BIGMallrat | Retail history of Northern California

Bayfair Mall (originally, Bay Fair Shopping Center) opened in 1957 at a pivotal moment in East Bay history. As thousands of families left Oakland for new suburban communities in San Leandro, Castro Valley, and Hayward, retailers followed.  Developed as a joint venture between Macy's and the Capital Company, Bayfair became one of the East Bay's first major suburban shopping centers and helped redefine where—and how—people shopped. A 1959 architectural illustration shows the completed Bayfair Mall—modernist in design, with dual-level access and clean concrete lines. Over the next seven decades, Bayfair would repeatedly reinvent itself. It began as a pioneering open-air center, became an enclosed mall during the 1970s, expanded during the mall boom of the 1980s, and struggled through the retail upheavals of the twenty-first century. Few shopping centers so clearly reflected the rise, evolution, and decline of suburban retail in the East Bay. Annotated Apple Maps view of San Lea...

MacArthur Broadway Center (commonly known as M/B Center) opened on September 9, 1965, as an unconventional retail development at the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard and Broadway in Oakland. A full-page advertisement in the Oakland Tribune promoted the center as "the most fantastic one-stop shopping and dining extravaganza in the entire universe," reflecting the era's fascination with futurism and technological progress. In this 1965 newspaper ad, Edmond E. Herrscher, founder of the MacArthur Broadway Center, greets shoppers with a heartfelt message on opening day—ushering in a new era of retail in Oakland. Annotated Apple Maps view of Oakland showing the location of MacArthur Broadway Center, positioned off Broadway and MacArthur Unlike most regional shopping centers of the period, M/B Center opened without a traditional department store anchor. Instead, the development centered on Woolworth's and a collection of specialty retailers organized around a highly t...