Category: California

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Another key note about this mall: There is an especially heinous red light camera at the intersection of Standiford Avenue and Sisk Road, directly in front of the mall. The camera is poorly signed and operated by RedFlex Traffic Systems under an illegal contract with the city of Modesto. Be very cautious when traveling in this area as there are several things intended to “trap” motorists into paying the egregious $489 fine, including a very short 3 second yellow signal on the left hand turn to Sisk (the lowest allowable by Califiornia law, and very short given the 45 mph speed limit on Standiford) and nearly non-existent signage. Studies have shown that these cameras actually increase accident rates (in particular rear-end collisions) and generate fairly little money for the municipalities that maintain them, since most of the money goes to shadowy corporations like RedFlex, who is owned by the Carlyle Group (who were, if you believe Michael Moore, partially responsible for the US’ involvement in the Iraq war!).

As a result, we highly recommend avoiding the Vintage Faire Mall altogether and shopping in another city to encourage the city of Modesto to abandon its illegal red light camera program. If you do receive one of these tickets, we highly encourage you to fight it either by mail or in person, and we have an agreement with document preparation service TicketKick wherein we can receive a bonus to help maintain this site for each referral (just please state that you were referred by “Jason Damas” when signing up). You can also try writing a Trial By Declaration yourself, by using the handy list of common ticket defects found on highwayrobbery.net. These red light cameras, like the Standiford and Sisk red light camera, are illegal according to California Vehicle Code and may well be unconstitutional. The only way to stop their proliferation is to fight every citation.

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.

The mailbag arrived the other day, stuffed with a bunch of (very touching, I assure you) notes expressing some grave concern about my whereabouts. I figured that I might as well come clean.

Many of you noticed that I haven’t been around as much, and that poor ol’ Labelscar just hasn’t had quite as much content as it used to. In a nutshell, the reason is a very big personal and professional change for me that I’m very slowly adjusting to. A very exciting career opportunity presented itself, and this exciting opportunity actually whisked me 3,200 miles across the country to the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s right, good ol’ Caldor is a New England boy no more–at least not for the moment.

While this has–quite understandably–taken up much of my time, I also see this as an opportunity to develop even more content. Labelscar has leaned heavily on the midwest and northeast largely because that’s where its authors reside. I have quite a bit in the can from the northeast (though, sadly, I do not have photos of *every* mall or antiquated retailer, which I would like) but now that I’m here in a brand new area, I can begin to bag some stuff from a whole new region of the United States that had been previously underserved. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that all the logistics involved with my recent switcheroo don’t completely bury me in other concerns.

One of the more interesting bits of this shift is that I’m staying–temporarily–with a friend who lives in Mountain View, California. In addition to being the home of Google (which is not where I work, in case you were wondering) and a part of Silicon Valley, Mountain View is also home to a total of three ghost malls! Sadly, all three of these were redeveloped over a decade ago, and very few remnants of any of them exist. But thankfully a local citizen who created a very comprehensive guide to this pretty South Bay suburb managed to document these three malls in great detail (along with photos of each), and I strongly encourage you to check it out!

I live right in the neighborhood where these three malls are located, and I was completely unaware of two of them. The Mayfield Mall building (just north of Central Expressway, east of San Antonio Road) even still exists, but it was converted to an office building (which itself has been abandoned) so long ago that it’s unrecognizable. The Old Mill Mall was demolished long before I arrived and no trace of it remains–today it is the condo complex that runs along Pacchetti Way. The San Antonio Center, which was the largest of the three, has the largest amount of artifacts, mainly in the intact Sears and Mervyn’s stores, as well as small pieces of the original outdoor mall. That crazy old pylon remains too, thank goodness. Unfortunately the rest of the center today is a pretty graceless big box center; a large patch of concrete with a few dozen box stores, strip malls, and restaurant pads scattered willy-nilly around its patch of land.

Read about the missing malls of mountain view–you won’t be sorry!