In October 1969, two anti-pollution campaigners entered Inland Center with petitions.
The mall was privately owned, but it looked and worked like a public indoor street.
It had wide walkways, benches, music, open doors, and thousands of daily visitors.
Security stopped the campaigners from collecting signatures.
The dispute later became Diamond v. Bland, a California Supreme Court case about free speech in shopping centers.
This event shows the main tension in Inland Center's history.
The mall was built to sell goods, but it also became a meeting place, an alternative to downtown, and a space for public activity.
It survived as traditional department stores closed and its tenant mix changed.
Before the Mall
The land in southern San Bernardino had been a public gathering place before it became a mall.
City history places Urbita Springs Park on the present Inland Center site.
People could reach the park by public transport.
It had a boating lake, picnic areas, a carousel, outdoor concerts, and a dance hall.
Pacific Electric later sold the land to Ernest Pickering.
He improved the property, which then continued as Pickering Park.
The exact locations of the old lake, park buildings, and later mall areas would require detailed historical maps.
It is therefore safer to say that they occupied the same general site.
The change was still important.
A recreation area connected to public transport became a shopping area designed for cars.
Both places attracted visitors from outside the nearby neighborhood, but they organized movement in different ways.
Urbita Springs invited people into open parkland.
Inland Center guided them through parking lots and an air-conditioned indoor space.
A New Indoor City in 1966
Homart Development Company, a shopping-center business created by Sears, developed Inland Center during the postwar mall-building boom.
The main department stores were connected by an enclosed walkway, though each occupied its own multistory building.
The Broadway opened first, followed by May Company and Sears.
The indoor mall opened on October 12, 1966, with about 70 smaller stores and parking for around 5,000 cars.
The city describes Inland Center as San Bernardino's first mall under one roof.
Its design helped make it successful.
A low, one-level shopping area connected several department stores with more than one floor.
Large parking lots surrounded the buildings.
The freeway beside the mall, now Interstate 215, made it easy to reach from San Bernardino, Colton, Loma Linda, Redlands, and other nearby communities.
By 1970, Inland Center had Sears, The Broadway, May Company, and 72 other businesses.
Court records said about 25,000 people visited on an average day.
Customers came from an area with about one million residents, including places up to 75 miles away.
These numbers describe the mall's early years, not its current performance.
They show how quickly Inland Center became important across the region.
The indoor walkway was more than a route between stores.
It acted like an indoor street where people could sit, look around, watch promotions, stroll, or talk.
This everyday social use gave the mall an importance that sales figures cannot fully explain.
The Move Away From Downtown
When Inland Center opened, downtown San Bernardino still had major stores and busy shopping streets.
Central City Mall opened downtown six years later.
This gave the city two enclosed malls located fairly close to each other.
Inland Center had several advantages.
It was near the freeway, had large parking areas, and had department stores designed for customers arriving by car from across the region.
Walter Schuiling, a former city planning commissioner, later said he regretted seeing a new mall built instead of downtown being renovated.
In an oral history, he linked Inland Center to downtown's decline and argued that both malls could not succeed.
His opinion carries the perspective of a later planning commissioner, though he had no role in the decision to build Inland Center.
It is still one person's explanation.
Carl Clemons remembered a wider change in how people understood the city.
In earlier years, downtown streets offered shopping, entertainment, and places to watch other people.
By the early 2000s, he said, someone asking where the city was might be directed to Inland Center or Hospitality Lane.
His memory suggests that the change was not only about business.
Everyday public activity also moved south into a different kind of urban space.
Inland Center did not cause downtown decline by itself.
Freeway construction, suburban growth, later development choices, job changes, and competition across the Inland Empire also played a part.
Still, the mall had a major effect.
It allowed regional visitors to shop in southern San Bernardino without entering the older downtown street system.
A Private Place With Public Functions
The Diamond v.
Bland case made Inland Center part of a long California debate about speech in privately owned shopping centers.
In 1970, the California Supreme Court supported the campaigners' right to collect signatures at the mall.
The court reversed that decision in 1974 after a federal ruling changed the legal situation.
Later, in Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution protected reasonable speech and petitioning in shopping centers.
Fashion Valley Mall v. NLRB later applied that protection to speech asking customers to boycott a mall business.
This legal history shows a basic conflict.
Mall owners could control the property, choose tenants, manage events, and set reasonable rules for when and where public activities took place.
At the same time, the mall invited thousands of people into spaces that were replacing sidewalks and downtown meeting places.
The question was not whether the mall was legally public property.
The question was whether so much city life had moved into private property that public communication also needed access to it.
That conflict still exists in quieter forms.
Current mall events include children's programs, seasonal activities, and community gatherings.
Public records have also placed county job services and a city police presence at the center.
Inland Center is still privately owned, but these uses make it part of the city's social and public-service system.
Growth, Costs, and Plans That Were Never Finished
San Bernardino continued to view Inland Center as an important economic property.
In 1996, the City Council approved a major expansion plan after reviewing an environmental impact report.
The plan allowed hundreds of thousands of extra square feet.
The city admitted that the project would cause serious negative effects, including some that could not be fully reduced.
However, the council decided that the expected economic, social, cultural, and other benefits were more important than those costs.
Only part of the expansion was built. A new Robinsons-May store and a parking structure opened on the west side in 1998.
Later stages, including more department-store space and an upper level, were never completed.
This adds another layer to the mall's history.
Inland Center was often planned as a larger place than it finally became.
The Department Stores Changed
The mall's large department-store buildings show how American retail changed over time.
The Broadway became Macy's. Macy's later moved into the newer building that had once been Robinsons-May.
May Company became Gottschalks. After standing empty, the building reopened as JCPenney in 2016.
The old Broadway building passed through Macy's ownership and an unfinished Mervyn's plan.
Forever 21 then took a large space there in 2009.
Urban Planet opened in the building in April 2026.
Sears was the last original department store to remain open without interruption.
It closed in early 2020.
This left a two-level building once reported at 264,700 square feet without a permanent new tenant.
Macerich bought the former Sears property in May 2024 for $5.4 million.
This placed the large northern part of the site under the mall owner's control.
A company report listed Inland Center at 895,000 square feet of gross leasable area as of March 31, 2026, including department-store areas under the company's reporting system.
The exact ownership and size figures matter less than the meaning of the empty Sears building.
Inland Center has filled large empty spaces before, and the replacements have used them differently.
Urban Planet uses a former department-store building for large-scale clothing sales.
JCPenney uses only part of the former May Company building.
The Sears building remains the mall's biggest unresolved space.
What Inland Center Is Now
As of July 2026, Inland Center remains open.
Its official directory lists Macy's, JCPenney, Urban Planet, H&M, JD Sports, Vans, Tillys, BoxLunch, Bath & Body Works, jewelry stores, phone shops, food-court businesses, clothing stores, and entertainment uses.
Newer businesses include an indoor children's playground, an arcade, collectible shops, a discount store, and a locally owned clothing store.
This mix does not prove that the mall is highly successful.
Available sources do not provide complete current information about empty space, visitor numbers, or sales.
However, the directory shows that Inland Center is still active and is changing beyond the department-store system that created it.
It is neither a perfectly preserved 1966 mall nor an abandoned building.
One reasonable interpretation is that the site's strongest continuing role is as a gathering place.
The land changed from springs, picnic grounds, and public transport trips to a freeway mall.
It later became a retail interior that also hosts services and community events.
The physical form changed from open recreation land to controlled commercial space.
The rules of social use changed as well.
The available historical record supports this interpretation, but it does not show that every worker, shopper, business owner, or resident remembers the place in the same way.
Inland Center's history is therefore not a simple story of success or decline.
It is the story of a city moving part of its public life into private indoor spaces, accepting economic benefits together with environmental and urban costs, and finding new uses for old buildings as retail changed.
The mall remains open, while the different layers of its history show how San Bernardino's meeting places have changed.
