Eastmont Town Center is a
shopping mall
A shopping mall (or simply mall) is a North American term for a large indoor shopping center, usually anchored by department stores. The term "mall" originally meant a pedestrian promenade with shops along it (that is, the term was used to refe ...
and social services hub located on bounded by Foothill Boulevard, Bancroft Avenue, 73rd Avenue, and Church Street, in the
Frick neighborhood of
East Oakland
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...
.
The mall opened in phases between 1966 and 1974 on the site of a 1920s-era
Chevrolet
Chevrolet ( ), colloquially referred to as Chevy and formally the Chevrolet Motor Division of General Motors Company, is an American automobile division of the American manufacturer General Motors (GM). Louis Chevrolet (1878–1941) and ous ...
automobile factory called
Oakland Assembly
Oakland Assembly was a former Chevrolet manufacturing facility located in Elmhurst, Oakland, California. It was the first automobile plant established in Northern California to build Chevrolet vehicles. In 1916, Chevrolet opened the auto industry ...
(itself shut down in 1963 with General Motors moving operations to a
new plant in suburban Fremont). Architect
William Pereira designed the building. It is physically almost next to, and by entry access a few blocks away from the similarly sized
Evergreen Cemetery. The official grand opening ceremony was held in November 1970.
History
Originally known as Eastmont Mall, the mall was a popular and heavily used shopping destination during most of the 1970s and 1980s, but declined by the 1990s due to a huge drop in the average income level, and a concurrent increase in the crime rate in the mall and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Eastmont's primary anchor tenants were
JCPenney
Penney OpCo LLC, doing business as JCPenney and often abbreviated JCP, is a midscale American department store chain operating 667 stores across 49 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. Departments inside JCPenney stores include Mens, Womens, Boys, Gir ...
,
Mervyns,
Woolworth's
Woolworth, Woolworth's, or Woolworths may refer to:
Businesses
* F. W. Woolworth Company, the original US-based chain of "five and dime" (5¢ and 10¢) stores
* Woolworths Group (United Kingdom), former operator of the Woolworths chain of shops ...
(including a
lunch counter),
Safeway
Safeway is an American supermarket chain founded by Marion Barton Skaggs in April 1915 in American Falls, Idaho. The chain provides grocery items, food and general merchandise and features a variety of specialty departments, such as bakery, d ...
,
Pay 'n Save
Pay 'n Save was a retail company founded by Monte Lafayette Bean in Seattle, Washington in 1940. Over the years, Pay 'n Save was the leading drugstore chain in Washington and was the owner of several Washington-based retailers including Lamonts ...
,
Kinney Shoes
The G.R. Kinney Company was an American manufacturer and retailer of shoes from until . Its listing on the New York Stock Exchange, symbol KNN, began in March 1923. The shoe concern was started by George Romanta Kinney whose father ran a general ...
, Gallenkamp Shoes and
Thom McAn, those three among the nation's leading shoe retailers at the time.
Hickory Farms
Hickory Farms, LLC is an American food gift retailer with headquarters in Chicago. Richard Ransom established the company in 1951 when he began selling handcrafted cheese at local fairs. By 1959, the company added summer sausage and opened its fi ...
had a location in Eastmont Mall, and there were also branches of Smiths and
Roos/Atkins
Roos/Atkins was the name of a chain of upscale men's clothing stores based in San Francisco, California. It was formed through a 1957 merger of the Robert Atkins and Roos Brothers clothiers. The chain expanded after World War II
World Wa ...
, both popular regional men's clothing stores. The mall also housed a
Syufy movie theater, opened in 1971, with four screens. Food choices included
Orange Julius
Orange Julius is an American chain of fruit drink beverage stores. It has been in business since the late 1920s and is noted for a particular drink, also called an Orange Julius. The beverage is a mixture of ice, orange juice, sweetener, milk, p ...
,
Karmelkorn
Karmelkorn was an American popcorn retailer. It was founded in 1928 in Casper, Wyoming, by Mr. and Mrs. William O'Sullivan. The O'Sullivans patented their candy-coated popcorn and trademarked the product's name and logo in 1929. Initially, they l ...
and the
H. Salt Esquire
H. Salt Esq. Fish & Chips is a restaurant chain specializing in British-style fish and chips, founded by Haddon Salt in Sausalito, California, in 1965. Salt followed his father and grandfather in becoming a master fish cook and entrepreneur. ...
fast-food seafood chain.
There is a four-story standalone building on the property behind (what was) the JCPenney parking structure, which in the early days of the mall was known as the "professional building." Completed in the fall of 1969, it housed temporary employment offices for the department stores in preparation for their openings, as well as various real estate, insurance, financial and medical offices serving the community, but suffered decline with the rest of the mall as the years progressed.
The Safeway store was actually part of the first phase of the mall, a freestanding location fronting Bancroft Avenue. Official groundbreaking ceremonies were held in September 1965, and the Safeway opened in the spring of 1966. The other stores adjacent to it were opened by 1967. The JCPenney wing, first announced in October 1966, began construction in 1968.
That store, which officially opened in October 1970, would replace a longtime downtown Oakland location at 11th and Washington streets (which shut down in April 1971), and would be torn down to make way (in part) for the
City Center redevelopment project.
The Mervyn's location was first announced in the spring of 1973 for a summer 1974 opening. The opening of the Marvyn's marked the completion of the entire mall.
Eastmont's JCPenney store was notable in that the signage for it, outdoors and at the inside entrances, was never converted to the "JCPenney" logo, rendered in the
Helvetica font, introduced chain-wide beginning in 1970 (but not fully implemented in catalogs and print advertising until 1972) and installed in all subsequently built Bay Area locations (including
Richmond
Richmond most often refers to:
* Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States
* Richmond, London, a part of London
* Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England
* Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada
* Richmond, California, ...
's
Hilltop Mall
Hilltop Horizon, formerly known as Hilltop Mall, East Bay Science and Technology Center and The Shops At Hilltop, was a regional shopping center in the Hilltop neighborhood of Richmond, California. Hilltop is managed and co-owned by Prologis, ...
); the Eastmont location always retained the older "Penneys" logo as originally introduced in 1963, right up until the store shut down (all signage and advertising inside the store itself always conformed to then-current branding). This may have been intentionally done by JCPenney to protect the trademark on the older logo.
Eastmont Mall became the only remaining indoor mall in Oakland after the closure of the mid-1960s-era
MacArthur-Broadway Center in
North Oakland in the mid-1990s.
JCPenney and Mervyns closed their Eastmont locations in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, the mall was only 30 percent leased and had fallen into bankruptcy. Local real estate developers purchased the mall in 2000, and emphasized a focus on neighborhood and community services; many of the abandoned retail stores were converted into office space. The Mervyns location was converted into a substation for the
Oakland Police Department and the JCPenney location was converted into a community medical clinic operated by
Alameda Health System
Alameda Health System (AHS), formerly Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC), is an integrated public health care system organized as a public hospital authority.
Formerly operated by Alameda County, California, it now has an independent board of ...
. A handful of existing retail tenants stayed on, and a few new ones were attracted due to the success of the renovations, including Gazzali's Market (opened 2004), the only supermarket to serve the surrounding neighborhoods (this supermarket was a
Safeway
Safeway is an American supermarket chain founded by Marion Barton Skaggs in April 1915 in American Falls, Idaho. The chain provides grocery items, food and general merchandise and features a variety of specialty departments, such as bakery, d ...
, as noted above, during the center's earliest years). In the spring of 2007, the mall was sold to a group of real estate investors based in Oregon.
In 2006–07, the four-story standalone office building was converted as an
adaptive reuse
Adaptive reuse refers to the process of reusing an existing building for a purpose other than which it was originally built or designed for. It is also known as recycling and conversion. Adaptive reuse is an effective strategy for optimizing the o ...
project into Miley Gardens, a residential senior housing complex.
A $6 million renovation of the property was completed in July 2008. The interior was brightened, new lighting, skylights and seating areas were installed, escalators and elevators were given an upgrade and the parking areas received new landscaping.
Currently, the mall houses the supermarket, a
Social Security
Welfare, or commonly social welfare, is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specificall ...
office, a branch of the
Oakland Public Library,
Alameda Health System
Alameda Health System (AHS), formerly Alameda County Medical Center (ACMC), is an integrated public health care system organized as a public hospital authority.
Formerly operated by Alameda County, California, it now has an independent board of ...
's Eastmont Wellness Center,
General Assistance
General Assistance (also known as General Relief) is a term used in the United States to denote welfare programs that benefit adults without dependents (single persons, or less commonly, childless married couples) as opposed to families with childr ...
and
WIC
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is an American federal assistance program of the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for healthcare and nutrition ...
offices, and other small businesses and social service organizations. There is a
Rainbow discount clothing store, one of the few national retailers in the mall.
Eastmont was sold for $54.5 million in 2015 to Vertical Ventures, a private equity investment firm based in
Walnut Creek (one of the East Bay's local suburbs).
Bus station
The Eastmont Transit Center
bus station
A bus station or a bus interchange is a structure where city or intercity buses stop to pick up and drop off passengers. While the term bus depot can also be used to refer to a bus station, it generally refers to a bus garage. A bus station is l ...
adjacent to the mall opened on March 4, 2001. The Eastmont Transit Center is the second largest bus station in
East Oakland
East Oakland is a geographical region of Oakland, California, United States, that stretches between Lake Merritt in the northwest and San Leandro in the southeast. As the southeastern portion of the city, East Oakland takes up the largest portio ...
after
Fruitvale station
''Fruitvale Station'' is a 2013 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ryan Coogler. It is Coogler's feature directorial debut and is based on the events leading to the death of Oscar Grant, a young man killed in 2009 by Bay ...
, serving 15 routes that carry over 25,000 passengers a day combined.
Bus service
The following
AC Transit
AC Transit (Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District) is an Oakland-based public transit agency serving the western portions of Alameda and Contra Costa counties in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. AC Transit also operates "Transbay" ro ...
routes serve the Eastmont Transit Center station:
*Local routes
40,
45,
57,
73, and
98
*
Limited-stop Transbay routes
NL and
NX3
*
All Nighter routes
805
__NOTOC__
Year 805 ( DCCCV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
* Siege of Patras: Local Slavic tribes of the Peloponnese lay siege to ...
and
840
*
School
A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes compuls ...
routes
638
__NOTOC__
Year 638 ( DCXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 638 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar ...
,
657
__NOTOC__
Year 657 ( DCLVII) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 657 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era ...
, and
680
__NOTOC__
Year 680 ( DCLXXX) was a leap year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 680 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era ...
The
fare free Alameda County East Oakland
East Oakland is a geographical region of Oakland, California, United States, that stretches between Lake Merritt in the northwest and San Leandro in the southeast. As the southeastern portion of the city, East Oakland takes up the largest portio ...
Shuttle also connects the Social Security Administration Office at Eastmont Town Center with
Oakland Coliseum station.
References
* "How shopping mall became the Eastmont Town Center";
Oakland Tribune, February 29, 2004
* "Rethinking an old box"; East Bay Business Times, November 10, 2000
External links
"Unlikely tenants spur recovery of blighted mall" San Francisco Business Times, March 14, 2005
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eastmont Town Center
Shopping malls in the San Francisco Bay Area
Buildings and structures in Oakland, California
William Pereira buildings
Abandoned shopping malls in the United States
Shopping malls in Alameda County, California
Shopping malls established in 1970
Bus stations in Alameda County, California
Transportation in Oakland, California
Transit centers in the United States
1970 establishments in California
Urban decay