Beverly Center

Beverly Center

View from the intersection of La Cienega Blvd. and 3rd St.
Location	Los Angeles, California
Opening date	March 1982
Developer	A. Alfred Taubman, Sheldon Gordon & E. Phillip Lyon
Management	Taubman Centers
Owner	Taubman Centers
No. of stores and services	100+
No. of anchor tenants	2
Total retail floor area	883,000 sq ft (82,000 m2)
No. of floors	8
Website	Beverlycenter.com

^[1]

Beverly Center is a shopping mall in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is a monolithic eight-story structure located at the edge of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, California, between La Cienega and San Vicente boulevards. Anchor tenants include Bloomingdale's and Macy's. Along with the retail and designers' boutiques, Beverly Center offers a guest service desk, valet parking, and taxi services. The mall's Rooftop Terrace offers sweeping views of the Hollywood Hills, Downtown Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Westside.

The Center's externally visible escalators previously resembled similar escalators at the Centre Georges Pompidou but underwent renovation in 2007 and now have a different appearance which affords visitors an expanded view of the surrounding area and the hills to the north.

Retail tenants

The mall contains shops for brands including Banana Republic, Victoria's Secret, Forever 21, Dolce & Gabbana,^[2] Louis Vuitton, Diesel, Gucci, Prada, Ferrari Store,^[3] Burberry, Fendi,^[4] Victorinox, and Hugo Boss.

History

Beverly Center at the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Beverly Boulevard

The Beverly Center was originally opened in 1982 by developers A. Alfred Taubman, Sheldon Gordon & E. Phillip Lyon. (The site's former occupant was a small amusement park known as Beverly Park and Kiddyland, featuring a ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and mini roller-coaster, and a pony ride known as Ponyland.) The northeast corner of the mall, at the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards, happens to be the center of the studio zone.

The mall's unusual shape and lack of street frontage along San Vicente Boulevard is due to its location on top of the Salt Lake Oil Field. The western portion of the mall property contains a cluster of oil wells, all operated by Freeport-McMoRan (formally Plains Exploration & Production), in a drilling enclosure that is active to this date.^[5][6]

The opening of the mall featured the debut of a multiplex movie theater initially boasting 14 screens, at that time the largest number of movie screens in any US multiplex.^[7] The multiplex was launched on July 16, 1982, with the West Coast premiere of Miramax's The Secret Policeman's Other Ball which played on three of its fourteen screens. Even though the movie theater was located in Los Angeles, the opening was newsworthy enough to warrant a full article in The New York Times.^[8] In the late 1980s, three smaller screens were removed on the main floor, so two larger auditoriums could be built on the roof. The theatre closed on June 3, 2010.

The mall contained the USA's first Hard Rock Cafe, the third installment of the restaurant chain, following those in London and Toronto. The Beverly Center was originally anchored by Bullock's and The Broadway department stores, and in 1993 Bullock's opened a separate Bullock's Men's store, before both stores were renamed Macy's in 1996. The Broadway closed its location in 1996 when it was absorbed into Macy's and its former store was reopened as a Bloomingdale's in 1997.

In 2004, Taubman Centers, the public Real Estate Investment Trust and successor to A. Alfred Taubman's shopping center interests, purchased its partners minority investments stake in the property.

Beverly Center and West Hollywood Hills

The Beverly Center underwent a renovation from 2006 to 2008 that had stores complaining about a decline of foot traffic. Still Calvin Klein opened a new store in the mall in early 2008.^[9]

In February 2016 the California Pizza Kitchen in the Beverly Center closed, leaving the mall with only two restaurants.^[10] Starting in March 2016 the Center underwent a major renovation that aimed to add a food court, skylights and more windows. Renovation costs were given as US$500 million.^[11]

^[12]The new Bev Center will also have a "perforated steel facade" on the outside of the building and an upgraded parking structure, which will include technology to tell drivers where spots are and also help them remember where they've parked.The new Beverly Center will also lean hard on food, attempting to lure "increasingly fickle consumers" with nine fancy new eateries, and a new food hall on its top-level terrace.

In popular culture

• A chapter in the 1985 Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero is set in The Beverly Center.
• The Beverly Center was the setting of the 1991 film Scenes from a Mall starring Bette Midler and Woody Allen.
• The Beverly Center played a part of the plot near the end of the 1997 disaster thriller Volcano starring Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche. A triage and childcare center for neighboring Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was set up in the mall's Hard Rock Cafe. This was evacuated when a geyser of lava erupted out of San Vicente Boulevard, threatening the structure and its occupants.
• The Beverly Center was shown briefly in the 1997 film "Selena", where Selena (played by then up-and-coming actress Jennifer Lopez) and her friend went shopping at an upscale store in the mall before Selena attended the Grammy Awards.
• On May 18, 2009, rap artist Dolla was fatally shot at the Beverly Center.
• In the film Eraserhead, industrial wasteland scenes were shot at the present location of the Beverly Center. Prior to its current state of development, the site was an oil field.^[13]

See also

• Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles City Council member (1974–94) who voted in favor of building the Beverly Center
• Studio zone—The Beverly Center is located at the intersection that marks the center of this zone, considered "local" by Los Angeles–area entertainment industry labor unions.
• List of largest shopping malls in the United States

References

External links

• Official Beverly Center Web site
• Taubman Company (owner)
• fact sheet

Coordinates: 34°04′30″N 118°22′37″W / 34.075°N 118.377°W / 34.075; -118.377