Mayfield Mall was a

shopping mall A shopping mall (or simply mall) is a large indoor shopping center, usually Anchor tenant, anchored by department stores. The term ''mall'' originally meant pedestrian zone, a pedestrian promenade with shops along it, but in the late 1960s, i ...

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

, United States. Operational from 1966 to 1984, it was the first air-conditioned, enclosed shopping mall in Northern California, though it has been an office complex since the 1980s. In 2013,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

rented the entire property and ultimately purchased it in 2016 for $225 million and is known as the company's Building RLS1.

As a mall

Mayfield Mall opened in 1966 and was the first enclosed mall of its type in the region, taking its name from the original town of Mayfield, which was annexed by

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

in 1925. Its original

anchor An anchor is a device, normally made of metal, used to secure a vessel to the bed of a body of water to prevent the craft from drifting due to wind or current. The word derives from Latin ', which itself comes from the Greek (). Anch ...

was

JCPenney Penney OpCo LLC , Trade name, doing business as JCPenney (colloquially Penney's and abbreviated JCP) is an American department store chain store, chain with 649 stores across 49 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. It is managed as part of the Catalys ...

, which closed stores on Castro Street and University Avenue to consolidate into the mall location."Malls of the Past"
MVNick, archived 2007 At the time, the JCPenney outlet was the chain's largest suburban location. There were 24 original tenants, notably including

Joseph Magnin The Joseph Magnin Company was a high-end specialty department store founded in San Francisco, California, by Joseph Magnin, 4th son of Isaac Magnin founder of the I. Magnin department store. Joseph Magnin Co. and I. Magnin Co. were rivals. Hi ...

and Woolworth. The mall declared itself the first enclosed and carpeted center in the United States. JCPenney announced it would close its branch there in May 1983, sounding an immediate death knell for a small center with no room to grow; after the mall's ownership found no way to lure another anchor tenant, it closed in January 1984. The JCPenney store moved to the

San Antonio Shopping Center San Antonio Shopping Center is an outdoor shopping center located on El Camino Real and San Antonio Road in Mountain View, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shopping center consists of two areas, owned by two separate ...

, where it would last until the mid-1990s. Several outlets, as well as a

Greyhound The English Greyhound, or simply the Greyhound, is a dog breed, breed of dog, a sighthound which has been bred for coursing, greyhound racing and hunting. Some are kept as show dogs or pets. Greyhounds are defined as a tall, muscular, smooth-c ...

bus terminal, continued to operate.

Office era

After the mall's closure,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

became the mall's only tenant and renovated the structure to serve as offices, adding an atrium and high ceilings. Under HP, the building housed the company's American response center and some 1,600 workers. However, in the early 2000s, HP opted to consolidate into other office spaces, leaving the mall vacant. By 2003, the old mall was on the market after a deal to sell to Stanford Hospital failed over zoning issues. The property was bought by Rockwood Capital and Four Corners Properties for $90 million in 2012, after William Lyons Homes, which had hoped to develop a 260-unit housing complex on the site and demolish the mall, went into bankruptcy. Rockwood and Four Corners instead sought to remodel the site and maintain the office use, renaming the complex San Antonio Station. In September 2013,

rented the entire mall in the largest lease deal of the year in Silicon Valley. Google is not the only large tech company to buy and renovate a former mall for office use; the headquarters of

Rackspace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in San Antonio, Texas. It also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, Blacksburg, Virginia and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Sw ...

are located at the former

Windsor Park Mall Windsor Park Mall was a shopping mall located on the northeast side of San Antonio, Texas, off Interstate 35 and Walzem Road. It opened in 1976 and closed in 2005. In 2007, the building, of which ownership was transferred to the suburb of Win ...

near

San Antonio, Texas San Antonio ( ; Spanish for "Anthony of Padua, Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the List of Texas metropolitan areas, third-largest metropolitan area in Texa ...

. Three years into the lease deal, Google purchased the entire property.

References

{{Coord, 37, 24, 33, N, 122, 6, 19, W, display=title Shopping malls in the San Francisco Bay Area Buildings and structures in Mountain View, California Defunct shopping malls in the United States Google buildings and structures Shopping malls established in 1966 Shopping malls disestablished in 1984 1966 establishments in California 1984 disestablishments in California

As a mall

Office era

See also

References