Country Club Plaza sits on Watt Avenue in the Arden-Arcade area of Sacramento, California, seven miles northeast of downtown. It's an enclosed mall, and its supermarket is in a building that used to be a department store.
The center opened in 1958 with a supermarket, shops and restaurants. A four-level Weinstock-Lubin took the north end three years later, and that store eventually became a Macy's.
Macy's closed in March 2016. The building had held a department store under one name or another for 55 years, and it has held nothing since.
The mall's biggest tenants now are a grocery store, a cinema, a gym, and a trampoline park. The old department store still stands at the north end with nothing in it. A developer wants to turn most of it into self-storage and put 174 apartments on the parking lot beside it.
Country Club Plaza opens on groceries
Food filled much of the south end's identity when Country Club Plaza's first group of tenants arrived in 1958.
Stop-n-Shop was the supermarket, while Gourmet Lane included Frank Fat's Famous Chinese Food, Farmer Joe's Bar-b-que, and T&T Burger Bar.
Sugar Bowl Bakery had a space elsewhere in the center.
Most of that first group opened November 19 on the 29.5-acre Watt Avenue property, which was still open-air.
You parked, you walked, and you ran your errands.
By 1962, Country Club Plaza had grown to about 317,900 square feet of leasable space.
One tenant accounted for more than half of it: Weinstock-Lubin had opened its four-level north-end store on March 4, 1961, with contemporary and later sources putting the building at roughly 163,000 to 169,000 square feet.
The plaza's first stores were at the south end, so its largest single tenant now sat across the property.
The food arcade comes down for Penney
The original 1958 south-end building didn't survive the next expansion.
Stop-n-Shop and Gourmet Lane came out, and their site eventually became a two-level J.C. Penney of about 194,000 square feet.
The nearly $10 million project, announced in January 1969, also added two store blocks on the east side and enclosed and air-conditioned the shopping concourse.
Penney was larger than the department store at the north end.
Inside, South Court had a lion statue brought from Great Britain, while a gazebo stood at the main entrance.
The Southern Garden treatment also used tile floors, Astroturf around large planters, and simulated gas streetlamps.
New inline space brought tenants including Country Casuals, Waldenbooks, Mother To Be, and Pied Piper Toys & Gifts.
Country Club Plaza dedicated the enclosed mall on August 13, 1970.
Penney followed on July 28, 1971, bringing the center to about 503,600 leasable square feet with a department store at each end.
Its south anchor now occupied the site where Stop-n-Shop and Gourmet Lane had opened in 1958.
Arden Fair takes the south anchor
On July 27, 1994, J.C. Penney left Country Club Plaza's south anchor for a new store at Arden Fair, about 2.3 miles southwest.
Arden Fair had already remade itself with a $100 million-plus overhaul: Nordstrom arrived in October 1989, the second level followed in May 1990, and the food court opened that June.
Gottschalks opened in the old Penney building on November 1, a little over three months after it went vacant.
The south end was a department store again. In May 1996, the north anchor became Macy's.
That change followed Federated Department Stores' 1995 acquisition of Broadway Stores, the renamed Carter Hawley Hale and parent of Weinstock's.
Country Club Plaza rebuilds on old steel
Large sections of the mall disappeared during the 2002-03 rebuild, while the two anchors and west-side store blocks stayed.
About 100,000 square feet was added, the common area shifted toward the rear, and the tenant spaces were reworked.
The old shops had run about 150 feet deep; the architects considered 70 or 80 feet a better fit for the retail market by then.
Much of the old steel remained underneath the new plan.
MCG Architecture and Robert Kubicek Architects recommended keeping the existing grid because it already met earthquake requirements.
Replacing it would have required additional seismic bracing and more money.
The remodeled Country Club Plaza debuted on November 15, 2003.
Its redevelopment brought large-format spaces for Bed Bath & Beyond, Sport Chalet, and Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse.
A two-level store becomes a supermarket
Gottschalks went bankrupt in 2009, and liquidation began that April. The south anchor closed later that year.
A plan came together to put Forever 21 into the building, but the assignment ran into objections over whether the chain qualified as a replacement anchor under the center's existing restrictions.
The deal did not go forward.
So the building sat, and it kept sitting while the mall around it thinned out.
Ross and Bed Bath & Beyond announced in February 2013 that they were moving to Town & Country Village, and both were gone by 2014.
Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse had closed by April 2015. Several of the largest spaces in the center were open at the same time.
What finally filled the south anchor was a supermarket, and it only fit after the building was cut down.
Work started in 2015 to take out the department store's second floor and rebuild the ground floor for groceries.
WinCo Foods put about $22 million into the site and took 94,000 square feet, roughly half of what J.C. Penney had built there on two levels.
The alcohol license was the fight.
The transfer would have added another off-sale license to a census tract that already had more than the standard ratio, and formal protests followed.
The Board of Supervisors made a finding of public convenience or necessity.
The Sheriff's Department pulled its protest once conditions were attached, among them alcohol sales only between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. and limits on some single-container and small-package sales.
The state issued the conditional license in October 2015, and the decision was affirmed on appeal.
WinCo opened on September 1, 2016, on one floor. The two-level department store that had stood there was gone for good.
Macy's closes, the other boxes fill
Macy's announced in January 2016 that it would close the Country Club Plaza store, and the store shut on Sunday, March 20.
The doors went at 4 p.m. instead of the planned 7, because the merchandise had already gone.
That building had held a department store without a break since March 1961, 55 years, and it has held nothing since.
Everything else large got refilled. Planet Fitness took 14,900 square feet of mall space.
A theater company applied for 48,850 square feet of former retail, and Sacramento County approved the use in May 2016 with conditions tied to the theater staying open after the mall's common area closed: security had to block access farther into the building, and patrons were sent to the east doors.
The theater also became part of a broader permit approved in April 2017, which set a theater parking ratio and allowed changes to parking, signs, and landscaping for the mall property covered by the permit.
Country Club Cinema opened on April 25, 2019 with 13 screens, powered reclining seats, and two Giant Screen auditoriums.
The former Sport Chalet space had been empty for more than a year when Rebounderz proposed taking it over.
The county project covered 46,061 square feet for trampolines, rock climbing, and Ninja Warrior courses. The county approved that in 2018.
The north end waits on the county
Country Club Plaza is an enclosed shopping center at 2310 Watt Avenue, in the unincorporated Arden-Arcade area of Sacramento, California, seven miles northeast of downtown.
It opened in 1958 as an open-air center and it's still trading, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. most days, with WinCo Foods, Country Club Cinema, Planet Fitness, and Rebounderz as its largest users.
Around 20 suites are being marketed for lease, from about 366 square feet up to 24,900.
The north anchor is the piece nobody has solved.
Tourbineau Real Estate Partners closed on the roughly nine-acre former Macy's property on December 15, 2025.
The plan for it would put about 106,600 square feet of rental storage lockers inside the vacant four-story building of about 156,000 square feet, keep retail on the ground floor along Watt Avenue, and add 174 apartments on the parking beside it.
An earlier version had a five-story hotel there instead of the housing.
On August 27, 2026, all five members of the Arden Arcade Community Planning Advisory Council voted to recommend that the storage permit be denied.
The vote is advisory. The county has not ruled.
The newest building on the property went up on a parking lot. Chick-fil-A opened at 2436 Watt Avenue on December 4, 2025, at 6:30 in the morning.
Large spaces here that emptied out have been cut, re-cut, or handed to uses they weren't built for, and the people parking at the north end still walk past a four-story building that has been empty for 10 years.
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