Chula Vista Center is an open-air mall at 555 Broadway in Chula Vista, California. A block of Fifth Avenue used to run through the property. It's not there now.
The center opened in 1962. Sears opened across Fifth Avenue in 1966, and anyone walking from the mall's other department stores to Sears crossed live traffic to do it.
The mall spent 22 years like that. The city closed the block in 1988 so the mall could connect its promenade to Sears, and the street became a shopping floor.
Sears closed in February 2020. Nothing retail took its place. Today 244 townhomes are going up on the old Sears land. The mall's new owner is working on an overhaul of the east side.
Chula Vista Center grew across a street
The Mallway was the center's spine: about 640 feet long and 40 feet wide, partly shaded by curved structures, with a fountain copied from one at the Alhambra in Granada.
Around it sat a low-rise outdoor complex on the former Vista Square wartime housing tract, which the city had cleared and sold for regional shopping.
The project had been called Vista Plaza before Chula Vista Center officially opened at 555 Broadway in Chula Vista, California, on November 12, 1962.
It has never been roofed over. Macy's, JCPenney, Burlington, Curacao, and AMC trade in the open air there today.
The center opened with 15 stores and had 26 by late 1964, because it arrived in phases.
JCPenney came on November 7, 1963 and brought the city its first escalator. Sears took the longest.
Construction started in March 1965, and the store and its auto center opened on February 21, 1966.
That gave the center three department stores and a problem.
The plan the City Council approved in April 1960 covered the old housing tract plus land east of Fifth Avenue, and Fifth Avenue was a working public street.
Sears sat on the far side of it. Getting there from JCPenney meant crossing a road.
The 1978 test closure of Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue became the obstacle as soon as the center wanted to grow.
Expansion talk in December 1976 already included closing the street and moving the Boys Club off the 1.6 acres it leased.
In December 1977 the City Council told staff to look at rezoning houses nearby and at landing another department store, and closing Fifth was part of that as well.
So the city tried it.
In 1978 the block between H and I was shut to traffic as a test, and traffic on Broadway rose about 16 percent while the trial ran.
Buffums, the anchor the expansion needed, declined to join the center even after the council asked it to reconsider.
Walker Scott looked at a scheme that left the street where it was.
Nothing got built, and the center settled for a $600,000 remodel in 1979 instead, polishing the outdoor mall while Sears stayed across Fifth Avenue.
More than 100 residents fought the closing
By January 1987 two of the center's three department stores were ready to leave.
Sales had been flat since 1980, and The Broadway and JCPenney had been hit especially hard after Plaza Bonita opened in National City in 1981.
They told the city they would go unless the place was rebuilt.
Homart, which by then was leading the redevelopment, brought a plan that answered them and reopened the old argument in the same stroke.
It added about 140,000 square feet and closed Fifth Avenue so Sears could be joined to the rest of the center.
The city's redevelopment commitment ran up to $7.5 million.
More than 100 residents filled a Planning Commission hearing on January 28, 1987 and opposed the closing.
The objection was the traffic it would push onto the surrounding streets, and a tunnel under the shopping center came up as a way to keep the road and still get the expansion.
Homart would not build the $42 million project with Fifth open.
The mayor supported Homart's plan, the redevelopment agency backed the project, and the closing went into the project.
The project also took the Boys & Girls Club, whose clubhouse of about 30 years stood inside the footprint on Fifth.
It had to go up somewhere else, and the city and school officials went looking at a site by Chula Vista High School.
What the closed block was rebuilt as
Work started on August 28, 1987.
Homart had hired Jerde Partnership that January to redraw the center, and the promenade that curved around The Broadway now carried on about 600 feet east and ended at Sears, which made the whole specialty-store route about a quarter of a mile.
Roughly 144,000 square feet of new retail went into a center that had about 680,000.
All of it stayed outdoors.
Trellises arched over stretches of both promenades, pavilions framed the department-store entrances, and the second-floor food court sat around a clock and elevator tower.
Kola Kron, a robot, poured soft drinks there. Pastel stucco, tile, glass block, benches, and planted seating filled in the rest.
The Broadway fought the new treatment for its store.
One mustard-colored version drew complaints and was repainted in a quieter pastel, while the taller part of the building was left alone and still looked separate from everything new around it.
Both ends of the closed block became cul-de-sacs, which changed how cars moved around H and I. The center was dedicated on October 27, 1988.
Fifth Avenue between H and I was a shopping floor now.
Sears closes and the east side leaves retail
Sears closed in February 2020, 54 years after it opened and 32 years after the mall took out a street to reach it.
Its parent had announced the closing that November in a national round, and no retailer replaced it.
In January 2021 the empty store at 565 Broadway opened as a vaccination superstation, running 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily and set up for as many as 5,000 vaccinations a day.
Then the ground itself changed use. Around 1990 the mall's developer had wanted housing at the edges of the property, and the city refused it.
Housing arrived on the Sears side anyway.
CalWest and IHP Capital Partners bought 13.4 acres in August 2023, and the approved Citrus Bay project puts 244 for-sale townhomes where one department store used to trade.
The rest of the old Sears site went to medicine and a park.
Sharp Rees-Stealy opened a three-story clinic at 480 H Street on January 6, 2026, with about 75,000 square feet of urgent care, pharmacy, laboratory, and imaging rooms, with a second-floor bridge to a 375-space garage.
A half-acre park started construction on March 5, 2026 near I Street and Fifth Avenue, on the corner the closed block used to run into.
The anchor that the street was closed for is gone, and the land behind it is residential.
Primestor draws a new road into Chula Vista Center
Primestor Development bought the mall in December 2024, paying about $86 million for 32 acres.
It cleaned the place up, ran market research, and by March 2026 had drawn a plan that takes retail space out of the east side.
The March 2026 leasing plan puts the structural work near AMC: demolition of some shop space, more parking in its place, an anchor position rebuilt, a restaurant grouping, and a vehicle-pedestrian promenade cut down the east side of the property.
A vacant anchor is being marketed to grocery operators. As of April 9, 2026, Primestor had talked to city staff and submitted nothing for approval.
So the promenade exists on paper. The mall itself is open and outdoors, and parking across its 2,517 spaces is free.
Several second-floor suites are empty.
Every other Sunday from September 27 through December 20, 2026, the outdoor space between Macy's and Burlington holds a craft market.
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