San Antonio Shopping Center is an outdoor

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 ...

located on El Camino Real at San Antonio Road in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...

. The shopping center consists of two areas, owned by two separate companies. The namesake San Antonio Shopping Center is a traditional outdoor power center anchored by

Trader Joe's Trader Joe's is an American chain of grocery stores headquartered in Monrovia, California. The chain has over 569 stores across the United States. The first Trader Joe's store was opened in 1967 by founder Joe Coulombe in Pasadena, Californi ...

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...

, and a 24 Hour Fitness gym. It was formerly owned by Federal Realty until the land was sold to the

Los Altos School District Los Altos School District (LASD) serves the elementary and intermediate educational needs of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View and Palo Alto, United States. The superintendent is Sandra McGonagle, and the Assistant Superintendent is Ca ...

in late December 2019 for the businesses to eventually be demolished for a neighborhood school for students in the area. The Village at San Antonio Center is a mixed-use property with apartments, restaurants, and 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 ...

supermarket. It is owned by Merlone Geier Partners.

History

Starting in the 1950s, the center was an open-air shopping mall, originally featuring

Rhodes Rhodes (; el, Ρόδος , translit=Ródos ) is the largest and the historical capital of the Dodecanese islands of Greece. Administratively, the island forms a separate municipality within the Rhodes regional unit, which is part of the So ...

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 ...

, with a Mervyn's opening later. Over time, the mall was expanded, with the Rhodes converting to Liberty House and finally J.C. Penney and a Best catalog showroom. In the 1970s and 1980s, Atari Games (located nearby) used the Time Zone arcade at the shopping mall to play test all their arcade games. Most of the mall was demolished and partially reconfigured circa 1995 to make way for

and additional retail shops. Sears closed its doors in 2010, three years after it had originally announced its departure. Sears and the surrounding strip of retailers were replaced by phase one of The Village, consisting of a Safeway supermarket, apartments, retail, and restaurants. A second phase, anchored by a Showplace ICON cinema, broke ground in 2015. In 2019, the shopping center was sold to the Los Altos School district to build a new school intended to be closer to nearby students than

Covington Elementary School Los Altos School District (LASD) serves the elementary and intermediate educational needs of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View and Palo Alto, United States. The superintendent is Sandra McGonagle, and the Assistant Superintendent is ...

. There were also plans to designate the land as a new site for the Bullis Charter School, which had 2 campuses with portable units serving as classrooms, housed at the district’s two junior high schools,

Egan Junior High School Ardis G. Egan Junior High School is a public middle school for seventh graders and eighth graders in Los Altos, California. It is part of the Los Altos School District. Most of Egan's over five hundred students live in Los Altos and Los Altos H ...

and Georgina P. Blach Intermediate School. The original plan was to have the school open by 2023 but the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

has since delayed those plans.

References

External links

San Antonio CenterThe Village at San Antonio Center
{{Shopping malls in California Buildings and structures in Mountain View, California Shopping malls in the San Francisco Bay Area Shopping malls in Santa Clara County, California