Panorama Mall is a mall in

Panorama City Panorama City is a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles, California, in the San Fernando Valley. It has a generally young age range as well as the highest population density in the Valley. More than half of the neighborhood's population was b ...

San Fernando Valley The San Fernando Valley, known locally as the Valley, is an urbanized valley in Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County, California. Situated to the north of the Los Angeles Basin, it comprises a large portion of Los Angeles, the Municipal corpo ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. It is an enclosed mall anchored by only one large discount store,

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...

. The mall originally opened as the open-air Broadway–Valley shopping center in 1955. Similar to what happened with nearby

Valley Plaza Valley Plaza was a shopping center in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, one of the first in the San Fernando Valley, opened in 1951. In the mid-1950s it was reported to be the largest shopping center on the West Coast of the United States and the ...

, after opening additional department stores and retail strips opened on the periphery of the Broadway center. During the 1960s the merchants' association of the various owners marketed its retail properties collectively as the Panorama City Shopping Center. In 1964 it claimed to be the first center with four major department stores. Panorama Mall was renovated and enclosed in 1980.

History

The Broadway–Valley shopping center, as it was then known, opened on October 10, 1955, as a single strip of stores along Van Nuys Blvd. north of Roscoe Blvd, with of retail space adjacent to and sharing a parking lot with a Broadway department store designed by architect

Welton Becket Welton David Becket (August 8, 1902 – January 16, 1969) was an American modern architect who designed many buildings in Los Angeles, California. Biography Becket was born in Seattle, Washington and graduated from the University of Washingt ...

Silverwoods Silverwoods, originally promoted as F. B. Silverwood, after its founder, was a men's clothing store chain founded in Los Angeles in 1894 by Francis Bernard (F.B. "Daddy") Silverwood, a Canadian-American originally from near Lindsay, Ontario. He was ...

Mandel's Mandel's (a.k.a. Mandel's Shoe Stores and Mandel's Fascinating Slippers) was a chain of shoe stores in the Southwestern United States for many decades of the 20th century. For a time it advertised its wares as "Mandel's Fascinating Slippers". Mauri ...

Kinney Shoes The G.R. Kinney Company was an American manufacturer and retailer of shoes from 1894 until September 16, 1998. It was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 1923, with the symbol KNN. The shoe concern was started by George Romanta Kinney ...

Lerner's New York & Company, Inc. (NY&C) is an e-commerce workwear retailer for women. New York & Company apparel and accessories are sold exclusively through their digital store. From 1918 to 1992, the company was known as Lerner Shops. Its name was then ...

and Woolworth were the other stores in the complex. The anchor department stores opened as follows: *

The Broadway The Broadway was a mid-level department store chain headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 1896 by English-born Arthur Letts Sr., and named after what was once the city's main shopping street, the Broadway became a dominant reta ...

, opened October 10, 1955, , 3 stories, currently Walmart *

Montgomery Ward Montgomery Ward is the name of two successive U.S. retail corporations. The original Montgomery Ward & Co. was a mail-order business and later a department store chain that operated between 1872 and 2001; its common nickname was "Monkey Wards". ...

, opened September 13, 1961, , 2 stories, closed in 2001, building demolished in November 2024 * J. W. Robinson's, opened on June 27, 1961"Panorama City Store Opened by Robinson's", ''Los Angeles Times'', June 28, 1961
/ref> *

Ohrbach's Ohrbach's was a moderate-priced department store with a merchandising focus primarily on clothing and accessories. From its modest start in 1923 until the chain's demise in 1987, Ohrbach's expanded dramatically after World War II, and opened nu ...

, opened October 7, 1964, , 2 stories, 7.5-acre site, cost $5 million to build, currently the Valley

Indoor Swap Meet An indoor swap meet in the United States, especially Southern California and Nevada, is a type of bazaar, a permanent, indoor shopping center open during normal retail hours, with fixed booths or storefronts for the vendors. Indoor swap meets hous ...

. * Curacao opened in 1995 closed in February 2025. A 1964 advertisement promoted 86 stores collectively as the "Panorama City Shopping Center" – not just the Broadway and Silverwoods complex. These included three full-line freestanding department stores within one block of The Broadway.Ohrbach's advertisement in Valley News, 1964
/ref> By the 1970s, business had declined compared to other regional malls that had opened in the Valley, such as the

Sherman Oaks Galleria Sherman Oaks Galleria is an open-air shopping mall and business center located in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States, at the corner of Ventura and Sepulveda Boulevards in the San Fernando Valley. The teenag ...

Sherman Oaks Fashion Square Sherman most commonly refers to: *Sherman (name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or surname ** William Tecumseh Sherman (1820–1891), American Civil War General *M4 Sherman, a World War II American tank S ...

, and

Northridge Fashion Center Northridge Fashion Center is a large shopping mall located in Northridge, Los Angeles, California. It opened in 1971. It was severely damaged during the Northridge earthquake in 1994, but renovated extensively in 1995, 1998, and 2003. The mall f ...

. In 1979, the

Santa Monica Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United Sta ...

-based Macerich Co. real estate development firm and the Connecticut General Mortgage and Realty Investments Co. bought the mall for $5.8 million, enclosed and renovated it. The $7 million in improvements included a refresh to the look of the mall, new construction including a second strip of shops, plus a roof over the mall walkway. The retail sales area increased to and the mall was physically connected to the adjacent Broadway store. A large stainless sculpture by artist Sebastian Trovato was added, portraying intertwining rings. In 1986, the Panorama Mall ranked 40th out of the 61 regional shopping malls in Los Angeles and Orange Counties with more than $68 million in annual sales. Business was improving, according to the manager of the Broadway, but the Los Angeles Times characterized retail in the area as "awaiting revival". In the late 1990s, Walmart opened in the building vacated by the Broadway after that chain's merger into

Federated Department Stores Macy's, Inc. (previously Federated Department Stores, Inc.) is an American holding company of department stores. Upon its establishment in 1929, Federated held ownership of the regional department store chains Abraham & Straus, Lazarus (departm ...

and then

Macy's Macy's is an American department store chain founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. The first store was located in Manhattan on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, south of the present-day flagship store at Herald Square on West 34 ...

, which was initially what it was supposed to become. The owners renovated the mall again for $1 million in 2005. As of 2019, the former Montgomery Ward store across from the mall is slated to become a residential and retail mixed-use development.

References

{{coord, 34.223516, -118.4505892, display=title Shopping malls in the San Fernando Valley Panorama City, Los Angeles Welton Becket buildings