Barstow Mall is a shopping mall in

Barstow, California Barstow is a city in San Bernardino County, California, in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Located in the Inland Empire region of California, the population was 25,415 at the 2020 census. Barstow is an important crossroads for the In ...

. It was formerly anchored by

Kmart Kmart Corporation ( , doing business as Kmart and stylized as kmart) is an American retail company that owns a chain of big box department stores. The company is headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, United States. The company was inc ...

and

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...

History

The Kmart store was originally slated to be W. T. Grant, which withdrew from the mall plans due to the chain's filing for bankruptcy. This resulted in the mall being only the second in the country to have both a Kmart and a Sears in it. Ernest Hahn was the mall's developer. The mall, previously delayed due to financial issues, began construction in March 1976, and was planned to have 144,600 sq ft of space including both anchors and 40 interior tenants. Sears was the first store to open at the mall, on October 20, 1976. The mall had its grand opening on November 19, 1976, with tenants including Rude's Department Store, Karl's Shoes,

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 genera ...

, Hartfield's Dress Shop, a card and gift shop, and several smaller clothing and food tenants. The mall suffered in the early 1990s, with the closure of Kmart in November 1992, followed by the closure of Sears in January 1993. The Sears building was later occupied by a

Big Lots Big Lots Stores, Inc. (stylized as Big Lots!) is an American retail company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio with over 1,400 stores in 47 states. History The Big Lots chain traces its history back to 1967 when Consolidated Stores Corporation ...

discount store, which closed in 2003. In August 2010, renovations began on the mall at the Sears end for conversion to office space.

References

Barstow, California Shopping malls in San Bernardino County, California Shopping malls established in 1975 {{US-mall-stub