Mall Project May Draw Traffic Knots Tighter at Tangled Intersection

Motorists may soon run into more confusion at the San Fernando Valley’s most topsy-turvy intersection.

A major remodeling project started Tuesday at a Woodland Hills shopping center where Mulholland Drive, Avenue San Luis, Valley Circle Boulevard, Calabasas Road and the Ventura Freeway meet.

The $2.5-million refurbishing of the El Camino Shopping Center means that construction work will be simultaneously under way on all four sides of the heavily used intersection during the next several months.

On the southwest corner, work began last year on a $40-million expansion of the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital.

On the northern sides of the intersection, work started this year on an $18.3-million Ventura Freeway repair and widening project. The freeway project’s headquarters and equipment yard are on the northwest corner.

The 20-year-old shopping center covers 13 acres on the intersection’s southeast corner.

New Ownership

Center manager Jan Humble said the remodeling was commissioned by a San Francisco firm that purchased the retail complex from a Van Nuys-based commercial investment company.

BRE Properties, which already owned the land beneath the center, is paying $10 million for the buildings, Humble said.

“It was time for the shopping center to get in sync with changes that are occurring in this area,� Humble said.

Part of the project may involve demolition of the 18-year-old Valley Circle Cinema, a defunct 900-seat movie theater at the edge of the shopping center. Two years ago, the tile-topped brick theater was targeted for use as a music hall for Broadway-style stage productions.

The cinema was renamed the Excalibur Theatre by promoters who raised and spent almost $300,000 in an ill-fated attempt to remodel the movie house and form a production company.

About 120 investors were left empty-handed by the Excalibur venture. The Los Angeles city attorney’s office investigated the case but decided earlier this year not to prosecute the producers.

Humble said the Excalibur venture has soured any chance of using the Valley Circle Cinema for theatrical purposes.

He said the shopping center’s owners will decide early next year whether to demolish it and build a combination restaurant and retail building on the site or save it and turn it into a furniture or appliance store.

The shopping center’s 907-space parking lot also will be refurbished as part of the project, which will include construction of a new “southwestern-look� facade, officials said.

The work will be done in phases so that no stores will have to close and there will be minimum disruption to traffic, Humble said.

Disruption and confusion are daily occurrences at the intersection, however.

The boundary between Los Angeles and Los Angeles County is nearby, which accounts for the mixture of street names. Valley Circle becomes Mulholland and Calabasas becomes Avenue San Luis at the intersection.

As part of the freeway-widening project, traffic engineers plan to detour freeway commuter traffic through and around the intersection.

There will be temporary closures of freeway on- and off-ramps at the intersection and freeway travelers will be routed across the freeway’s center divider when the major phase of the reconstruction work begins next to the intersection, state Department of Transportation officials said.