Upstairs in the old JCPenney box at Northridge Mall, Round1 runs bowling lanes, arcade games, billiards, and karaoke.
Down the concourse sit a claw-machine arcade called Stuffies and a 14-screen Cinemark with reclining seats.
In the old Sears, a 23,400-square-foot Dave & Buster's is headed to the second floor.
Northridge Mall is the enclosed regional mall of Salinas, California, open since 1972 off Highway 101.
The early draw was the department-store lineup: Emporium-Capwell, JCPenney, Mervyn's, and, after a later expansion, Sears.
The anchors thinned the usual way. Mervyn's failed with its chain, Sears closed in 2020, and games and food moved into the space the department stores left.
One of the mall's owners appealed the Dave & Buster's over crime concerns. The Planning Commission said no in September 2025, and the arcade kept coming.
Here's how a 1972 department-store center ended up in the games business.
The Emporium project that scared downtown Salinas
Word reached Salinas in the late 1960s that a large Emporium shopping center was planned for the north side of town. The timing stung.
The city was already deep in arguments over urban renewal, aging buildings, and how to keep its central business district alive.
Downtown merchants started worrying before a single wall went up.
What was coming was a modern, weatherproof shopping environment with free parking and department-store anchors, all of it outside downtown's old street grid.
North Ridge puts Salinas shopping under one roof
North Ridge Shopping Center opened on October 25, 1972, near North Main Street, Boronda Road, and Highway 101.
It was the largest climate-controlled retail project between San Jose and Santa Barbara, and by 1974, after Sears was added, the complex had been unified under the Northridge Mall name: today the main enclosed regional mall in Salinas, California, and the largest shopping destination in Monterey County.
The early anchor mix included Emporium, JCPenney, and Mervyn's, with Sears joining the complex in 1974.
The format was the one developers kept repeating that decade: anchors at the ends, a covered interior concourse, landscaping inside, a controlled climate sealed off from the street.
The freeway did the rest, putting Prunedale, Marina, Seaside, Monterey, and Castroville within easy reach.
The site is marketed as the only indoor shopping experience between San Jose and Santa Maria.
Downtown's million-dollar answer
Downtown Salinas fought back.
In 1973 the city moved toward an Oldtown concept built on shopping, tourism, and western heritage.
In April 1974 the City Council committed $1 million in municipal funds to downtown revitalization, and that July it approved the full plan.
A newsletter called the Oldtown Gazette launched in 1975, and city officials promoted the district on local radio.
Some downtown businesses saw gains by the 1975 Christmas season.
The department-store trade, though, had already moved north, and it stayed there.
Sears arrives late, and the mall stretches south
Sears had been selling in Salinas since 1948 from a store on South Main Street.
That store closed in 1980, and Sears opened a new building at the south edge of the Northridge property, at 1700 North Main Street.
At first it stood alone, a separate box sharing the site with the mall.
The 1982 south-wing expansion tied it in.
New stores connected Sears to the enclosed concourse, and the center became a genuinely regional draw.
The expansion came with a flaw.
The internal connection was awkward, the corridor pattern incomplete, and JCPenney sat in a position that broke up movement between sections of the mall.
A remodel, then Macy's replaces the Emporium
The 1990s changed the interior and the signs.
The mall got a 1990s refresh, and the next clearly documented big overhaul would come in the 2010s.
In 1996, the Emporium name disappeared into Macy's as the decade's department-store consolidation reached Salinas.
Mervyn's, too, was caught up in its chain's late-1990s store-design push.
The boxes stayed put. The names on them kept changing.
Macerich's $128.5 million purchase
On September 15, 2003, Macerich bought Northridge from Northwestern Mutual for $128.5 million, paying with proceeds from another mall sale plus borrowed money.
What it got was a healthy property: 864,100 square feet counted as a super-regional mall, four anchors in JCPenney, Macy's, Mervyn's, and Sears, and 96.8 percent of the space leased.
Macerich ran it the way it ran its other dominant trade-area malls, with on-site management and steady leasing.
In June 2004, the company borrowed $85 million against the property on a five-year loan, floating at first and then fixed at 4.94 percent.
Sold in a two-mall, $230 million package
Ten years later, Macerich sold.
On June 4, 2013, Northridge went to Starwood Capital Group in a package with Rimrock Mall in Billings, Montana, the two properties together fetching $230 million.
Occupancy at Northridge had slipped to 91 percent, down from 96.8 percent near the start of Macerich's run.
The on-site management teams stayed on under Starwood Retail Partners.
Starwood spent on the building.
Work started around JCPenney and spread outward: a brighter two-story center-court atrium, new seating, new landscaping, modular furniture.
H&M and Sephora came in, and edge-of-property stores such as DSW and Ulta drew investment too.
JCPenney moves and fixes the floor plan
The Starwood-era move corrected the 1982 mistake.
In November 2016, JCPenney left its two-story box in the middle of the property and opened a new 127,000-square-foot, one-story store on the west side, facing the Highway 101 traffic.
The old box got split by floor.
New mall shops, outward-facing restaurants, and a center-court atrium filled the first level.
In 2019, Round1 took the second, with bowling, arcade games, billiards, karaoke, food, and party rooms.
After 37 years, the break in the corridor became a reason to come to the mall at night.
The same stretch started the parking-lot restaurant pattern, with Panera opening as a detached restaurant out on a pad in 2019.
More food would follow.
Mervyn's to Forever 21 to Hobby Lobby
The Mervyn's box cycled through three names.
Mervyn's went down with its chain in the 2000s, and Forever 21 took the big space in the leasing wave that followed across California malls.
Forever 21 later shrank into a smaller in-line spot, then closed its Salinas store in the chain's 2019 bankruptcy closings.
Hobby Lobby held its grand opening in the former big-box space on September 16, 2019.
A craft store in a department-store shell fit the trade enclosed malls were making by then, filling former anchor space with value, hobby, fitness, and entertainment tenants.
Sears goes dark
In 2015, Sears Holdings moved the Northridge store's real estate into the Seritage Growth Properties deal along with hundreds of other Sears and Kmart buildings.
Five years later, after a long national decline at the chain, the store closed.
The 2020 shutdown left a two-story building with more than 130,000 square feet empty at the south end.
The parking lot went the other way.
While the biggest building on the property sat empty, Chick-fil-A opened out in the lot on April 8, 2021, with new jobs and heavy opening-day traffic.
A $93 million sale and a new name
In December 2022, Bridge Group Investments and Steerpoint Capital bought Northridge Mall for $93 million.
The package covered 64 acres and more than 600,000 square feet of retail space, anchored by Macy's and JCPenney.
Macerich had paid $128.5 million 19 years earlier.
The purchase came during a buying run that also took in The Shops at Montebello and Antelope Valley Mall that year.
In May 2025, Bridge Group renamed itself Mershops, a real-estate platform built around upgrading malls and other destination properties.
Northridge was part of the portfolio. Salinas had a stake in the outcome.
By early 2024, Northridge was the city's largest sales-tax generator, and more than $60 million had gone into improvements over the previous few years.
Refilling the Sears box
One early public idea for the empty Sears site was housing.
In August 2023, Salinas studied a General Plan amendment and rezone for part of the Sears parcel, one of several shopping-center sites the city reviewed for possible mixed-use development.
The building then turned toward retail and entertainment: by 2024, the owner, Ethan Conrad Properties, was signing leases.
The plan splits the two-story box across both floors.
Burlington is set for the first level, with city permit records tied to its build-out.
Dave & Buster's takes a second-floor suite, plus a first-floor lobby: 23,400 square feet of arcade, restaurant, and bar, with city approval in July 2025 for on-sale alcohol.
O'Reilly Auto Parts, Gohan Buffet, and Smashen Axe round out the first-floor plan, and a 2025 permit covered 10 electric-vehicle charging stations outside.
Dave & Buster's had to clear a fight first.
Steerpoint Capital, part of the mall's own ownership, appealed the project, arguing an arcade with a bar could raise crime around the building and the nearby neighborhood.
That put the mall side against the neighboring parcel's owner, an odd position for two halves of the same shopping center.
The Planning Commission rejected the appeal in September 2025, with police discussing weekend armed security, cameras, and a 2 a.m. alcohol cutoff.
O'Reilly has since opened.
What Northridge Mall is now
As of 2026, Northridge Mall is open and running at 976,900 square feet with more than 110 stores.
Macy's, JCPenney, and Hobby Lobby still sit in major anchor boxes.
Cinemark shows movies on 14 screens with reclining seats, Round1 fills the old JCPenney upstairs, and Planet Fitness handles the gym crowd.
The smaller spaces mix national chains with local operators: Anime World, Stuffies Claw Arcade, Toys 4 U, Taqueria El Pastor, Jocelyn's Eternal Flowers.
Smaller projects kept rolling through 2025 too, including a $1.2 million ground-up Starbucks building permitted in March and a Pandora build-out in April.
The newest arrival came with a crowd.
Raising Cane's opened on a pad near Big 5 Sporting Goods on November 18, 2025, the chain's first Central Coast restaurant, with long customer lines from its 9 a.m. start.
Doors open at 11 most mornings, at 10 on Fridays and Saturdays, and the reasons to show up now run well past shopping: bowling, karaoke, movies, a workout, claw machines, and a food court that stretches from Cinnabon to Saigon Noodles.
