For 30 years, Teresa Lefranc has been coming to the Village at Orange with her family, strolling the corridors, window shopping, going to the movies and stopping off for something to eat.
During a recent visit to the mall with her son, however, the 65-year-old Lefranc saw a virtual ghost town.
Foot traffic is light. Perhaps as much as 40% of the mall is vacant, and many of the remaining stores have big signs in the windows touting “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sales.
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In a notice sent to merchants last September, owner TRC Retail announced that Village at Orange’s “era has passed.”
Despite two multimillion-dollar facelifts during the past two decades, the retail center is “no longer viable,” the notice said.
The indoor portion of the mall, which opened in the summer of 1971 on a date picked by a psychic, will close its doors Jan. 31.
The owner plans to demolish the 52-year-old enclosed section of the 855,728-square-foot mall but hasn’t yet decided what to do with the land.
“We will begin evaluating a range of options for potential uses in the coming months,” Byron de Arakal, TRC’s planning and special projects consulting director, said in an email.
In addition, the owner of a separate parcel containing the former JC Penney building at the rear of the mall is seeking city approval to tear that shuttered business down and replace it with 209 condos and accessory dwelling units.
Bulldozers will spare just over half of the shopping center’s total space, however. Normal operations will continue for outdoor venues and outparcels, including Walmart, Sprouts, Home Goods, Trader Joe’s, the Red Robin restaurant and other eateries.
Nevertheless, longtime residents said they will miss the shopping center’s climate-controlled portion at the heart of the center.
“I have a lot of great memories (of the mall), so it was really sad to hear that they were going to close,” said Orange native Kim Shield Schmok.
Others recalled going to the mall with dates, all-night lines to buy rock concert tickets, showings of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” playing pinball at the arcade and just hanging out with friends.
“I’m pretty sad about it,” Lefranc said. “Who knows what’s going to be the next chapter here?”
A propitious date
The grand opening for what was then the “Orange Mall” took place on Aug. 16, 1971 — a “propitious” date, an Orange County website quoted a psychic as saying.
A Sears outlet went in the south corner four years earlier. The additional construction increased the mall’s total size to about 820,000 square feet, making it one of Orange County’s biggest regional shopping centers at the time.
It reportedly was Southern California’s first mall with wall-to-wall carpeting, online websites said.
The 1,800-seat AMC theater opened four months later outside the mall.
Anchors also housed Sears, a Broadway department store and a Woolworth’s.
Over the next five decades, however, the shopping center went through a succession of names, owners and tenants.
JC Penney moved into the Woolworth’s building in 1977. Walmart replaced Broadway in 1998.
Initially, it was a bustling, busy mall. But signs of distress began to surface as long as 20 years ago, and the mall struggled to keep high-quality tenants.
In 2002, Rawson, Blum & Leon paid $24.2 million to buy the center from its developer, Newman Properties. RBL changed the name to Village at Orange and spent $57 million refurbishing and expanding the mall, adding another 36,000 square feet.
RBL sold the mall to Passco Real Estate Enterprises of Irvine a year later, followed by a sale to Phoenix-based Vestar in 2013 and TRC Retail in 2016. Vestar invested $30 million giving the mall a new facelift in 2015.
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Currently, just over half of the mall property belongs to TRC. Transformco has a long-term ground lease on the former Sears buildings at the south end, and Integral Communities owns the JC Penney site at the rear of the mall.
Longtime Orange residents say, however, the mall is more than just real estate.
It’s a repository of memories.
In the late 1970s, Schmok would head to the mall after school with classmates from Peralta Junior High, which was located across the street and is now home to a golf and recreation center.
“We would just go to the mall and get Hickory Farms free samples and See’s Candies free samples and go to the pet store and look at the animals and (shop at) the cute little clothing stores they had,” said Schmok, 61.
In high school, she went to movies with her boyfriend or watched people cruising in their cars at the back of the mall. On weekends, she would walk over to the Sears basement, where there was a candy counter and an arcade filled with pinball machines.
“It was kind of a fun little hangout for high school,” she said. “(It) felt like you had a little freedom because your mom would be like, ‘Alright, you can go.’ ”
Justine Burgess, 52, used to hang out at the mall on weekends in the 1980s, watching a parade of teens with Mohawks and combat boots pass by. Every week, a friend who owned a hearse would pick up a group of kids and take them to see the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” stopping off for a bite at Ecco’s Pizza beforehand.
Young people would queue up all night at the mall’s Ticketmaster to be among the first to buy concert tickets when the outlet opened in the morning.
“I brought my teenager there this past March because I wanted him to understand where we hung out when we were kids,” Burgess said. “It was so empty and not familiar anymore. There was a piano store in the mall. Of all things to put in a mall. So, I knew that the end was coming.”
The latest victim
The Village at Orange is just the latest victim of declining foot traffic at traditional malls.
Citing industry sources, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2022 that the number of U.S. malls declined from an estimated 2,500 in the 1980s to about 700 earlier this decade.
Aging malls struggle to compete with online retailers and with newer, glitzier malls offering food and entertainment as well as shopping. Many are reinventing themselves, with major mall renovations underway in Laguna Hills, Santa Ana and Westminster. Needed housing is finding a home in vast, empty parking lots.
Parts of the Village at Orange still are thriving, said retail consultant Greg Stoffel. Four tenants — Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Sprouts and CVS — account for half of the mall’s foot traffic.
But the mall as a whole suffered from bad geography and stiff competition, he said.
The Village at Orange’s “trade area” is limited to the city of Orange and the hills of Villa Park, he said. It doesn’t draw many shoppers from north of the 91 or south of the 22 freeways.
It also competes with the Brea Mall to the north and MainPlace, the Outlets at Orange, the Market Place in Tustin and South Coast Plaza to the south.
“They’ve had a tough time attracting tenants for quite a long time,” Stoffel said. “It’s not a surprise that the owner has reached this conclusion (to close).”
At its peak, the Village at Orange had three anchors plus space for nearly 100 smaller retailers. The company’s current directory shows fewer than 60 tenants, and the indoor section has at least a dozen empty stores.
“Before COVID, we were OK. But after COVID, it was very bad,” said Giang Pham, owner of Abi Nail Spa, which employs five manicurists. Now, she said, “the mall is empty.”
“Vacancies started (to grow) just before the pandemic. Then, the pandemic hit, and a lot of stores didn’t come back,” added Youssef Zeeb, owner of J&C Creative Design, a watch and jewelry repair business at the mall since 1988. “Amazon ate everybody’s lunch.”
Although there are for-rent signs throughout the mall, leasing agents never answered the phones, Zeeb said.
Blanca Martinez, owner of Fiesta Center Bridal and Rentals, which provides wedding gowns and quinceañera dresses, said the mall’s owner didn’t give merchants much notice. Many scrambled to find a new location, and several said they’re paying a higher rent than they paid at the Village at Orange.
Martinez, who has been at the mall for the past five years, said she had to lose money in a clearance sale because her new location at the MainPlace mall is smaller.
“It’s sad to have to leave,” Martinez said. “But the management didn’t have much commitment. It’s frustrating. They weren’t enthusiastic.”
In limbo
Like other malls throughout the nation, developers have been drafting plans to convert much of the center’s parking area to housing.
Integral Communities, which owns about 14% of the mall land, is seeking to build a condo complex under “the builder’s remedy,” a loophole in state law allowing developments with affordable housing to ignore local zoning rules in cities without a state-approved housing plan.
Almost a third of Southern California’s 197 municipalities still don’t have such housing approvals. Orange didn’t get its plan approved until Jan. 2 — six months after Integral filed its builder’s remedy application. That means its 209-unit housing plan should go forward without a zoning change.
But the city has submitted two, one-inch-thick responses to Integral’s application outlining a host of legal and technical reasons for deeming the application to be incomplete. Among them is the city attorney’s opinion that Integral still needs to go through a zoning change and get a general plan amendment regardless of the builder’s remedy.
That leaves about 46% of Village at Orange space in limbo.
“I know people in the community will be unhappy. They lose the convenience of having somewhere to go shopping,” said Zeeb, the watch and jewelry repair owner who calls himself a “watch engineer.” “A lot of locals will be heartbroken. I hear it from my customers 10 times a day. They grew up here. They had their first job here. People are upset. They don’t like it.”
UPDATE: This post was revised to reflect that Transformco controls the former Sears building through a long-term ground lease, but is not the property’s owner.
