But similar dramas have been happening in the Bay Area, in California, and across the country for decades.
Because it is in the nature of shopping centers that they are constantly changing. Businesses come and go. Owners do too. Surrounding communities thrive and fade. Over the years—and the vertical mall at Fifth and Market Streets is relatively young by industry standards, having opened in 1988 and expanding in 2006—each area has become a creation of its own, no matter what the initial intention was like.
“It’s all evolutionary,” said J. Victor Fandel, a veteran Bay Area commercial real estate agent. “A lot depends on the terrain and geography of the market. Some become more or less important, and some become very different places.”
You’ll see this in three East Bay malls, reflecting the evolution of 21st-century retail centers across the region. One is sturdy. One is endangered. The third works pretty much as always and is notable for having changed very little.
The vulnerable
The Bayfair Center in San Leandro has many enclosed spaces.
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The Bayfair Center in San Leandro was established in 1957 as a standard suburban mall. A huge parking lot on East 14th Street provided access to a Macy’s, a convenience store, and a community garden where middle-class Americans could meet and browse.
Now it’s a mall in limbo. And it’s not alone.
According to Green Street, a real estate analysis firm, about 185 malls have closed in the US over the past 20 years. That includes 74 since 2018. Bay Area centers have fared better given the region’s prosperity, but Richmond’s Hilltop Mall closed in 2021, with the exception of an attached Walmart, which remains open.
More could follow: In Marin, a developer wants to replace San Rafael’s Northgate Mall with 1,345 residential units and a neighborhood shopping center. The longtime owner of Hillsdale Shopping Center in San Mateo envisions something similar. According to conceptual plans submitted to the city last year, a medical research campus could be combined with housing as part of a complete transformation of San Bruno’s Shops in Tanforan.
A sign indicates a store has moved out of the Bayfair Center in San Leandro.
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A similar fate may be in store for Bayfair, a mall whose long-term decline has only accelerated since B3 and Gaw Capital Partners bought its 42-acre site last year.
As you enter the mall, only three glazed retail spaces remain in the store beneath the skylights, which have removable sheeting designed to reduce glare. There’s also a kiosk specializing in cell phone repairs, located a few feet from tall plywood panels that obscure the rest of the interior storefronts.
To the right of the kiosk is Kohl’s, one of Bayfair’s remaining anchors. “As of February 2023, the entrance to our shopping center will be closed,” reads a sign on a large glass door.
“We don’t know what’s next,” said the man at the repair kiosk, who declined to give his name. “Nobody is here.”
Bayfair has always been out of step: It premiered a year after America’s first fully enclosed mall, Southdale Center near Minneapolis, spawned a new generation of consumer centers that Time magazine dubbed “pleasure-domes with parking.”
As Bayfair expanded 20 years later, a roof was added to make up for lost time. Curiously, the expansion coincided with the completion of a BART station to the west, accessible only by foot via loading docks and across a narrow bridge over a concrete canal.
After the novelty faded, Bayfair tried to lure shoppers with stores that ignored the inside and only opened onto the parking lot. Biggest newcomers included Staples, Target, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Only Target remains behind, with a security vehicle modeled after a police car parked outside.
Though the B3 and Gaw team has yet to announce their plans for Bayfair, the city of San Leandro is on the verge of receiving a $1.8 million grant from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to find out how one mixed-use “transit village” might look to the side. These include improved connections to the BART station and possibly keeping part of the Bayfair hull but padding it with a research and development lab or office space.
“Right now there is a mall that just so happens to be next door to BART. We want to look at public transportation as an advantage,” said Avalon Schultz, San Leandro’s associate community development director. “We are very excited about the chance to create a place that becomes a catalyst, but where existing (city) residents also feel comfortable.”
This might sound easy – what’s so difficult about redesigning a parking lot and a box-like structure? Many, experts say.
“Owning real estate is getting really complicated,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has written two books on suburban regeneration. For example, anchor stores often have 99-year leases—not just for their structure, but also for part of the parking lot.
For this reason, the transformation is often piecemeal and not a major renaissance, Dunham said: “Many of these projects are actually happening incrementally.”
Schultz is confident that Bayfair’s next chapter will come sooner rather than later.
“With tenants standing vacant,” she suggested, “what looks like a disaster might be seen in a different way, which is as new opportunities.”
The powerhouse
Broadway Plaza at Walnut Creek offers shopping formerly only available in downtown San Francisco.
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The Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek is the counterpart to the Bayfair Center. This is also one of the reasons why San Francisco’s Union Square falters.
Colorful flowers spill out from tall planters on the sidewalk. There is a small plaza with café seating beneath a giant video screen. The site of a California Pizza Kitchen today is a free-standing Apple Store whose four rounded sides are made of pristine glass. There is a Tesla dealership on a storefront not far from an Eileen Fisher boutique and across from Allbird’s.
Things were very different when the original Broadway incarnation opened in 1951 with Lucky’s and JC Penney as the main attractions. Subsequent growth came in methodical waves, including the first Bay Area Nordstrom in 1984 and culminating in a major renovation in 2016 that included one floor of what is now the coworking space above a landscaped pedestrian mall featuring shopping mall staples from Wetzel’s Pretzels to Tommy Bahama .
Macerich, the Santa Monica-based owner, now describes Broadway Plaza as a “regional downtown” with revenue in excess of $1,800 per square foot. You can also think of it as a variation on the Village at Corte Madera and the Stanford Shopping Center — all three offer serious Bay Area shoppers the kind of retail mix that used to be only found in San Francisco, but with free parking and a well-groomed one ambience.
Each reflects its community: that’s why Stanford’s retail assortment, drawn to the wealth of Silicon Valley, includes a Cartier and Hermès store alongside a Neiman Marcus. In Corte Madera, three retail spaces along the long road from Macy’s to Nordstrom are dedicated to electric vehicle makers, no doubt aiming to make a splash in one of the first districts where Tesla made a splash on local streets.
However, Broadway Plaza is part of a traditional downtown area.
That’s more of a coincidence — Broadway opened before the Northland Center offered the self-contained model that retail developers soon adopted. One of the two public streets has been replaced with open-air retail streets, but the center remains inextricably linked to Walnut Creek’s increasingly affluent core.
In other words, there’s a Tiffany’s across the street to the west and a Restoration Hardware to the north.
Broadway Plaza at Walnut Creek is the Bay Area’s rare suburban mall built downtown.
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
The ambiance can feel precious. It’s not without its problems, either: Looters and vandals swarmed Nordstrom as it neared closure on a Saturday night in 2021, ambushing workers and running away with bags of goods less than five minutes later. Then they piled into waiting cars and sped away.
However, occasional incidents aren’t the same as the long-standing outside perception in other parts of the Bay Area that accessing Union Square is too tedious and too stressful once you’re there. Broadway Plaza offers well-heeled shoppers a touch of urbanity—and blue skies overhead.
The Runaway
While many malls struggle, the Sunvalley Shopping Center in Concord never ceases to amaze with its resilience.
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When the Sunvalley Mall opened in 1967 on 72 acres of former corn and onion fields in Concord, it typified the large, ambitious malls of the era. This included two floors of stores between three anchor department stores: Macy’s, JC Penney, and Sears.
Remarkably, 64 years later, all three remain — even Sears, which was once America’s largest retailer but now has fewer than two dozen satellite locations.
“Wait, a Sear’s that’s still open? asked Alexandra Lange, author of the 2022 book Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. “It’s something I didn’t expect.”
The central atrium is larger than in the early days, with a glass elevator beneath a latticed skylight. The ice rink is long gone, as is the 1,500-seat cinema.
But the real change can be seen in the regulars – many of them teenagers then and now – who visit Sunvalley to sample the wares, or among themselves.
Concord had a population that was approximately 85% White in the 1960s. The 2020 census shows a place that is much more diverse: 30% Latino and 13% Asian. If today’s Sunvalley has malls like Mrs. Field’s and Cinnabon, there’s also Xpresion Cultural, a small Bay Area chain specializing in Latin American crafts and apparel.
There are vacancies in the mall, but no sign of an incipient plague. What you’ll notice instead are youth-focused mainstream long-time favorites like Uniqlo, Forever 21, and Abercrombie & Fitch — all of which have left San Francisco’s Market Street and Union Square in recent years.
The Bay Area has other malls that continue to function at a mass-market level, such as Southland Mall in Hayward and Serramonte Center in Daly City. However, none of them have the resilient timelessness of the Sunvalley.
“It’s pretty unusual that something like this from the middle class is still doing well,” Lange said after hearing a description of the mall and its tenants. “It sounds like the mall I grew up in in North Carolina — a place where teenagers run around and their parents shop for the family.”
Fandel had the same observation.
“It’s the rare mall that hasn’t had to redefine itself,” he suggested. “The ethnic groups have changed, but it serves the community.”
Correction: This article has been updated to accurately identify the country’s first closed mall.
Reach John King: [email protected]; Twitter: @johnkingsfchron