The interior of the Old Mill Mall

The San Antonio Road area of Mountain View was home to three (yes three!) malls at the same time. They were, in order of appearance, the San Antonio Mall, Mayfield Mall, and the Old Mill Mall. By 1994, each of them had been wiped away by the wrecking ball. But each are fondly remembered by Mountain View residents and other locals who lived in the area before the 1990s. 

So, I figured why not devote a page to them? After all they had an important part in Mountain View's history and were once the largest presence in the San Antonio District. They also show how retail has evolved in Mountain View and the Bay Area. Malls are typically looked down upon, symbols of suburbia. But there's nothing too wrong with that. You just don't realize how much you miss em' till they're gone.

"Mayfield  Mall-Northern California's first fully enclosed, air conditioned, carpeted shopping-mall-has more than 50 stores, and parking for several thousand cars. Such well-known firms as J.C. Penney, Joseph Magnin, Woolworth's, and Wells Fargo Bank are tenants of this unique complex on the west side of the city."

-From the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce guide to Mountain View 1972

Malls were a new thing when Mayfield Mall opened its doors, especially indoor, air conditioned, and *wow* carpeted ones. Mayfield mall was built in the 1960s, and was indeed all that the chamber of commerce claimed it to be. The mall is remembered by local residents as a nice place to shop. It was very successful. This success pulled many people away from downtown Mountain View and Palo Alto. J.C. Penny's closed both their Castro Street and University Avenue stores and moved into Mayfield Mall. It started a trend. 

The mall was built in a field right on the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View. It was named after Mayfield, a city that once was located between Palo Alto and Mountain View, but  was taken over by Palo Alto in the early 1900s. Mayfield was a city that was about as old as Mountain View. It was a college town for Stanford before Palo Alto was. So anyways, back to Mayfield Mall.

So, you may be thinking the air conditioned and carpeted Mayfield Mall was nifty, wait until you here about what opened across the street from it. The Old Mill Shopping Center was, like Mayfield Mall, a revolutionarily new shopping concept. It was centered around a large indoor courtyard, and filled only with specialty shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues. People called it the "Ghiradelli Square" of Mountain View. (Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco had only recently been transformed into a specialty shopping center when the Old Mill opened) 

Mayfield Mall had its carpeted floors, the Old Mill had its creek and miniature mill. The creek was a beautiful center piece to the mall, along with the waterfalls and ponds that it ran through. The creek was shaded by large, living trees that reached towards the roof of the two story mall. The Old Mill was indeed a beautiful place. It became a tourist stop, and place to take your out of town relatives to, and busloads of people would come to visit it. But as with Mayfield Mall, the newness wore off, and the small stores located in the mall struggled to survive.

Soon, the owners of the mall decided to try to transform it into an indoor European market. Bad mistake. They ripped out the creek and mill, and altered the award winning interior design. The market also failed. By the mid 1980s, the Old Mill's doors were shut. The AMC movie theater remained open for a few years after. The mall itself was used, strangely enough, as Gyros haunted house for those years. Eventually, it was decided that the mall would be knocked down, and it was. A new neighborhood centered around a new train station, The Crossings, was built in its place. The Crossings are a landmark development as well....both they're covered elsewhere in this guide. This section is about malls....and Mountain View lost what was possibly one of the nicest malls Silicon Valley has ever seen. 

The San Antonio Road frontage of the mall in the late 1950s. The only thing that has changed about Sears in the past 45 years is the lettering of the "Sears" sign!

Good ol' San Antonio Center. It was there when downtown was still the strongest retail area in the city. It was there when the Mayfield Mall was built a few blocks away. It was there when the Old Mill opened across the street. And it survived. 

Compared to Mayfield Mall and the Old Mill, the outdoor San Antonio Mall was a second rate place. It's architecture, it's landscaping, were ho-hum. Unlike the other malls, San Antonio Mall was not indoors, air conditioned, or carpeted. However, what it had was a very visable El Camino Real/San Antonio Road location, and a large list of major stores that drew shoppers even when the nicer malls went belly up. 

The San Antonio Center/Mall was not built all at once, was not built by the same people, or owned by the same owners. It grew sort of haphazardly, pieces were added on here and there, producing a strange layout and a mix-match of unremarkable architectural design. Sears was the first to build there, in the 1950s. It was one of the first large department stores built outside of a downtown area in the Santa Clara Valley. Most of the area around it was still bean fields and orchards. After Sears came Rhodes, a now non-existent department store. The Rhodes development, built behind Sears also included a small mall. The mall was not even connected to Sears, you'd have to drive across a parking lot to get to it. 

By the 1970s, things were connected up by a larger mall that had fountains and shaded walkways. J.C. Penney's, which had bailed ship at Mayfield Mall, replaced Rhodes and Meryvn's opened in what was once a bean field. For its time, San Antonio Mall was a pretty nice place. It even had a large statue designed by a Swedish artist in its center courtyard. It had a very popular 2 story international restaurant called the Menu Tree, which had hundreds of cuckoo clocks and funky little robot birds that would all sing at lunch time. The problem was that all growth at the mall seemed to end after 1970, and things went downhill from then.

By the 1990s, the mall was a beat up old place. It was 70% vacant, and J.C. Penney's left for the Sunnyvale Mall. Plans for a major update were drawn up. The mall would be made larger, 2 new department stores would open, glass canopies would shield shoppers from the elements. The mish-mash architecture and buildings would be replaced by a cohesive super-regional shopping and entertainment center. Mountain View residents eagerly awaited this new mall. Things were so close to happening, but for various reasons, including the departure of J.C. Penny's, the plans fell through.

Then came Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart expressed interest in locating in the center. Hoping that the Wal-Mart would resurrect the failing mall, the center welcomed Wal-Mart with open arms.  In 1994, in order to build the Wal-Mart, most of the mall was knocked down and replaced by parking lots.  And now all that's in San Antonio Center is a set of disconnected stores floating in a sea of parking lots.