Fashion Fair is an enclosed mall at 645 E. Shaw Avenue in Fresno, California. Its east end is bare ground. A fence runs around the pad where a department store stood from the day the mall opened.
That building went up in 1970 for Weinstock's. Gottschalks moved into it in 1996, and Forever 21 followed in 2011 and closed in 2025. The mall kept trading around it.
Macerich wanted the building gone rather than reused, so the city had to decide whether it was historic. The preservation commission voted 5-1 in March 2026 that it wasn't. The walls came down over the summer.
At the end of 2025, the rest of the mall was 95.5 percent leased. A Dick's House of Sport is planned on the cleared ground, two levels, smaller than the store it replaces, for late 2027 or early 2028.
Fresno said no to Fashion Fair twice
By 1965, Fresno had spent years trying to hold retail downtown.
The six-block Fulton Mall had been dedicated in September 1964, while the College Community Plan kept the Shaw Avenue tract to residential and light commercial use and pointed the corridor toward low-rise offices.
Then Gordon L. MacDonald Investments bought 58 undeveloped acres between Fresno and First streets and proposed an enclosed regional mall costing about $20 million.
It would run to roughly 700,000 square feet - about 50 percent larger than Manchester Center and three to four times Fig Garden Village.
The City Council said no twice in 1966. MacDonald returned anyway. In December the council rezoned the tract.
Land planned for houses and small offices could now legally hold the biggest shopping center in Fresno.
What opened in 1970, and what didn't
Part of the bargain never arrived.
During the approval fight MacDonald had promised to work on bringing a new department store to downtown Fresno if the Shaw Avenue mall went ahead.
No downtown department store was ever built. The mall itself came late.
The developer had set the opening for February 1, 1969, and Fashion Fair opened across the second half of 1970 instead, in pieces.
Weinstock's came first, on August 31. Then 25 stores opened over a single weekend in late September.
The east anchor was the expensive one: Broadway-Hale paid $8 million for that building alone, inside a project put at $18 million to $20 million.
Charles Luckman Associates designed it.
From the parking lot, long horizontal masses stepped outward one over another; inside, the steel frame left the selling floors almost unobstructed.
On June 26, 1970, two months before the store opened, a time capsule went into the ground underneath it. The plaque called for opening it in 2070.
Macy's opened, Edmond's set the limit
Macy's California opened 177,000 square feet at Fashion Fair in August 1983, with a food court in the new west wing.
JCPenney sat between that wing and the old mall, so getting from one to the other indoors meant walking through a department store. It still does.
A lease signed before Fashion Fair opened decided how much jewelry could go into the expansion.
Edmond's had taken about 5,000 square feet on March 17, 1969, through the end of 1990.
Fashion Fair promised no more than two retail jewelry stores, one of them Edmond's. Rogers was the other.
The physical expansion had been in the works since 1978.
The ownership bought 11.5 acres immediately west of the mall, then occupied by a drive-in theater, and sold that parcel to R.H. Macy & Co. for the department store.
Most of the connecting wing stayed on Fashion Fair's existing ground, replacing surface parking and JCPenney's garden shop.
The new space was lined up for more jewelers. Edmond's objected in April 1983 and had a preliminary injunction by July.
The landlord said the old restriction stopped at the original enclosed mall.
The trial court disagreed in May 1984 and permanently barred competing jewelry stores from the expansion for the rest of Edmond's term.
The Court of Appeal affirmed on August 23, 1985.
Gottschalks moved in, Forever 21 shrank
The next change did not come out of Fresno City Hall.
The Broadway and Federated consolidation took the Weinstock's name off the east building in 1996, and Gottschalks moved out of its original anchor and into it.
Macy's took the space Gottschalks left, which gave it two stores in one mall.
That December, Macerich bought Fashion Fair as part of a three-mall purchase for $128.9 million, and it has owned the place ever since.
Gottschalks filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and closed the east store that July.
Forever 21 had already taken the lease, but the building sat empty for about a year and a half.
It cut a double-height glazed entry into the 1970 front and opened on April 2, 2011 with a line of nearly 1,000 people waiting outside.
It had about 150,000 square feet across three floors, more than ten times the roughly 14,000-square-foot store it had been running inside the mall.
The full three-floor footprint did not last.
Closing signs went up in February 2025 after years of retreat inside the building: the third floor had been closed to shoppers since 2016, and by then only one floor was operating.
The commission voted 5-1
Macerich and Dick's Sporting Goods wanted a House of Sport on the east end, and they wanted the 1970 building gone rather than reused.
That put the 1970 east anchor in front of Fresno's Historic Preservation Commission.
The building was past 50 years old and still held most of its original exterior, altered entrances and glazing and signs and all, which was enough to ask whether it belonged on the Local Register of Historic Resources.
The commission heard the case on February 23, 2026 and continued it to March 23 so an evaluation could be finished.
The evaluation found the building ineligible.
It had not been individually responsible for retail moving north out of downtown, Charles Luckman Associates had designed similar department stores elsewhere, and the project architect was not a master architect.
On March 23 the commission voted 5-1 against starting the designation, and the demolition went ahead that summer.
The capsule came out of the ground first.
On July 21 the mall confirmed it was safe in management's custody, still carrying its instruction to be opened in 2070.
By late August the east end was cleared.
Fashion Fair at 645 E. Shaw Avenue
Fashion Fair is an enclosed regional mall at 645 E. Shaw Avenue in Fresno, California.
It opened in 1970 with Gottschalks, JCPenney, and Weinstock's, and Macerich has owned it since 1996.
At the end of 2025 it had 974,000 square feet of leasable space and was 95.5 percent leased.
JCPenney and two Macy's still anchor it, with H&M, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and XLanes bowling in the basement among the tenants around them.
About 10.2 million visits a year are now walking through a construction site.
The first phase of a multi-year renovation started on July 13, 2026: oversized shade sails off the Outdoor Village, drought-tolerant planting in, new hanging lights, and the mall's first full restroom rebuild in more than four decades.
Shoppers used portable restrooms in the parking lot through August.
The east end is the slower half.
The House of Sport is planned at about 120,000 square feet on two levels, smaller than the 150,000 Forever 21 opened with, with a climbing wall, golf simulator bays, and a multi-sport cage.
Fresno gets it in late 2027 or early 2028.
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