Valley Commentary : Longing for the Bullock’s Building : I never analyzed exactly how all those flat planes came together; I don’t think there was a symmetry to it. That’s why it always was a surprise to look at it. And yet it held its place firmly, like a bullock, overlooking the stores.

I miss Bullock’s.

Well, I don’t exactly miss Bullock’s. I miss the Bullock’s building. Oh, I bought a few things at the Northridge store over the years, as did my wife; I think I’ll always remember the light green leisure suit I bought there in the ‘70s, which I loved (did I really wear that to teach classes at CSUN?).

What I really miss though, is the structure, the architecture, which was taken away from us so rudely by the earthquake. There was something about that building that caught my eye every time I drove by on Tampa Avenue, whether or not I had any business at the Fashion Center. Many, many times I looked at it in its off-kilter stalwartness, squatting amiably to anchor one end of the mall.

What possessed a department store designer to come up with such a profile? My fancy always said it was the name of the store that inspired the design. Bullock’s. The sound of it, the animal imagery of it. Heavy, low, sturdy, strong. Rounded in its squareness with all those facets meeting one another at odd, unpredictable angles.

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I never analyzed exactly how all those flat planes came together; I don’t think there was a symmetry to it. That’s why it always was a surprise to look at it. And yet it held its place firmly, like a bullock, overlooking the remainder of the stores.

I ask myself why I miss it more than a building I actually used more frequently and that has been totally gone now for weeks: the Kaiser Permanente pharmacy and clinic at Balboa and Devonshire. My wife and I always had our prescriptions filled there, utilized the services of optometry there fairly often. It was astonishing to see what the quake did to that building. The sides of it completely slid off from the central structure, leaving it looking as though bombs had hit it.

To find it a few weeks after the quake gone , entirely demolished with nothing left, not even debris--just a vacant lot--was also breathtaking, a building that had been there so many years, seen so many uses.

But miss it? Not at all. Yes, we’d have to travel to Panorama City or Woodland Hills now for prescriptions--we’d miss the convenience. But the building? It had nothing to distinguish it.

It would certainly be another matter too if the Oviatt Library on our Cal State Northridge campus should, God forbid, turn out to need total replacement. It was the architectural centerpiece of the university, warm, lofty, ambitious . It would be more than missed, it would be as though a dagger had been sent to the heart of the institution. No one will feel the campus is fully itself until the Oviatt is ready to open its doors again.

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Reports now say Bullock’s will take the longest of the Northridge Fashion Center stores to reopen, and it must be completely rebuilt. Its completion is not expected until the summer of 1995. That doesn’t sound unreasonable considering the devastation.

I wonder if those geometrically shaped facets coming together at odd angles weren’t especially vulnerable to the thrusts and shifts of the earth’s movements, each surge putting the junctures into unbearable stress upon one another. Wouldn’t it be the way--the building’s especial satisfactions for the eye also proving to be its weakest links in resisting an earthly onslaught? What will the newly designed store look like? I don’t know. I could hope for the old look in some ingeniously reinforced manner. But I suppose not.

Meanwhile, among the unsung losses from the Northridge quake exist such nonquantifiable and nonfleshly, yet human, matters as a lost building upon a landscape. Commercial ventures go on within it to serve a public’s needs. But services to the heart and spirit, no less needed, were etched upon its face.