On the Gladstone Avenue side of Sylmar Plaza, two addresses fourteen numbers apart now belong to food businesses that do their slowest work on site. At 13217 Gladstone, Amapola Market lists a Sylmar store whose company makes its masa with a traditional nixtamal process. At 13231 Gladstone, El Pollo Peru takes pickup orders for pollo a la brasa that the restaurant says marinates in more than 20 ingredients for over 24 hours.
Sylmar Plaza sits at Hubbard Street and Gladstone Avenue, next to the 210. With these two tenants, the corner now sells masa and chicken that take hours of preparation before they reach the counter. Both businesses also came here from somewhere else.
The corner as it stood
The center covers 13205 to 13243 Gladstone Avenue. Its leasing materials from this year name DD Discounts, Fitness 19, Dollar Tree and Denny's among its tenants and count 537 shared parking spaces. The same materials put traffic at Gladstone and Hubbard at roughly 31,032 cars a day. They also list Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles Mission College and El Cariso Golf Course among its neighbors.
The Sylmar Neighborhood Council announced a neighborhood grocery with a deli and bakery for 13217 Gladstone back in March 2023. The address has been marked for a full-service food store for more than three years. The company now listing it traces its roots to 1961.
A 1961 deli, now one of four stores
Amapola Market's own history starts in 1961, when Don Francisco Galvan and his son Carlos opened a small deli. Ownership passed from the Galvan family to the Pozos family in 2021, and the company still calls itself family-owned.
The company's locations page lists four stores: Los Angeles, Downey, Paramount and Sylmar. The Sylmar listing gives 13217 Gladstone Avenue. The Downey store, for comparison, is at 7420 Florence Avenue.
In August, What Now Los Angeles reported that CEO Rolando Pozos expected a September grand opening for a space of roughly 12,000 square feet.
Amapola says each of its stores combines five operations:
- A tortilla factory
- A full-service meat market
- A bakery
- A service deli
- A specialty grocery
Masa is the main draw. The company advertises "over 60 years of offering the best masa in California," made from non-GMO corn through the nixtamal process and sold ready to cook, in savory and sweet versions.
The timing also suits the season. Fresh masa is the base of tamales, and Amapola sells it ready to cook at a Sylmar address in the weeks before the December holidays.
A Pacoima favorite, rebuilt on Gladstone
El Pollo Peru took a less planned route. Its original restaurant at 13273 Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima closed after smoke damage from a fire in February, according to What Now Los Angeles. In August the neighborhood council shared that report. It said the restaurant would reopen at 13231 Gladstone and placed the new space in Sylmar Plaza Shopping Center, at the corner of Hubbard and Gladstone.
The restaurant's online ordering page now lists "El Pollo Peru – SYLMAR" at 13231 Gladstone Avenue and offers pickup in about 30 to 35 minutes.
El Pollo Peru's site describes a family restaurant with more than five years behind it that cooks every meal to order. Its specialty is pollo a la brasa, the Peruvian rotisserie chicken, marinated in more than 20 ingredients for over 24 hours. The menu also covers:
- Ceviche
- Lomo saltado
- Tallarin saltado
- Papa a la huancaina
- Choritos a la chalaca
The same team runs El Pollo Peru Express in Chatsworth and Peru's Bake Shop in Panorama City. The full menu that left Pacoima after the fire now has a Sylmar address.
Fourteen addresses apart, side by side
| Amapola Market | El Pollo Peru | |
|---|---|---|
| Sylmar address | 13217 Gladstone Ave. | 13231 Gladstone Ave. |
| Roots | Small deli opened in 1961 | Van Nuys Boulevard, Pacoima |
| In the kitchen | Tortilla factory, meat market, bakery and service deli; masa made through nixtamal | Pollo a la brasa marinated 24+ hours, dishes cooked to order |
| How the company describes itself | Family-owned, Pozos family since 2021 | Family restaurant with five-plus years of tradition |
| Sister locations | Los Angeles, Downey, Paramount | El Pollo Peru Express in Chatsworth, Peru's Bake Shop in Panorama City |
One sells the ingredients for a meal that takes all afternoon, and the other sells a meal that took a day to prepare. Both are now within the same 537-space parking lot.
A Friday with the plaza in it
The plaza's new tenants fit with the farmers market already running up the hill. The Olive View/UCLA Farmers' Market sets up Fridays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Parking Lot A at 14445 Olive View Drive, and the Sylmar community calendar lists it on Friday, Nov. 13.
Here is one way to build a Friday around all three, using only their published details:
- Produce at the Olive View/UCLA Farmers' Market, any time between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.
- Masa, tortillas and meat at Amapola Market, 13217 Gladstone Ave.
- A pollo a la brasa pickup at El Pollo Peru, 13231 Gladstone Ave., ordered online about half an hour ahead.
Olive View-UCLA Medical Center also announced free food distributions starting this month at the same Olive View Drive address. Its fourth-Wednesday produce distribution falls on Nov. 25, from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.
Up Gladstone, a corner that will take longer
Where Gladstone meets Maclay Street, the city has started a corner rebuild. Late in October, Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez and Sylmar Neighborhood Council President Kurt Cabrera-Miller marked the groundbreaking of the Maclay Street Reconfiguration Project at Gladstone, the council reported. That post notes that Maclay has always narrowed from two lanes to one at this spot.
The city's own capital project status report is more specific. The work is on the northwest corner of Maclay and Gladstone, in front of 13060 Maclay Street. It calls for roughly 250 linear feet of 10-foot-wide concrete sidewalk, curb and gutter, a retaining wall, curb ramps, new pavement and a streetlight. It also relocates a power pole and removes three trees. Getting the street to its standard width requires a 13-foot right-of-way acquisition from the corner lot.
The same report puts estimated construction cost at $2,224,151. Total funding is $2,366,022, with $1.7 million from the city's CTIEP program and $666,022 from state SB1 funds. Its schedule lists estimated completion on Aug. 31, 2028.
That works out to about $8,900 of estimated construction cost per linear foot of new sidewalk, with the retaining wall, pole relocation and right-of-way work all inside that figure. By the city's estimate, the corner stays unfinished until late summer 2028.
At Brandolino Group, we track corners like Hubbard and Gladstone because what fills a shopping center, and when, shapes daily life around it. If you own near Sylmar Plaza or along the Maclay construction zone and want to know how these changes affect your property, contact us.
