Developers have high hopes for vertical mall

Imagine Hong Kong, or Seoul, or the crowded L.A. envisioned in futuristic movies.

Languid sprawl has been replaced by density all around: High-rise apartments have supplanted bungalows, and shopping centers go up instead of out.

Not here, you say?

As urban planners push for ever-increasing density in Southern California, one of the region's biggest real estate developers is preparing to build Southern California's first vertical shopping mall on Wilshire Boulevard.

Shopping centers that rise several stories are a staple in Asia, Europe and a few tightly packed American cities but have been shunned in the past by builders in land-rich Southern California. Customers here are accustomed to malls that spread horizontally and have balked at traveling up and down more than a floor or two for casual shopping.

Now, Los Angeles developer Jerry Snyder and his J.H. Snyder Co. partner Michael Wise are planning to break with local tradition and put up a seven-story mall near the Red Line station at Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue that would house perhaps 100 stores under rooftop restaurants and a cinema complex in 300,000 square feet.

Urban planners are ready to embrace the idea, saying it's all part of the verticalization of L.A. -- the push from city officials and others toward building high-rise condominium and apartment buildings near public transit lines, along with equally dense job centers and shopping districts.

"The days of being able to continuously expand outward are gone," said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. Rising suburban land costs, traffic congestion and the price of gasoline are discouraging further sprawl, she said.

Already, Snyder has won the conditional support of Herb Wesson, the neighborhood's city councilman. The city's top urban planner, Gail Goldberg, said L.A. was ready for a vertical mall.

Snyder and his architect, Boston-based Howard Elkus, say they hope to create a city landmark on par with the former Bullocks Wilshire department store or the Wiltern Theater -- a new architectural attraction near those classics that would attract tourists as well as local shoppers.

But can a high-rise mall succeed in L.A.?

The conventional wisdom says no. Several local real estate professionals expressed surprise that anyone would even try it, saying that people here are used to going to a big, rambling mall with a huge surface parking lot and looking for a parking space close to the store that they want to visit first.