Sherman Oaks Galleria

We visited this iconic shopping mall, one of the birthplaces of “Valley” culture and used in several films, several months before it was severely damaged by the Northridge earthquake and it’s eventual decline.

Note This article is part of our USA Retrospective series, featuring images captured on an early generation Kodak DC220 digital camera with 1280x1024 resolution. The images have post processed to artificially increase sharpness. Please forgive us if they do not meet your expectations of photographic quality.

According to Wikipedia:

Sherman Oaks Galleria is a shopping 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 teenage mall culture which formed around it and nearby malls formed the basis of the 1982 satirical song “Valley Girl” by Frank Zappa and daughter Moon Zappa, which mentions the Galleria by name (though misattributes its location as Encino, which it abuts). The mall has also been a shooting location for many films, most notably the seminal 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High as well as the 1983 film Valley Girl, both of which focused on the early 1980s San Fernando Valley youth culture.

We visited it during its prime as a shopping mall, months before it was severely damaged by the Northridge earthquake. After that, despite being reopened 11 days after the earthquake, it went into a steady decline and eventually closed in 1999 and underwent major renovation into an open air centre that is very different in architecture and usage compared to the original mall that opened in 1980.

The photos presented here are therefore of historical value rather than photographic quality. Lately, retail shopping in the USA have been in decline and many shopping malls have closed down or repurposed, so in a sense these photographs give us a glimpse into what Peak Retail would have been like.