than twice the rate of the population.

Akan Semuels (journalist, The Atlantic): The U.S. has twice as much square footage in shopping centers per capita than the rest of the world, and six times as much as countries in Europe.

Steven Kurutz (journalist, The New York Times): This, among other factors, nearly killed downtowns, and malls reigned supreme for some 40 years.

Andy (former mall rat): There was an arcade there called the Sega Center and we managed to find a way to cheat the machines to get free credits. All you had to do was rub your shoes on the carpet to build up some static electricity, hold a key in your hand, and slightly jump up while touching the key to the coin feeder.

Patricia Ward Biederman (journalist, Los Angeles Times): We know that shopping pre-dates the settlement of the Valley, but it is here that shopping acquired celebrity.

Agena (Valley Girl): I’ll always remember seeing the cast of Real People at the Galleria. They were hosting a Valley Girl look-a-like contest.

Wire Service Reports (1982): To some of the thousand or so contestants who jammed the Sherman Oaks Galleria on Saturday, the competition was an opportunity to out-Val Miss Zappa, who put the teen jargon to music by her father, rock musician Frank Zappa.

Moon Unit Zappa (musician and author): It was like a nightmare…I hope the winners take over my position as the spokesperson for Valley Girls.

Wire Service Reports (1982): Winning contestant, Erica Freudenberg, 16, of Canoga Park, helped her cause by turning the fad phrase, “Gag me with a spoon” to “pitch me with a fork.”

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II – Hollywood of the Valley

Sherman Oaks Galleria (brochure): Shop the Valley’s finest…Robinson’s, May Company, and Pacific 4 Theaters, plus 120 specialty stores.

Mister Lister’s Lounge (YouTuber): It was, in essence, the Hollywood of the Valley.

Kelly (former employee): I worked there in 1984-85. Worked overnights while they were filming Commando (1985). It always tickled me they turned the pet shop into a restaurant for the film.

Eric Chang (YouTuber): Besides its Hollywood fame, the mall was otherwise rather small and unremarkable, although Janet Jackson had been spotted shopping there on at least one occasion. Molly Ringwald used to shop there regularly.

Evan Lovett (host, L.A. in a Minute): The Sherman Oaks Galleria invented mall culture and is responsible for exporting it to the world.

Jennifer Christman (journalist, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette): It’s a historical landmark—a significant modern cultural icon of Woodstock and Graceland proportions.

Patricia Ward (journalist, Los Angeles Times): [Jennifer Christman] had never actually been to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, but she had seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High—the 1982 film in which the mall co-starred with Sean Penn— “about 193 times on cable.”

Jared Cowan (journalist, Los Angeles Magazine): The exterior of Ridgemont Mall, however, is the original Santa Monica Place.

Kaarin Vembar (journalist, Retail Drive): The central importance of the mall is immediately established in the opening credits of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It starts with an establishing shot of the Ridgemont Mall, and within the first two minutes of the film we are introduced to all of the main characters and get context around who they are…an entire world of teen culture reveals itself while the Go-Go's sing that they've got the beat.

Evan Lovett (host, L.A. in a Minute): The L.A. Times credits Nic Cage and Sean Penn’s careers to Sherman Oaks Galleria.

Cameron Crowe (filmmaker and author): Amy [Heckerling] was like, “I love how all the action is centered around the mall in the book. Let’s make the mall an even bigger character for the movie.” We were like, “Great idea, we’re on our way.” Amy completely got it, and we were up and running

Amy Heckerling (filmmaker): Movies I had seen on TV that had teenagers back then would go to what was like the soda shop. There was always a place where people went, and they sat…people from school could be together in a non-school atmosphere

Former Employee: I worked at the Pacific 4 theaters in the mid-80s. Fast Times gives me great flashbacks. It was just like that, except the girls were at the Pretzel & Smoothie place, not the pizza place, Perry’s Pizza, which had thick square pieces.

Mark "Rat" Ratner (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1982): I hate working the theater. All the action’s on the other side of the mall.

Mark (former mall rat): The whole mall was supposedly built on giant rollers which was a new earthquake damage prevention technology. Every time a large car pulled into the parking structure; the whole building would shake like we were having an earthquake. The May Company and Robinsons had the worst shaking.

Alan (former mall rat): Used to skate in the parking lot, down five levels, or whatever it was.

Sherman Oaks Galleria (promo, 1980): Conveniently located near the interchange of the San Diego 405 and Ventura 101 freeways. Daily hours 10-9; Saturday 10-6; Sunday 12-5. You’ll like our style.

Andre (former mall rat): What a memorable place for me. I lived a few blocks from there back in the ‘80s. There used to be Madonna look-a-like contests every year with a stage and all. We’d play arcade at Time Out, get a bite to eat next door, go check out a movie and then go look at clothes at the Oaktree. Fun Times.

Carol (Valley Girl): A lot of tweens showed up looking like Madonna in her “Like a Virgin” video.

Alexandra Lange (author and critic): The mall is the place to buy the clothes that allow [people] to project their identities in a visual way….[They use] the atrium of the mall like a catwalk, and the importance of the escalator [becomes] this showcase for movement and drama and fashion in the mall.

Kaarin Vembar (journalist, Retail Drive): The mall used to be the center of the universe.

Tom (former employee): I worked at Licorice Pizza (record store) in the mid-80s, Had an in-store visit from Bananarama for the promotion of “Cruel Summer.” A very young Drew Barrymore came in with a bodyguard to shop and I asked her to sign our Firestarter soundtrack album. CDs were just coming out.

Mister Lister’s Lounge (YouTuber): It would not be out of this world to catch a Debbie Gibson concert here or a radio contest. They used to have an animation cel show, too, where Disney animators would come out and do hand-drawn pictures for guests.

Kevin (former employee): I worked as an usher, ticket-taker, and box office at Pacific 4 Theaters from 1984-1989. I was working there when they filmed Fast Times at Ridgemont High…lines would be wrapped around the corners every Friday and Saturday night. The only drawback was the polyester brown blazer that we had to wear.

Denice (former employee): My first job. I was 15. It was at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. We were paid 30% more per hour than all other places. I’m sure the “uniform” was part of that. On this day, as we closed at 10 pm, I handed my uniform over to an actress as they were filming a little movie that night called Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I decided to take acting classes soon after that because I thought it was ridiculous that they didn’t just give me the part…

For Denice’s full story, click here.

Mister Lister’s Lounge (YouTuber): It was an authentic movie star. The Sherman Oaks Galleria serves as the setting for an array of iconic movies of the ‘80s. It was the venue not only for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Valley Girl (1983), but also Night of the Comet (1984), Commando (1985), Mother (1996), Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge (1989), Walk Like a Man (1987), Innerspace (1987), and my personal favorite, Chopping Mall (1986).

Julie Corman (producer): We have a great ensemble group on Killbots [later retitled, Chopping Mall]. They started calling themselves the “Bot Pack.” We were up all-night shooting [Killbots] in the Sherman Oaks Galleria for three weeks and then we finished in our studio. Everybody was on zombie time.

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III – The Day the Muzak Died

Joshua Beroukhim (journalist, Behind the Deals): Ever since the mall’s opening in 1980, Robinson’s department store occupied the mall’s southern anchor space, and a May Company department store occupied the mall’s northern anchor space. As a result of a merger, both anchor spaces were rebranded as Robinsons-May department stores.

Joan Didion (writer): Two major tenants, one at each end of the mall. This is called ‘anchoring the mall,’ and represents seminal work in shopping-center theory.

Joshua Beroukhim, (journalist, Behind the Deals): But the mall’s two identically-branded anchor spaces likely didn’t arouse much of the general public’s enthusiasm and excitement…there likely wasn’t much of a reason to visit the only mall with just one department store.

Mindy (Valley Girl): I was watching Superman in the theater when the plane crashed into the mall. We had to be evacuated. It was intense!

Trina (former employee): I was working that night at May Co. It felt like an earthquake.

The Telegraph (1981): Stores at the Sherman Oaks Galleria shopping mall had closed just before the 9 p.m. crash. Some people were still in the May Co. department store when the Piper Cherokee Archer II crashed into its roof…most of the people still in the mall were in the four theaters.

Michael (former employee): I worked at Orange Julius the evening a plane crashed into the roof.

Valley Relics: Jeffrey Tomlinson, 21, of Camarillo, who was preparing to land at Van Nuys Airport, died when his Piper Cherokee Archer II was struck in the tail and plummeted 2,500 feet into a May Co. store. Also killed were his two passengers.

Carol Watson (journalist, Los Angeles Times): The Sherman Oaks Galleria, a symbol of youthful consumerism in the 1980s, is updating its image with renovations that cater to the values of the ‘90s.

Carrol Beals (former general manager): The “Valley Girl” is now married to and has two children and a station wagon.

Paul Thomas Anderson (filmmaker): I have located two films in the San Fernando Valley. In the pop imagination, this usually means stupid girls, malls, and big hair. In reality, this is not the case. Well, not exactly. Yes, there are stupid girls and drunk boys and malls and bad hair, but the valley also has the closest thing to a "real life" in the Los Angeles area.

John Schwada (journalist, Los Angeles Times): Street gangs have sprayed graffiti on Ventura Boulevard signs.

Valley Relics: The Northridge Earthquake struck Southern California at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994. The earthquake killed 57 people and injured countless others. It caused $40 billion in damage.

Drew Boghorsyan (former employee): It shook us pretty hard. We heard the building just rumble. It was really scary.

Rosa (Valley Girl): That was the official end to the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

Anonymous: That's a bit misleading. The mall was only slightly damaged from the quake, and only closed for a couple of weeks for repairs. The shutdown did cause a fairly rapid decline for the mall, though, going most of the 90s with a lot of store vacancies.

Evan Lovett (host, L.A. in a Minute): Even though the mall wasn’t badly damaged, Robinsons-May didn’t reopen its store until more than four years after the earthquake, severely hampering business.

George White (journalist, Los Angeles Times): The mall’s owners, a partnership led by Los Angeles-based Douglas Emmett Realty Advisors, blamed Robinsons-May, contending that the department store operator did not adequately staff or stock its two Galleria stores, thus hurting overall business at the mall.

Mister Lister’s Lounge (YouTuber): Many smaller stores on that floor [3rd floor] closed.

Patrice Apodaca (journalist, Los Angeles Times): At the hardest-hit shopping mall, Northridge Fashion Center, a collapsed Bullock’s department store has been condemned and two parking structures will have to be rebuilt. Carrol Beals, general manager at Sherman Oaks Galleria, said the damage was mainly from water and broken glass. But she said it wasn’t known yet when the mall would reopen.

Melissa (former employee): I worked there in the ‘90s. My first job was at the China Inn in the food court. Loved going to the Sam Goody on my lunch break or to check out the animals in the pet store [Vince’s Pets]. It was such a cool mall, but sadly the ‘94 quake made it unsafe.

George White (journalist, Los Angeles Times): The Sherman Oaks Galleria, famous as the former hangout of shopaholic Valley Girls is involved in a legal dispute between its owner and Robinsons-May, its largest tenant.”

Robert A. Jones (journalist, Los Angeles Times): The death of the Galleria suggests something profound and mysterious. No one can know for certain what killed it. Whatever the forces were, they were big.

Anonymous: In 1995, when I finally moved to LA, the Galleria was already going downhill fast. Instead of Claires, Contempo, and the usual, there were junky stores run by Asian women selling fake Louis Vittons and things that should be sold downtown on the street instead of a mall.

Deborah Hastings (journalist, The Associated Press): Among Western malls, the Galleria has become somewhat of a white elephant, an enclosed monolith whose only outside views come from skylights. Newer malls are more apt to feature stores with individual entrances, united by a street that fosters a feeling of community.

Erica (former employee): I used to like this mall before they ripped it apart and turned it into an outdoor mall.

Joshua Beroukhim (journalist, Behind the Deals): Three years into Robinson-Mays four-year reopening delay, Douglas Emmet acquired the Sherman Oaks Galleria for $51 million. The off-market transaction reflected a price-per-square foot of just $51 for the mall’s 1,000,000 square feet of retail and office space.

Anonymous: My dad was the architect who designed the original Sherman Oaks Galleria [which opened on October 30, 1980]. Even though I'm biased, I preferred his design to the new one which, when it gets windy, you really feel it because the new design creates a wind tunnel. Who thought that was a good idea?

Nick (contractor): My crew installed all those handrails.

Joshua Beroukhim (journalist, Behind the Deals): In 1998 Douglas Emmett sued Robinsons-May for its “unauthorized closure” of the third floor of its southern anchor store which lasted over four years, claiming that “virtually all the mall tenants located adjacent to the closed third floor…have vacated the mall due to lack of customer traffic.

George Ritzer (professor): The last half of the twentieth century was characterized by the rise of- to use a concept I coined— ‘cathedrals of consumption’—such as shopping malls, mega-malls, big-box stores, and the like. However, in the 21st century, these consumption sites are all showing signs of distress (e.g. dead or increasingly vacant malls).

Anonymous: It was never that great of a mall. Its main appeal was the movie theaters, which holds true today, as well. For a while, it was home to one of the San Fernando Valley’s Tower Records locations, which made it a worthy destination, until Tower closed and that storefront became a furniture store.

Alexander Lange (author and critic): Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck had conceived a connected interior retail space that had much more in common with the glass-roofed gallerias of Europe (albeit contained in a radically new form) than with the car-focused shopping plazas of America.

Marianna Eloise (journalist, The Independent): Gruen intended to architecturally mimic the Greek agoras and town plazas of Europe, offering people a place to go in a country that so often requires cars just to move around.

Malcolm Gladwell (author and podcaster): He [Gruen] revisited one of his old shopping centers, saw all the sprawling development around it, and pronounced himself in “severe emotional shock.” Malls, he said, had been disfigured by “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking” around them.

Victor Gruen (architect): I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.

Sarah Cheka (journalist, Vogue): Down from an apex of 2,500 in the 1980s, there are currently only about 700 shopping malls remaining in the United States, and there may be just 150 left by 2032.

Hayley Peterson (journalist, Business Insider): Traffic-driving anchors like Sears and JCPenney are shutting down stores, and mall owners are having a hard time finding retailers large enough to replace them.

Daniel (former mall rat): I get so emotional watching anything about the Galleria and usually break down in tears. It wasn't just a ‘mall.’ It was a piece of American history, California history, and each one of our personal histories.

Simone Polgar: In June [2020], Pitchfork published a piece on contemporary post-punkers Molchat Doma in which a 19-year-old listener likened their music to “being alone in a shopping mall, but you’re almost comforted by the fact that you’re alone in it.

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[1] This is a quote from Joan Didion’s essay “On the Mall,” which was originally published in Esquire in 1975.