Indian Hill Village is a former

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 ...

Pomona, California Pomona ( ) is a city in eastern Los Angeles County, California, United States. Pomona is located in the Pomona Valley, between the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Valley. At the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the city's population was ...

. It has been redeveloped into a multi-use retail, commercial, and educational facility and is now known as The Village @ Indian Hill, comprising on .

History

The original, open-air mall was built in the mid-1950s as Pomona Valley Center. Its anchor store, a

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears ( ), is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosen ...

, had been dedicated in November 1954. Inline stores included Long's Drugs, F.C. Nash, and J.J. Newberry. Between 1967 and 1969, the mall was expanded westward. A Zody's discount store opened in June 1969 as the center's second anchor. One year later, the F.C. Nash store was sold to Roberts Department Store. In 1974, the mall was renamed Indian Hill Village, a name the mall owners chose in a contest. In 1979, there were 19 stores and a total taxable sales of $32 million, ranking 39th out of 52 regional shopping centers in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. That year, Pomona's redevelopment agency as redevelopers National Redevelopment and American Income Properties announced a $25 million renovation which changed Indian Hill to an air-conditioned enclosed mall aimed at the blue-collar market with four department store anchors (Zody's, Sears, Roberts, and another to be determined) and about 80 other tenants. The renovation was completed in September 1982 and was described as "the largest single commercial development in the city's history". In 1985, Sears moved to the Montclair Plaza Mall. In 1995, part of the property was acquired by the Pomona Unified School District, which created the nonprofit Pomona Valley Educational Foundation to manage it; the foundation was dissolved in 2010. The conversion of the failing mall into an "impressive" educational facility has been cited as one of the chief accomplishments of then-school superintendent Patrick Leier. The expanded property now houses multiple educational facilities which serve more than 2,000 students in grades pre-Kindergarten to 14. An eight-screen movie theater formerly in the mall was closed in September 2005, prompting the theater owner to sue the school district, alleging that the lease had been improperly terminated.

External links

Indian Hill Marketplace at Mall Hall of Fame

References

{{Pomona, California Defunct shopping malls in the United States Buildings and structures in Pomona, California Education in Los Angeles County, California Shopping malls established in 1955 1955 establishments in California