BIGMallrat | Retail history of Northern California

When Stonestown Mall was first conceived in 1948, it wasn’t originally planned as a mall in the modern sense. The earliest proposal was for a modest community hub—a supermarket and a few shops lining the roads of a new suburban neighborhood. Parking would sit in the center, surrounded by storefronts facing outward, blending retail into the residential fabric of San Francisco’s Lakeside district. An early 1948 newspaper rendering of the original Stonestown Shopping Center plan—shops lined the surrounding streets with parking concentrated in the center. A far cry from the open-air pedestrian mall it would eventually become. But once The Emporium expressed interest in opening a location there, everything changed. The development was quickly redesigned to include a pedestrian-only mall at the center, with parking moved to the outer edges. This early attempt to separate people from cars—and pollution—was forward-thinking, and Stonestown became the first pedestrian shopping mall of its kin...