1951. America’s first suburban, freeway-accessible shopping plaza, built to accommodate, among other communities, Bob Symonds’s Valley Village, just down Laurel Canyon Blvd. This historic, low-profile, affordable retail space should be preserved. The parking lots should be made permeable and re-landscaped for customer-friendly green mixed-retail open park space (food trucks; street vendors; a weekly farmers’ market). With routine earthquake retro-fitting and a commitment from Metro for better service to the Laurel Canyon corridor, there’s no reason in the world (other than the usual greedy ones) why Valley Plaza couldn’t, within a year, become once again the Valley’s chic-est retail center.  All they have to do is nothing. The architecture is fabulous. The dowdy 1980’s re-fit didn’t help, and may have hurt the mall’s chances, which were doomed by the Earthquake. (The Valley Plaza signs, for instance, aren’t nearly as snazzy as the originals, nor is the current Tower mural as cool as the Bicentennial one.)