I grew up — to the extent I grew up at all — in West Los Angeles, a few blocks west of the sprawling Twentieth-Century Fox studio. In their golden era, that lot covered an awful lot of real estate but in the early sixties, the movie biz was so screwy and unpredictable, that Fox sold off 180 acres to developers. The result was an also-sprawling area called Century City that was eventually filled with — among other landmarks — office buildings, a huge hotel, a huge entertainment center, a Playboy Club and a big, fancy mostly-outdoor mall. The office buildings and the mall are still there.
They started building it around 1963 and my father decided that all those towering office buildings were part of a deliberate plot to ruin our TV reception. On some channels, we got so much of a double image that whenever the Smothers Brothers appeared, there were four of them.
In spite of that, I came to like Century City in all its incarnations. Since then, they've always seemed to be tearing a building down, putting one up and remodeling all the ones that remain. The mall is still mostly outdoors but it's so oddly-designed now that it reminds me of one of those "escape rooms" that are like a puzzle to find your way out…or in this case, to an escalator down to anywhere near where you left your car.
Alison Martino, who covers the changing face of Los Angeles, assembled a great collection of photos of Century City in past years. It was fun to scroll through it and see so many places where I used to go.