Shopping Malls

An early-morning fire Monday at an Anaheim shopping mall gutted three stores and caused more than $325,000 in damages, a fire official said. No one was injured in the two-alarm blaze, which started about 12:30 a.m. at a music store in the 400 block of North Anaheim Boulevard. It took 43 firefighters from the Anaheim and Fullerton fire departments 40 minutes to control the blaze at the six-building complex, said Maria Sabol, spokeswoman for the Anaheim Fire Department.

"No, no, we're not buying those," said the woman, pulling her little guy away from an enticing pile of plush toys in a store window. The dachshund obediently retreated and trotted on leash down the mall. In a shop that sells faux jewels, a bichon frise named Murray chomped contentedly on his bone as his mistress, Teri Weiss, looked over the baubles and beads.

After building countless suburban shopping malls, real estate giant TrizecHahn is betting hundreds of millions of dollars that Southern Californians are ready for something different. Hollywood & Highland, a $560-million retail and entertainment complex that will serve as the permanent home for the Academy Awards show, is being built in Hollywood by TrizecHahn's development arm.

I've lived in Ventura for 10 years, and there's a lot to like about this town. There are also a number of things that puzzle me. One of them is the parking garage at Pacific View Mall. It's the wrong building in the wrong place. Something this homely should have been located elsewhere or camouflaged. OK, it isn't the Louvre or the Guggenheim or the Getty. It's a parking garage. It adheres to the dictates of function at the expense of expression of form. By definition, we must forgive a parking garage if it is not pleasing to the eye. However, that is no reason something so unsightly should be put on display, running parallel to a main thoroughfare, as though it were a real building.

About 1,000 Santa Ana middle school students found respite from overcrowded campuses this fall by reporting on the first day of school to Bristol Market Place. Their destination was a three-story schoolhouse built where a building supply store once stood, atop a parking garage.

Two young men were killed and three others were wounded when a gun battle erupted between what investigators believe were rival gangs Tuesday on the rooftop parking lot at the Fox Hills shopping mall in Culver City, police said. The incident began just before 6 p.m. with a dispute between two groups of teenagers in the mall's food court, said Culver City police spokeswoman Randi Joseph. As the argument escalated, eight to 10 young men walked out to the parking lot, she said.

Shopping centers across the nation are planning to install large, showy advertising displays, uncorking a new stream of revenue for mall owners and transforming retail hubs into advertising runways. In the Southland, four centers are adding dozens of the back-lit displays this month, including the Shops at Mission Viejo, MainPlace/Santa Ana, Brea Mall and Century City Shopping Center in Los Angeles.

A developer has proposed a $140-million expansion and refurbishing of Valley Plaza in North Hollywood, one of the San Fernando Valley's oldest outdoor shopping centers, with 828,000 square feet of new stores, theaters and office buildings. The plan by J.h Snyder Co. is aimed at reviving the 47-acre center, parts of which were heavily damaged in the Northridge quake, and which, aside from a popular Sears store, has had trouble keeping many of its storefronts filled.

A surge of new real estate development continues to wash across the Inland Empire, where plans for a major new shopping center and massive distribution facility have been announced. Catellus Development Corp. said it will soon begin construction on a 500,000-square-foot distribution center in Ontario for New Balance Athletic Shoes Inc.

Maybe it's those magnetic strips on the backs of credit cards that are pulling our wallets and purses to the malls and we just go along for the ride. Or, it could be that during the holiday season everyone has adopted a tradition of depleting the checking account before moving on to baking cookies and decorating. Whatever the cause, the malls are filled with shoppers and it's every man, woman and child for him- or herself.