San Jose is the third largest city in California, and the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, trumping even the region’s more famous namesake city in population. San Jose, however, is a much different kind of city than San Francisco: sprawling and modern, built mostly in the automobile age, this formerly agricultural metropolis with around 1,000,000 residents is the hub of the world’s high tech industries, with many computer manufacturers and internet companies (Apple, Google, HP, etc.) all calling the region home. The San Jose MSA–even viewed separately from San Francisco–is one of the highest-income metropolitan areas in the United States and also amongst the most expensive places to live.

Because San Jose is mostly suburban in character–with much of it built in the post-war era and cris-crossed with massive boulevards and defined by tract housing–it’s surrounded by a bigger crop of malls than much of the rest of the Bay Area. We’ve already discussed the most prominent dead one–Cupertino Square/Vallco Fashion Park–but here are some tidbits about the most significant one serving the city’s mostly middle-class southern flank.

Westfield Oakridge (formerly known as “Westfield Shoppingtown Oakridge” or, originally, just “Oakridge Mall) is a large shopping mall located on the south side of San Jose, in the Almaden/Blossom Hill area. One of three malls along the Blossom Hill Road corridor and the largest by far, the mall is one of the largest and most dominant malls serving Silicon Valley and one of the largest overall in Northern California. Westfield Oakridge was originally built in 1971 by The Hahn Company, with anchors Montgomery Ward and Macy’s. A Bullock’s store was added somewhat later. Bullock’s closed in 1983 and was replaced by Nordstrom in 1985, when Nordies acquired all of Bullocks stores in the region. Unfortunately, the store underperformed and was sold to Sears in 1994, and they continue to occupy the space today.

Westfield bought the mall in 1998 and did their standard rebranding deal wherein they make the logo look like every other Westfield mall on the planet. Bigger changes came the following year when Target replaced bankrupt Montgomery Ward to anchor the mall’s eastern end in 1999. As you can see from the photos, the exterior of this Target store is *really* cool and modern but with quite a bit of the hip old verve of the department stores of the old days. I have to give Target credit; their mall anchor stores (and even their standalone multi-level stores) have some of the best new department store architecture today.

In 2003, Westfield decided to significantly upgrade and expand Oakridge with a $150,000,000+ renovation that added a new multiplex Century Theatres and tacked an entire new parallel wing in front of the old mall. This is a fairly standard tack for Westfield (they’ve done similar at other malls in Northern California, including Westfield Valley Fair and Westfield Roseville Galleria) and it created a distinctive “racetrack” design and significantly expanded the size and dominance of the one-level mall. Borders, Old Navy, and Nordstrom Rack (originally Linens N Things) also complete the roster as junior anchors, and there’s a restaurant row outside of the mall along the side facing Blossom Hill Road.

• More on Westfield Oakridge from BigMallRat.
• Aerial shot of the mall area.

During the height of the economic collapse last winter, I took a trip to one of the most threatened malls in California: Bakersfield’s East Hills Mall. It doesn’t take a genius to see why this place is having a hard time, because it has practically everything stacked against it:

• Its anchors are/were Gottschalks (which was, at this point, a few weeks shy of announcing that they were going out of business), Mervyn’s (whose stores had all just shuttered), and Harris, who were acquired several years ago by Gottschalks. The Harris store at East Hills Mall was shuttered a few years ago. This leaves only a United Artists Theatre as a major anchor tenant in the center.
• It’s located in California’s Central Valley, one of the regions of the nation most heavily impacted by the precipitous drop in housing prices from 2007-2009
• It’s located on the *EAST* side of Bakersfield, which is a higher-crime and lower-income part of town.
• East Hills Mall isn’t a terribly large mall overall.

First, just a few notes about Bakersfield itself. Bakersfield is one of the largest cities in California’s central valley, located about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and due west of the Mojave Desert. The region has long been known for its oil production and agriculture, and was one of the prime spots for migrants from the Dust Bowl during the depression. As a result, the region has long held the honor of being California’s most conservative city, due to the influence of Evangelicalism and country music (Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were both from here, and Bakersfield is sometimes referred to as the Nashville of the west). In recent years, however, Bakersfield’s identity has been transforming from its Okie past as new residents–mainly from the Los Angeles area–have come to the area in search of cheaper housing. In addition, a significant number of immigrants from locations as diverse as Mexico, Phillippines, and many countries in the middle east and northern Africa. Bakersfield has even become known as something of a destination for Basque food, which isn’t easy to find just anywhere. Despite the city’s considerable growth, however, it does not remain much of a cultural hotbed, and has significant issues with poverty and crime (as well as a nasty history of racism), and its hot, dusty climate is one of the least favorable in California. With a population of around 330,000 in the city proper and approximately 800,000 in the entire metropolitan area, Bakersfield is the third largest inland metropolitan area in California after Sacramento and Fresno.

The East Hills Mall is one of only two enclosed malls serving the Bakersfield metropolitan area, and is the far smaller of the two. Unfortunately, there’s also almost nothing about the history of this unloved mall floating around on the internet. Judging by the architecture, it appears that the 415,000 square foot mall was probably built sometime in the late 1980s. Although we know Harris and Gottschalks were former anchors, I’m not entirely sure if the third anchor was originally a Mervyn’s–something about the architecture of the store tells me it may have been a Target originally (and there is a Target on the outlots of the parcel) but I’m not entirely sure if the timeline matches up for Target to have been in California at the time. I also wouldn’t be shocked if one of these anchors had at one point been a Montgomery Ward or a Robinson’s-May, but I am really guessing here. It does appear that the mall’s decline began a long time ago–late ’90s-ish, and was sold in 2003 to a developer who had a plan to modernize and expand the center, especially to cater to the growing suburban area in the city’s northeast hills. Bakersvillians, help us out!

When I visited in early January 2009, there was a robust plan to redevelop the center, bringing in new tenants and adding more of an entertainment and dining focus. A year later, the anchorless East Hills Mall filed for bankruptcy, its hopes dashed by the low likelihood of a housing rebound in this somewhat depressed corner of California. While the mall remains open, it serves as little more than a lobby for the movie theatres and a handful of local merchants who have been able to survive with so little foot traffic. The bankruptcy itself may also force even more dramatic changes–such as the (possibly likely) outcome that the mall will be demolished and completely replaced. Given its condition, that may not be a terrible option.

Santa Rosa's Coddingtown Mall, early 1960s

Coddingtown Mall, in the Sonoma County city of Santa Rosa, is one of the largest and oldest malls north of San Francisco along the California coast. Unfortunately it seems to be a bit troubled nowadays, but historic mall geeks may find a lot to love. Let’s take a look:

Coddingtown Mall opened in 1961 just off US 101 in the city of Santa Rosa, the population and business hub of California’s wine country region. The Coddingtown Mall’s most notable feature is a spinning neon pylon–original from its construction–that continues to spin today. Look:

I had a bit of a hard time cobbling together much history about the center, but it apparently began as an outdoor mall before being enclosed sometime later. Although the 800,000 square foot mall’s recent anchor roster was Gottschalk’s, Macy’s, JCPenney, and Ralph’s supermarket, the Gottschalk’s wing is of somewhat newer vintage and the Macy’s store was almost certainly originally an Emporium location.

Due to the Coddingtown Mall’s age and the fact that it began life as an outdoor mall, it has some pretty neat interior and exterior architecture. The inside, in particular, caught my eye; the mall’s corridors are wide and sunny, adorned in wood beams as a nod to the redwood-filled nature of this part of Northern California, and there are various grade changes throughout. It seems most modern malls are on sites that were so heavily graded before construction that there’s none of these interesting slopes and sub-levels anymore, but these variations make the interior of the mall more entertaining and pleasant.

Codding Enterprises, owners of the mall, were aware by 2005 that the aging center would need an upgrade to keep up with the larger and newer Santa Rosa Plaza in downtown Santa Rosa, so they inked a deal with Simon Property Group to update and revamp the aging plaza. From a 2005 newspaper article:

A hint of what those changes might be can be found on Simon’s Web site, which shows a “proposed bookstore” where Big 5 Sporting Goods is located. A “proposed restaurant” is also shown over the Narsi’s space, while another “proposed restaurant” and “proposed theater above retail” are shown in the space where Old Navy is located.

One of the first fruits of the Coddingtown Mall redevelopment appeared in 2008, when an expansion project began to replace the former Ralph’s grocery store with a Whole Foods–somewhat of an unusual choice for an enclosed shopping mall–but construction on this has recently halted as a result of the economy and the mall’s increasing misfortunes. Whole Foods claims they are committed to open the store by fall 2010, however. During the same timeframe, one of the mall’s three main anchors–Gottschalks–went out of business, creating a large vacancy that will prove difficult to fill.

The photos here were all taken in October of 2008–just about a year ago–and show that while the mall isn’t exactly thriving, it’s filled with a mixture of national and local tenants and seems to be hanging on. However, this was fairly soon after the economic collapse of 2008, and as a result the mall has fared somewhat worse since–just check out this article from the Press Democrat about how many stores closed in early 2009.

As the closures continued, the local half of the ownership team–Codding Enterprises–stepped back in to take a more active role in managing the center, apparently unhappy with Simon’s inattention to the center’s decline.

More on Coddingtown Mall:

• BigMallRat article
• Associated Content Review of the Coddingtown Mall

Part of the reason Labelscar exists is because tons of enclosed shopping malls have been turned inside out to plazas or lifestyle centers in the last decade, but we’ve actually talked fairly little about the results of these transformations, in part because our focus has been on preserving bits from the old versions of these centers. Sometimes the new product is just as interesting, or at least worthy of discussion.

This is a set of photos I took back in February at the former Huntington Beach Mall in Huntington Beach, California, down in Orange County. The center has since been renamed and re-christened “Bella Terra,” and it sports a cross section of stores that supplements the larger Westminster Mall an exit up the freeway, instead of trying to compete with it.

First, a brief bit of history on the old Huntington Beach Mall. The center originally opened in 1965 at Edinger Ave & I-405 as the first fully enclosed shopping mall in Orange County, with The Broadway, Montgomery Ward, and JCPenney as anchors arranged mostly in a dumbell fashion. The Huntington Beach Mall was expanded with a new Mervyn’s-anchored wing in 1986. Unfortunately, competition from other malls in the area began to have their impact by the early 1990s: JCPenney shut their store in 1992, and The Broadway went out of business in 1996. The mall closed for good in 2003.

Instead of turning the Huntington Beach Mall into a lifestyle center or a big box center, the developers (Bella Terra Associates) went for something about halfway inbetween, where the focus of the center is on a cluster of big box anchors and a movie theatre, with a small pedestrian court sporting a variety of dining options and higher-end street furniture with an Italian village feel, such as fountains and landscaping. The result is a very pleasant center that still retains some sense of the sense of “place” you’d find in larger lifestyle centers or malls. At the same time, the groovy, Googie-style architecture of the massive The Broadway store was cleaned up and retained for Kohl’s to fill the space.

The problem with the Bella Terra development may well be the small size of the pedestrian friendly area, however. Although it’s designed mostly for dining and theatre patrons, the area feels too small to generate much foot traffic or critical mass and it’s questionable how successful it will be in the long term without that degree of a draw. Plus, Kohl’s, Mervyn’s (who was a tenant), and Burlington Coat Factory don’t feel very serendipitous with the higher-end dining options, the movie theatre, or the Barnes & Noble store. On the one hand, Bella Terra is trying to be a convenience-oriented, apparel-heavy, female-skewing big box center, and on the other it’s trying to be an upscale suburban nightlife and lifestyle retail destination, but frankly it’s too small to balance both of these acts.

There is one carrot here for dead retail enthusiasts. The mall’s original Montgomery Ward store still sits completely abandoned at the mall’s western end because the parcel is owned separately from the mall itself. The store looks especially sad and derelict, and given the amount of attention paid to the redevelopment of the rest of the center it’s somewhat shocking that this parcel was never reused.

More on Bella Terra:

• Los Angeles Times article about the redevelopment
• Beach California
• An article about the redevelopment

Macy's/Food Court area at Downtown Plaza's West End

Sacramento is the state capital of California, and the core of its largest inland metropolitan area. With over 400,000 people in the city proper and almost two and a half million in the immediate area, Sacramento is the fourth largest fully independent metropolitan area in California and is the most important city in the state’s fertile Central Valley.

Sacramento’s Westfield Downtown Plaza is a classic example of a downtown shopping center built to drive an urban renewal effort. Opened in 1971 as a hybrid indoor-outdoor shopping mall along the K Street corridor of downtown Sacramento, the mall was meant to bring a significant amount of retail space to the center of the city. The center is two levels and has two traditional anchor stores as well as a movie theatre, and the main mall concourse (which is outdoor) aligns exactly with K Street at either end. There is also a small, two-level, mostly “enclosed” but very dank and dated portion on the mall’s south side. On the western side, the mall adjoins a pedestrian passage that goes under busy I-5 and connects to Old Town Sacramento, a popular tourist destination. At the eastern end, the mall spills onto the K Street Pedestrian Mall, where there is access to the city’s light rail system.

Downtown Plaza was originally developed as a one-level mall by the Hahn Company in 1971, and adjoined an existing Macy’s store that had opened in 1963. By the end of the 1970s, the mall was so successful that Weinstock’s moved their existing downtown store to the center, and Liberty House joined the roster as the third anchor. Liberty House was replaced in 1984 by I. Magnin, who similarly was short-lived at the center, closing in 1992. The loss of I. Magnin prompted a dramatic re-envisioning of the center, which added a second level and refreshed the look of the entire center of the mall (and, although I’m not entirely sure, likely added the food court as well). The Hard Rock Cafe also opened their lone Sacramento area location at the same time, and it became a major draw to the downtown area. After the renovation, the center boasted 1.1 million square feet of floor space. Weinstock’s closed in 1996, and their location became a second Macy’s store for Men’s and Home. Like most malls with the “Westfield” branding, this was more recent; the mall was purchased by Westfield in 1998.

Macy's at Downtown Plaza

In recent years, however, Downtown Plaza began to struggle. Although it is located at the center of downtown and thus is well-positioned for daytime office-worker traffic (including the many California state employees, who work within a close radius) and is just steps from Old Sacramento, and thus nets lots of suburban tourists, it’s falling prey to the competition from newer, larger suburban malls, especially Arden Fair and Roseville Galleria. In addition to this standard suburban competition, Westfield Downtown Plaza seems to face its own set of challenges. The mall thoroughly turns its back on its two parallel streets–J Street and L Street–which are major thoroughfares through downtown. As a result, these large avenues often feel barren and abandoned even as the mall’s heart is bustling. The flaw with this is that Downtown Plaza was so thoroughly walled-off from its surroundings that they weren’t able to benefit from spillover development much during the center’s truly successful days, and in turn downtown didn’t fully bloom into a successful retail district. The portion of the K Street Mall east of Downtown Plaza feels mostly windswept and abandoned, and can feel threatening even on sunny weekend afternoons. And apart from the mall and Old Sacramento’s waterfront, most of the activity in the center of Sacramento is in the large, bustling Midtown neighborhood, located about ten blocks east of the mall itself. Midtown is home to hundreds of restaurants, shops, and a thriving arts scene, including the city’s popular Second Saturday Art Walk event. But all of this activity is separated from the mall by a large convention center and blocks of office buildings and vacant storefronts that most pedestrians wouldn’t bother to cross.

One other strike against Downtown Plaza? Sacramento was one of the most adversely affected areas in the housing crisis of 2007-2009. Real estate prices in the area shot up precipitously during the 2000s due to the area’s relative proximity to the Bay Area and reasonably healthy economy, but the collapse of these prices was equally steep. By fall 2008, the Sacramento metropolitan area had the tenth worst foreclosure rate in the United States, and by some estimates one of Sacramento’s nearby cities–Stockton, 45 miles to the south–had the worst foreclosure rate in the nation. While California’s capital city still has a vibrant urban life and a fairly robust economy, it’s bad news for any shopping mall when so many area residents are in distress.

In 2006, Westfield announced an ambitious plan to refresh the mall. The vacant Copeland Sports anchor store on the second floor of the mall’s eastern end (above Hard Rock Cafe) would be the home of a relocated food court, which would improve the mall’s streetscape in relation to the windswept K Street Mall. The existing movie theatres would be expanded in size, and the mall would add a grocery store and a brand new anchor Target store. In addition, the main mall concourse–which is rather cut up, for an outdoor mall–would be opened up, and much of the now-dated 1990s decor would be replaced with a more modern, urban feel. This plan seemed to at least partially address Downtown Plaza’s two main problems: its poor relation to the streetscape and lack of “essentials” type stores to appeal to the burgeoning downtown population. Target and the grocery store could help draw in the many young professionals and families who had recently set up shop downtown, and the mall could reclaim its place as a retail hub in a city center that has a fair amount of activity but not much other major retail. You can read a thread about the original proposal at the SkyScraperPage forums.

Original 2006 redevelopment proposal for Westfield Downtown Plaza

Unfortunately, Westfield dragged their feet until the state of the economy made it a bad time for redevelopment. The first major blow was when Target backed out of the project in 2008, removing a significant impedus for the project. Although I can’t say for sure, it appears Westfield had begun not renewing leases, but also is understandably skiddish about proceeding with such a project, at this time, in such an economically precarious region. As a result, the mall–especially its second level–has emptied out dramatically in the past year. These photos were taken in April 2008, but there has been a significant increase in the vacancy rate since then, and many in the city have been criticizing Westfield’s lack of investment in the property even as they sink millions into expanding their 9-year-old mall in Roseville.

At the moment, it remains to be seen what will happen to Downtown Plaza, even as the rest of Sacramento’s city center sees continued revitalization.

At this point, anyone who has followed shopping center developments even slightly over the past few years knows that enclosed malls–those raggamuffins we love so much at Labelscar–are kind of on the outs. Everything’s all about big box plazas and lifestyle centers nowadays, and the “eternal springtime” of indoor, air-conditioned corridors has lost popularity to the convenience of parking near the store you want to shop in. Well, what happens when “eternal springtime” describes the weather outside?

This is the case in much of California, but nowhere moreso than Santa Barbara, a picturesque coastal city about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Known for its natural beauty, mediterranean architecture, and favorable climate, Santa Barbara’s metropolitan area is one of the most expensive in the United States. The Santa Barbara area is home to two shopping malls, both of them completely outdoor to take advantage of the favorable climate. This mall, Paseo Nuevo, is also located in the heart of the city’s downtown, and is woven seemlessly into the rest of the city’s bustling heart.

Beyond that it opened in 1990, I don’t know much about Paseo Nuevo’s history–Californians don’t seem to be as good about putting much of this stuff online, I’ve found. And while we tend to be big fans of enclosed malls around here, I have to admit that there seems to be little reason to throw a roof on places that enjoy such good weather. California has quite a few malls like this, and they seem to fare approximately as well as their sheltered cousins–the ones that are smaller, ancillary centers seem to fail even worse (and mostly wind up as big box centers), while the ones that truly embrace their surroundings or are positioned as a major destination do pretty great.

What IS kind of cool about Paseo Nuevo, however, is that it’s an urban mall that exists in complete harmony with its urban surroundings. Paseo Nuevo feels less like a mall than a labyrynth of Grecian alleys, decorated with overgrown vines and tiled fountains and dotted with occasional outdoor cafes. Too many urban renewal-style downtown malls failed to have much impact on their overall downtown districts because they were unfriendly to the street, facing their environments with brutalist multi-story concrete-clad walls or imposing parking structures. Even some of the downtown enclosed malls that were successful–Santa Monica Place or Burlington Town Center come to mind–became victims of their own success. They got people to come downtown and the neighborhood around them thrived, but eventually people simply didn’t want to step inside to the mall anymore. Paseo Nuevo is a fairly successful example of an urban-core, big block shopping center that seems to really work.

So, what’s up coastal California readers? Can you fill us in on the background of this place? Also, given the location, was the original late ’80s development of a center like this a tough sell to the community?

More on Paseo Nuevo: John Dickson’s Paseo Nuevo Guide, with Tour

We first started traveling to shopping malls in the late 1990s, and it was during those trips that we were awakened to the beginnings of the death of the American shopping mall. In almost every major metropolitan area, there was at least one white elephant, one center that wasn’t cutting it, one place that for some reason was never renovated and still sported decor from the 1970s. We were fascinated, not only because these malls reminded us of our childhoods but also because it was inconceivable to us then that the almighty shopping mall–a development pattern that had been so dominant our entire lives–could possibly fail.

In the last decade and change, of course, this reality has been writ large and discovered by many, ranging from Deadmalls.com to CNN and NPR and (more recently) the entirety of the general public. But the types of malls that we discovered were “dead” in the mid to late 1990s had mostly already gone away: these were the weakest players, the least-loved, and they were wiped off the map before the public’s collective consciousness began to recognize their existence. As a result, our trips since have been somewhat less enjoyable, since most of the remaining malls are at least somewhat whitewashed and there’s a sad knowledge that in just about every city in America, there’s at least one true gem of retail history that’s already long gone.

Before I get too histrionic, this is why I found Manchester Center in Fresno, California to be such a treat. It had been at least five years since I had discovered a mall quite like this one, and it was a shock to find such a creepy time capsule still completely open and accessible.

First, just a quick bit about Fresno: Fresno, California is the largest city in California’s central valley, and the second largest metropolitan area (after Sacramento) in the region. It’s the largest city between San Francisco and Los Angeles and has around 470,000 people proper, with almost 900,000 in the metropolitan area. Like many of California’s inland cities, much of the development in the city and its surrounding areas is fairly new, and the population has been continually exploding over the last decade and a half. Despite anchoring a primarily agricultural region, Fresno is known as a hub for business incubators and is somewhat more politically moderate than some of the other, smaller, more conservative cities in the central valley. On the retail scene, Fresno is the home of Gottschalks department stores, one of the last true independent old-line department store chains in the country.

Like many of California’s Central Valley cities, Fresno doesn’t have the greatest reputation. Its historic downtown area, which is centered around the pedestrian Fulton Mall–one of the first downtown pedestrian malls in the nation, and the home of the original, deceased Gottschalks flagship–is notoriously foreboding and vacant, as noted when the California Planning & Development Report named it the worst big-city downtown in the state:

Bakersfield, Oakland and Anaheim all have less-than-ideal downtowns, but none of those districts is as desperate, depressing and even threatening as downtown Fresno. The hideous 1970s office buildings are the least of the problems in Fresno’s core. The place is one gigantic real estate “opportunity,” and it’s usually deserted after 6 o’clock. Yes, there is a nice new minor league baseball stadium, but that’s about the only reason locals willingly go downtown.

Manchester Center is Fresno’s oldest enclosed shopping mall–I think–heck, I’m not even sure because I can’t find much about it on the internet. It’s over 50 years old, though, and its located near the southern end of the long and massive commercial corridor along Blackstone Avenue, which leads north from downtown. The 950,000 square foot, two-level center contains three large anchor stores–currently filled with Sears, Gottschalks, and a large CalTrans office–and sports a variety of local retailers and office space. Since it was displaced by the more successful Fashion Fair (as well as several burgeoning outdoor shopping malls and one somewhat troubled enclosed one), the Manchester Center has attempted to carve out a niche as a “mixed use” building, with much of the upper level and nearly all of the CalTrans wing occupied with office space. Don’t be fooled, however; the entire mall is open for your perusal!

One thing that really struck me, aside from the really dated decor, was the mall’s strange floorplan. Let me detail it as I saw it:

• I entered at the mall’s northern end. Sears was the anchor here, but when I came in on a side hallway I noticed windows on the second floor leading to a vacant space, and there was visibly an area where a stairway had been removed. The Sears store also faces the mall in a strange way, meeting it only halfway head-on, meaning that when you are standing in the center of the mall and facing Sears, only the left side of the mall enters into the Sears while the right side exits to the rear parking lot (check the pics, it’ll make more sense).
• It appears that the “ghost” space next to Sears on the second level was at one point some smaller anchor. The mall goes underneath this anchor on the first level, but then emerges on the other side as the mall becomes fully two level. Does anyone know what this floating “ghost anchor” was?
• Most of the main mall is a two level “L” shape with a carousel at center court. The further you get from Sears and Gottschalks, however, the further you get from retail activity. Most of the southern part of the center is either vacant or occupied by offices. The second level has no retail activity aside from a food court with several tenants.

I wish I knew more about the place… maybe some of you can fill me in. There’s precious little about Manchester Center available on the internet, including huge missing details like what the third anchor originally was. I would obviously add Manchester Center to the death watch, especially in light of this week’s chapter 11 filing by Gottschalks, one of the mall’s two surviving anchor tenants.

It’s really cold in Northern California today. My friends back in New England are all struggling with a historic ice storm and no heat or power. How do I respond? I post a set of photos I took on a 110 degree day. Can’t you just feel the heat in these shots? The air conditioner in my car could not keep up at all during this trip in June; just be glad you weren’t my wingman for this one.

Modesto, California is a city of just over 200,000 people in California’s Central Valley, located about an hour south of Sacramento and about 90 minutes east of the San Francisco Bay Area. Known as a hub for large-scale commercial farming (and cheap, marginally-undrinkable wine; Ernest Gallo is here) as well as the home of Scott and Laci Peterson, Modesto has grown in recent years due to its low cost of living and relative proximity to employment hubs in the expensive San Francisco Bay Area. The lower land values come with a wealth of social problems, however, including the highest per capita car theft rate in the nation (2005, 2006, and 2008), some of the worst air quality in the country, excessively long commute times, and high crime. American Cities Ranked and Rated by Bert Serling and Peter Sander named Modesto the worst city to live in America, based on their criteria.

I don’t mean to dump on this dusty exurban metropolis, however. I only visited once, in that searing June heat, and took these pictures through a veil of haze. For the most part, though, the place didn’t seem so bad: Modesto is fairly sizable, but it’s a largely modern city built primarily around sprawling newer developments. The central downtown area wasn’t much different than many east coast cities. Not much activity, but not terrible either, with a mixture of nightlife and business services.

The Vintage Faire Mall is the largest enclosed shopping center between Sacramento and Fresno in California’s central valley, and the only enclosed mall serving the city of Modesto. Located at Standiford Avenue and Highway 99 in the Northwestern corner of the city, the mall has two levels of shopping and five anchor stores spread across a little over a million square feet of space. Like many still-thriving malls it just recently received a cliche “lifestyle” village expansion that contains the same stuff you see in every lifestyle village. (There’s a PDF with a very detailed plan at this link; scroll down and you’ll find a site plan and elevations).

The Vintage Faire Mall is anchored by Sears, JC Penney, Gottschalks, and two Macy’s stores. According to the BigMallRat, Weinstocks was originally where Gottschalks is now and Gottschalks had a store where Macy’s Men’s & Home is now. There’s not honestly anything terribly exciting about this Macerich-owned center (a sentiment shared by all these Yelpers), apart from a somewhat dated patina and the continued presence of some fountains… which is always a treat nowadays.

For the most part Vintage Faire was a fairly average, large suburban mall, though it seemed more successful than I was expecting–perhaps because it’s the only mall serving such a sizeable city, and that many of the other cities in the area (such as Turlock or Manteca) don’t have enclosed malls of their own. Also the malls serving the city of Stockton, Modesto’s slightly larger twin to the north, are both quite underwhelming–Vintage Faire has both of them beat by a large margin. Since we’ve been a bit short on material in the Central Valley in the past, I don’t know much about the history of this place or retail in the valley at all… maybe one of you locals can chime in and give us some insight

Cupertino Square (the former “Vallco Fashion Park“) has a more tangled and bizarre tale than many of the malls of the San Francisco Bay Area, and today seems to be mired in a never-ending renovation and revitalization that bears few fruits. Take a look with us…

Vallco Fashion Park opened in September 1976 as one of the largest malls in the San Jose (soon to be known as “Silicon Valley”) region. Located in the affluent western suburb of Cupertino–which would become famous in later years as the home of Apple Computer–the mall sported Sears, JCPenney, and The Emporium (now Macy’s) as anchors. The mall got its rather sterile and discounty-sounding name from the center’s developers: Varian Associates, and the Leonard, Lester, Craft, and Orlando families. To me, it sounds like the kind of place that would have Totes, Bugle Boy, London Fog, and Van Heusen outlets.

Vallco employed a very strange floorplan from the very beginning. There is one large, two level wing that extends between Sears and the Macy’s store, west of Wolfe Road. Then the first level of the mall ends while the second level takes a 90 degree turn, going over Wolfe Road and ending at a JCPenney anchor while also sprouting a small first floor on the far side of the street. The decor of the center–even to today–is a unique mix of ’70s modernist design; if you’re at all interested in the kind of frumpy old ’70s shopping center architecture that was at one point designed to look “fancy” then this place is a real treat.

Vallco was for many years the dominant middle-tier mall in the west valley region, drawing shoppers from the many affluent suburbs to the west of San Jose. However in the 1990s the center began to falter due to the continued expansions at the nearby Westfield Valley Fair Mall, currently the largest mall in the Bay Area. Valley Fair’s growth–combined with the 2002 opening of the massive Santana Row lifestyle center directly across the street–caused many malls to go under, including the Sunnyvale Town Center and Mountain View’s San Antonio Shopping Center. Vallco remained open but occupancy rates dipped down to around 25%.

In the mid-2000’s, three local investors (Alan Wong, Emily Chen, and John Nguyen) decided to use some Silicon Valley bank to restore some luster to this fading behemoth. Given that Vallco was located just a few miles from Valley Fair on Stevens Creek Blvd., the group needed to differentiate the center from its immediate competition by adding a significant dining and entertainment component–including the upscale Strike bowling alley, a huge AMC movie complex, and new restaurants–and giving it a spiffy new name in “Cupertino Square.”

However, while some progress has been made to date–such as the opening of all of the above attractions–the mall seems to be frozen in amber, unable to move forward on the promise of renewal. The entire first floor of the mall is mysteriously shuttered, the food court has been closed and under construction for over a year, and little seems to ever change. The large pylon facing I-280 still displays the “Vallco Fashion Park” name, even as all other signage for the mall has been updated to reflect the new name and logo. In 2008, it was reported that the mall’s investors were deep in debt and the center on the brink of foreclosure. For a dead mall, Cupertino Square does seem to generate a fair amount of foot traffic, but nearly all of the storefronts are dusty and vacant, relics of a bygone era of scrunchies, hairspray, and Huey Lewis cassingles.

Maybe Steve Jobs should turn it into a mall of the future, or something. For now, it remains one of California’s strangest dead malls.

• Also read some memories of Vallco on its Yelp page.
• More from BigMallRat–the mall has barely changed since this post was written.

Marin County in many ways symbolizes quiet California affluence. It’s a place where people reuse their grocery bags, drink expensive wine, and reliably vote Democratic. It’s no surprise that Marin County–which resides just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco–has become a popular spot for well-heeled suburbanites. The scenery, which is dominated by dramatic mountains that rise straight from the ocean and the bay, is breathtaking. Land is extremely limited and the weather is some of the best in the world. On a more retail related note, it’s also the home of Restoration Hardware.

Marin County has two major outdoor malls in Corte Madera that target the affluent crowd that resides in the towns just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, but San Rafael–the county’s principal city–is actually a bit more mid-market than southern cousins like Sausalito, Mill Valley, and Tiburon. Besides being the home of George Lucas (and the Skywalker Ranch), San Quentin State Prison (and thus, Scott Peterson and various other famous criminals), and–formerly–Carmen Sandiego (Broderbund Software was here), San Rafael is also the home to the county’s lone fully enclosed shopping center, the Northgate Mall.

The Northgate Mall is not exactly what you would expect of a mall in Marin County. Unlike its more southern competition, the 744,000 square foot mall skews to the middle-tier, with Macy’s, Sears, and Mervyn’s as anchors, and it clearly had been years–MANY years, 21 to be exact–since the 1965-vintage mall saw a significant renovation. The place was frozen in amber, stuck in the time when local Marin County boy Huey Lewis was still placing yuppie anthems about cohabitation the top of the charts (though we’ll ignore “Pineapple Express”). This relative degree of neglect is pretty unusual by California standards, so I thought that Northgate was really quite a find. Unfortunately, that’s changing now, as the mall is getting an upscale new refresh meant to bring it into the 20th century, and better target the fairly affluent consumer base in the area.

Thankfully, my photos were all taken in March of 2008–before the renovation began.

Granted, the Northgate Mall clearly needed a refresh. While I found the parquet floors and yellow-tiled Macy’s to be charming, the Freitas Parkway facility does feel and look a bit tired, and has a fairly run of the mill group of stores (plus a fair number of vacancies). I kind of hope they keep the puzzling little balcony above the stores in front of Macy’s, but I have no idea why they would.

Enjoy the *old* Northgate Mall! As I understand, the renovations are now already well underway, and it no longer looks quite like this. I’m glad I caught it just in time!  Also, do check out our friends at Big Mall Rat, who did a feature on this (and every other) Bay Area mall as well.

OH, AND… some of you may have noticed that Labelscar was down for a ghastly 24 hours the other day. We’re really sorry about this. Our hosting company had an “emergency” of some sort that wiped everything out for a day, and it took some time to get back online. We didn’t go anywhere, though, and it frustrated us as much as it did you. Either way, we’re back, thanks for waiting, yada yada.