David Udoff fondly remembers how his mother would drive him and his brother to Valley Plaza in her avocado Dodge Dart.

The family would shop at the once-vibrant and bustling selection of retail businesses. They would visit the Sears, a bakery and the animatronic fortune-telling machine in front of the drugstore. Then they would lunch on Salisbury steak and Jell-O platters at Schaber’s Cafeteria.

“The good old Valley days,” the 67-year-old former North Hollywood and Toluca Lake resident said of his family outings in the 1960s.

Now, swaths of the historic San Fernando Valley mall are being demolished after years of complaints from neighbors that the collection of vacant buildings and parking lots had fallen into disrepair.

The Valley Plaza, which opened in 1951, was among the first and largest open-air shopping malls on the West Coast and a major center of commerce.

In its heyday, the sprawling complex of suburban buildings and modernist high-rises drew crowds and even a visit from John F. Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign.

The demolition, which began this week, came after a panel of Los Angeles city commissioners appointed by Mayor Karen Bass voted in August to declare much of the site a public nuisance.

The vote greenlighted the destruction of six buildings in the plaza. Some structures deemed historic, including the iconic 12-story, 165-foot-tall tower — among the first skyscrapers built in L.A. — will be spared.

“It’s crazy that it’s happening. It has been an eyesore in the Valley for so long,” said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. “We’re excited we are going to have something built there that will be usable.”

The site had drawn squatters, and nearby homeowners voiced concerns about crime and potential fires.

Waldman, who lives nearby, said watching the mall’s deterioration “has been sad.”

He said he expects the property will be turned into a mixed-use commercial and residential space, as was done in the development of NoHo West, which repurposed the site of the former Laurel Plaza mall and a Macy’s department store.

But Waldman warned it could be an uphill battle.

“It’s hard to build in L.A. It is expensive, and the city makes it difficult,” Waldman said. “I hope someone’s going to take a chance. It’s an opportunity to help the community while also making a profit.”

The influential regional shopping center was an early example of how building entrances were reoriented to face large rear parking lots instead of streets and sidewalks, emphasizing vehicle access from newly built freeways, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy.

“This was our stomping ground,” Jack McGrath, a former president of the Studio City Chamber of Commerce, said in a video series on Valley Plaza published by the news outlet Patch in 2013.

McGrath, in the video, described how thousands of people crowded into the mall’s sprawling parking lot to see Kennedy speak.

“This man was absolutely handsome, and more importantly, he had the best-looking tan I’ve ever seen on a man or a politician,” McGrath said. “The women were goofy, looking at this fellow.”

The shopping center’s decline began with the rise of big-box retail, as well as competition from other newer malls in Burbank and Sherman Oaks. Economic strife in the 1990s and damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake also dealt blows, pushing some businesses to permanently close.

In 2000, about 30% of the mall’s storefronts were vacant, and in recent years film and television producers have used the site as a grimy, boarded-up backdrop — rather than an iconic institution once showcased in the music video for Randy Newman’s 1983 anthem, “I Love L.A.”

On Thursday, piles of dirt, concrete shards and other debris surrounded the property, with a bulldozer watching over.

Fred Gaines, an attorney for Charles Co., the real estate and development firm that owns the property, and which engaged the demolition contractor, said there was not yet a specific redevelopment plan for the site. He said future development would depend on how the city handles homelessness encampments in the area.

“We certainly will look to the city to fix this problem in the neighborhood and allow this to be a viable development site,” Gaines said.

Charles Co. has had its own problems in recent years, as one of the firm’s owners became embroiled in a major L.A. corruption case. Co-owner Arman Gabaee was sentenced in 2022 to four years in federal prison after making payments to a county official in return for leases and nonpublic information.

Udoff, the former Valley resident who currently lives in South Florida, said he tried to move back to L.A. a few years ago, but housing was too expensive. As prices rise in the Miami-area suburb where he lives, he is looking to resettle in a more affordable area in California or Oregon.

In August, he wrote a letter to Bass’ office urging the city to help steer development of the property into a cultural center or subsidized affordable housing.

“How things change,” Udoff said. “They should make it into something really nice.”

Times staff photographer Eric Thayer contributed to this report.

If you blinked you may have missed this, but the stock of Beyond Meat, the purveyor of meatless burger patties, had a spectacular run a few days ago.

The stock had surged by more than 1,400% in the four days through Oct. 22, when shares hit an intraday peak of $7.69, up from a low of 50 cents on Oct. 16.

Given that this El Segundo-based company has never had a profitable year since its 2019 initial public stock offering, the run-up was apparently triggered by the online touting of the stock by a trader named Demitri Semenikhin, and the shares have since settled back to $1.65 (in intraday trading Thursday), the action has market observers asking if “meme stocks” are back.

The answer is no — because they’ve never gone away.

The appetite of small retail investors for what beckon as big scores in unloved stocks has remained strong since the meme stock trade attracted attention during the pandemic year 2021.

The “meme” sobriquet points to the most notable factor driving the swift run-up and rapid downfall of these stocks: They feed on momentum generated by internet touts, not sober assessments of business prospects and financial results. Indeed, the quintessential meme stock has little in the way of profits to catch the eye of serious investors.

Beyond Meat is just the latest company to enjoy sudden meme-dom, followed by an equally sudden dose of reality. In Beyond’s case, the surge came in the wake of its Oct. 13 announcement of the results of a debt swap deal that will massively dilute the stake of shareholders. Short sellers piled into the stock, setting up the momentary rebound typical of meme stocks.

Over the last few months, meme stock traders have piled into, and then out of, shares in Krispy Kreme, GoPro, Kohl’s and other companies that are disdained as underperformers by the Wall Street establishment, only to be taken up by an internet-fueled army of small investors. But those investors seldom have the resources to survive the almost inevitable snapback.

For those who may not recall the meme stock frenzy of 2020-21, here’s a trip down memory lane.

The emblematic meme stock of 2021 was GameStop, a spavined mall-based video game retailer that was struggling through the transformation of its franchise from brick-and-mortar stores to online commerce. The company had lost a combined $1.36 billion from 2018 through 2020, and its future looked bleak.

Then, as if out of nowhere, the stock got noticed by online investment promoters, who urged followers to buy GameStop shares to hurt Wall Street short sellers, who were betting that the stock would keep falling.

The shares climbed relentlessly through January 2021, soaring from a low of $12.16 in mid-December to an intraday high of about $483 on Jan. 28. It closed that day at $193.60, delivering a prompt lesson that investing in stocks based on claims touted online is a mug’s game.

All this action was the product of several confluent factors. One was the pandemic and its attendant lockdowns, which prompted people deprived of social contacts and customary entertainment pursuits to fill their empty hours day-trading stocks. Internet influencers goaded their followers into trading in concert with the goal of putting it to the Man — i.e., rich Wall Street hedge fund managers who were shorting unloved stocks and deserved to be taken down a peg.

GameStop stock wasn’t the first issue to get memed. In 2020, investors piled into Hertz, even though it had been forced to seek bankruptcy protection after the COVID-19 outbreak cratered the rental car market,. Bloomberg even declared 2020 “the year of the meme stock.” (Hertz abandoned a plan to sell new shares into the frenzy after regulators raised questions about it.)

But it was GameStop that made meme stock trading into, well, a meme. GameStop displayed all the elements that drove the meme frenzy, the Securities and Exchange Commission ultimately reported: “(1) large price moves, (2) large volume changes, (3) large short interest, (4) frequent Reddit mentions, and (4) significant coverage in the mainstream media.”

A key element of the meme market was an influx of young individual investors enthralled by get-rich-quick trading come-ons. Robinhood, an online brokerage that cut commissions to zero and enticed new customers with an app that made stock trading resemble playing a video game, disclosed that “its average customer is 31 years old and has a median account balance of $240,” the SEC reported.

One might have expected that as these factors ebbed, the meme stock frenzy would evaporate. It did, somewhat, but not nearly as much as Wall Street pros expected. Indeed, as GameStop rose, the buyers gleefully declared victory over the shorts, fueling the search for more meme-able stocks. Some investors made the theater operator AMC Entertainment a meme stock. Some joined new crazes, such as cryptocurrencies, nonfungible tokens and other assets more or less immune from the traditional investment fundamentals such as revenues and profits and business plans.

Nothing was especially new about individual stocks having a moment in the sun before falling back into obscurity, but the frenzy of early 2021 turned meme stocks into an assiduously followed investment category all its own. Financial pages and tout sheets ran wrap-ups of meme action every year. GameStop and AMC were perennial members of this club, supplemented by newcomers.

In 2022, the star was the bankruptcy-bound retailer Bed Bath & Beyond, which staged a nine-day rally that summer culminated in a one-day 40% surge Aug. 8 on extraordinary volume of 120.5 million shares. (Its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing finally arrived in April 2023.)

To define the category, market analysts generally rely on the factors mentioned by the SEC in its reference to GameStop. But not all meme stocks were similarly obscure before having their day. One that has recently landed on meme stock rosters is Tesla: “Wildly overvalued compared to rival automakers, its shareholders are betting that they can sell their holdings to a greater fool in the near future,” economist J. Bradford Delong of UC Berkeley wrote in May 2024.

Earlier this year, Yale professor Jeff Sonnenfeld polled the attendees of his most recent CEO conference on the question: “Compared to NVIDIA’s 40x P/E forward multiple and Apple’s 30x multiple, has Tesla at 160x become the biggest meme stock in modern financial market history?”

Of the 100 participants, 83 voted “yes.”

Meme investors have acquired new tools to follow and invest in meme targets. Bloomberg and UBS have developed meme stock indexes, and in October a meme stock exchange-traded fund — a mutual fund that trades like a stock — was launched by the investment house Roundhill.

One can hardly fault Roundhill’s warning of the risks of meme investing: “Meme Stocks are characterized by high trading volumes and significant price volatility, often driven by social media trends and investor interest,” it advises potential investors. “Meme Stocks often trade untethered from … fundamentals, driven instead by speculative fervor and viral momentum.”

“Volatility” is the mot juste for this ETF: Despite notching a 17% gain over four days shortly after its introduction, MEME is currently down more than 23% from its Oct. 14 peak.

Meme-stock buying is often triggered or sustained by a nugget of bull-market sentiment. The Beyond Meat narrative included its Oct. 21 announcement of a deal with Walmart that will place its products in more than 2,000 stores. But whether that’s enough to overcome the company’s evident financial headwinds remains questionable.

For Opendoor Technologies, a money-losing residential real estate broker that quintupled in price during a few weeks this summer and nearly doubled in price on a single trading day in September, the story was that lower interest rates would spur more housing transactions.

Opendoor Chairman Keith Rabois bristled at a CNBC anchor’s description of the company as a meme stock during an interview in September, arguing that investors have begun to appreciate its “potential upside.” Beyond Meat didn’t respond to my request for comment on its share price. (Opendoor was the Roundhill ETF’s largest holding when the ETF was launched; more recently, the largest holding has been Beyond Meat.)

The economic fundamentals underlying the overall stock market don’t seem to have much to do with meme stock rallies. The original craze developed when interest rates were close to zero, making stocks look attractive compared with fixed income investments; the current craze has unfolded during a period of high interest rates and economic uncertainty — though that hasn’t stopped the major stock indexes from notching record highs lately.

Small investors would be well advised to keep in mind that the meme market could be the very definition of a risky place to trade. Meme investors tend to crowd into a stock after it has already begun its rapid march upward — and sometimes when that trend is about to reverse.

GameStop hasn’t fallen back to its pre-frenzy price in the low double digits, but with its current price below $23, investors who bought at its January 2021 peak have lost about 80% of their money. (The company staged a 4-to-1 stock split in July 2022, so one must multiply its current price by four to replicate its 2021 prices.)

The smart money says that the meme trade is with us to stay. There’s just too much uninformed, misinformed and self-interested commentary washing about in the investment sphere, too easily accessed by unwary and novice investors. Most of the advice being pushed on investors today isn’t much good, and what can be gleaned from promoters on Reddit even worse. The term “buyer beware” has never been so important.

Universal Music Group said Wednesday it has reached licensing agreements with artificial intelligence music startup Udio, settling a lawsuit that had accused Udio of using copyrighted music to train its AI.

Millions of users create music using Udio’s AI, which can compose original songs — including voices and instruments — from text prompts.

Udio has agreed with UMG to launch a new platform next year that is only trained on “authorized and licensed music,” and will let users customize, stream and share music.

“These new agreements with Udio demonstrate our commitment to do what’s right by our artists and songwriters, whether that means embracing new technologies, developing new business models, diversifying revenue streams or beyond,” Lucian Grainge, UMG’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

Udio declined to disclose the financial terms of the settlement and licensing agreements. UMG did not immediately return a request for comment on the terms.

Artificial intelligence has brought new opportunities as well as challenges to the entertainment industry, as AI startups have been training their models on information on the internet, which entertainment companies say infringes on their copyrighted work.

In the music industry, music businesses have accused New York City-based Udio and other AI music startups of training on copyrighted music to generate new songs that are based on popular hits without compensation or permission.

UMG, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and other music businesses sued Udio last year. In the lawsuit, Udio was accused of using hits like The Temptations’ “My Girl,” to create a similar melody called “Sunshine Melody.” UMG owns the copyright to “My Girl.”

“A comparison of one section of the Udio-generated file and ‘My Girl’ reflects a number of similarities, including a very similar melody, the same chords, and very similar backing vocals,” according to the lawsuit. “These similarities are further reflected in the side-by-side transcriptions of the musical scores for the Udio file and the original recording.”

Udio said on its website at the time that it stands by its technology and that its AI model learns from examples, similar to how students listen to music and study scores.

“The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one,” Udio had said in a statement. “We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.”

On Wednesday, Udio’s CEO and co-founder, Andrew Sanchez, said he was thrilled at the opportunity to work with UMG “to redefine how AI empowers artists and fans.”

The collaboration is the first music licensing agreement that Udio has reached with a major music label.

“This moment brings to life everything we’ve been building toward — uniting AI and the music industry in a way that truly champions artists,” Sanchez said in a statement. “Together, we’re building the technological and business landscape that will fundamentally expand what’s possible in music creation and engagement.”

Udio said that artists can opt in to the new platform and will be compensated, but declined to go into the specifics or the artists involved.

Udio, launched in 2024, was co-founded by former Google DeepMind employees. Udio’s backers include music artist will.i.am, Instagram co-founder and Anthropic’s chief product officer Mike Krieger and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Udio has had 128,000 app downloads in Apple’s App Store since it launched, according to estimates from New York-based mobile analytics firm Appfigures.

On Thursday, UMG also announced a partnership with London-based Stability AI to develop music creation tools powered by AI for artists, producers and songwriters.