Monthly Archives: November 2018

Valley Plaza Tower

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The Valley Plaza Tower, when built in 1960, was the tallest building in the San Fernando Valley.  The Los Angeles Federal Savings and Loan was the first bank tenant. In 1976 a patriotic mural was painted on the west face; but the current mural, faded to illegibility, features LA City Hall and, for some reason, a mountain-scape that looks like Yosemite.
Acres and acres of ground-level parking lots for freeway-friendly convenience were a novel feature of the design of Valley Plaza; but to draw people off the freeway, developer Bob Symonds hired modernist architects Douglas Honnold and John Rex to design a 165-foot tower that he hoped could be seen for ten miles in any direction. The lot size is only 35 feet wide, so the building seems especially gracile for a skyscraper.

Laurel Plaza redivivus, as NoHo West

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Built in 1955 as the regional headquarters for for The May Company, the store was the anchor for a large shopping center, located where the parking lots are (above). The 1994 Northridge quake destroyed the small retail spaces; the anchor building was the only part of the Laurel Plaza shopping center that survived. It was turned into a Macy’s in 2006, and closed for good in 2016.
Laurel Plaza sits across the street from Valley Plaza, and is adjacent to the the 170 (that is, the Hollywood Freeway). It is being redeveloped into “NoHo West” (terrible name; why not WeHo North?), a massive mixed-use apartment/retail complex. Tragically, there is practically no public transportation available anywhere nearby — only a single once-an-hour bus line, the terribly unreliable 230.
When NoHoWest is completed it will  block out quite a bit of our mountain view; let’s hope that the architects at least found a way to give their future tenants a piece of this gorgeous sky-drop.