The Shops at Tanforan is an enclosed two-level mall at 1150 El Camino Real in San Bruno, California, beside the San Bruno BART station. It's still open, but most of the building is set to come down.
The mall opened in 1971 as Tanforan Park Shopping Center, with a department store at each end. Everything between those stores was torn down and rebuilt in 2005, and reopened under its current name.
The rebuilt mall filled up. Then the big stores started leaving, and J.C. Penney closed in May 2025. By then a single developer had bought the ground under most of it, the old Penney store included.
Target is still open in its original building, and so is the cinema. Target chose to stay, so the plan to replace the mall was redrawn around its store. No closing date is set for the rest.
Tanforan racetrack becomes a detention center
Tanforan Racetrack opened in 1899 on the north side of San Bruno, and horse racing was its main business.
Racing came back in the 1930s, and the track later became associated with Seabiscuit. Then came 1942.
The Army took control of the track, and construction on the 118-acre Tanforan Assembly Center began April 7. The first detainees arrived April 28.
The racetrack decided how the camp looked.
Its stables became family quarters, with 26 stable buildings converted among roughly 180 barracks, and the grandstand held offices and sleeping space, all inside a guarded perimeter.
The camp held 8,033 Japanese Americans. About half slept in converted horse stalls, and most were U.S. citizens.
Tanforan closed October 13, 1942, 171 days after it opened. Nearly everyone held there was sent to Topaz in central Utah.
The Army used the site as a training camp after that. The Navy later operated a personnel depot there until October 1946.
A burned grandstand and a mall with three owners
Racing returned after the war, but by the 1950s Tanforan was competing with Bay Meadows, and the track closed in 1964.
On July 31 that year, the grandstand that had held sleeping space in 1942 burned.
The land had already gone to Sunset International Petroleum in March, and through the mid-1960s it drew plans for housing and for stores, until San Bruno approved a shopping-center layout in 1966.
Hapsmith Company bought the empty site in March 1968, and Sears had signed on by June.
The ground was split from the start among three owners.
Sears held the north end, J.C. Penney the south end, and Hapsmith the middle, so any big change to the mall would later need all three.
Sears opened first, with its tire, brake, and accessory store on October 7, 1970.
The enclosed mall followed in March 1971 on two levels, with the upper level pulled back along the central corridor to leave it open through both stories.
J.C. Penney and The Emporium joined Sears in the early 1970s. Fire and grading had cleared most of the racetrack, but the mall kept its name.
Why the old mall came down around three stores
By the mid-1990s, occupancy inside the enclosed mall had fallen below 50 percent, even with the department stores still open.
Target took over The Emporium's store in 1996.
The failing part was the corridor between the big stores, so when Wattson Breevast bought the central mall from Hapsmith in 1999, it set out to tear that corridor down and build a new one instead of renovating again.
That took years, because the new owner didn't control what surrounded it.
Sears, Target, and J.C. Penney each had their own property or lease rights, and each had to agree.
BART was also taking land on the east side for its airport extension, and the fight over that land ended in a settlement in 2001.
The San Bruno BART station opened in June 2003, right next to the mall.
The last small stores in the old mall closed that same year. Target, Sears, and J.C. Penney stayed open while the corridor connecting them came down.
A formal groundbreaking for the rebuild followed on February 9, 2004.
Tanforan Park reopens as The Shops at Tanforan
The new mall opened Friday, October 7, 2005, 35 years to the day after the Sears tire store. It opened under a new name.
Tanforan Park Shopping Center, the enclosed two-level mall at 1150 El Camino Real in San Bruno, California, came back from a $140 million rebuild as The Shops at Tanforan, with the San Bruno BART station on its east side.
It's still there, with most of its big stores gone and plans filed to replace it with housing, labs, and new shops.
After the rebuild, the mall presented a new face to El Camino Real.
Its glass entrance sat between BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse and a Barnes & Noble that occupied two floors.
The food court moved to the side facing the station, and by 2010 it took up two levels.
The racetrack past survived in smaller details: horses and a jockey marker appeared in the children's play area, while a Seabiscuit statue and historical plaque remained on the grounds.
In April 2008, a 20-screen Century theater opened on the same side as the food court, joined to the mall by a skybridge.
By 2013, the rebuilt mall was 98.6 percent occupied. Before the 1999 sale, it had been below 50 percent.
Sears closes, JCPenney's parcel goes up for sale, one buyer arrives
The department stores the rebuild had been drawn around started to go.
Sears, the first store to open at Tanforan, passed its real estate to Seritage in 2015, and by 2021 the building was empty.
JCPenney filed for bankruptcy in May 2020 and put its Tanforan parcel up for sale.
By 2021 each of the main owners was weighing a sale or a redevelopment, and San Bruno acted first.
In July 2021 the city called for one plan across the Sears, JCPenney, and mall parcels instead of separate projects, and set an expectation of at least 1,000 homes.
Alexandria Real Estate Equities then bought all three between September 2021 and February 2022, for $328 million in total.
For the first time since the mall opened, one company held the private ground under it.
In August 2022, on BART land beside the station and outside anything Alexandria bought, the Tanforan Memorial to the 1942 detention was dedicated, with a replica horse stall as part of it.
Two months later, Alexandria filed its first application for the mall site.
Alexandria had first pitched a mostly office-and-lab campus, but the October application already included housing, shops, and public space.
What's still open while the plan waits
The plan at first moved Target to a new building near El Camino Real and Sneath Lane.
By March 2025, Target had chosen to stay in the old Emporium building, and the site plan was redrawn around it.
The redrawn plan calls for demolishing 785,500 square feet of existing retail, everything except Target, the Century theater, and their parking.
The stores have been leaving ahead of it.
J.C. Penney closed May 25, 2025, and Barnes & Noble, at the El Camino Real entrance since 2005, closed May 2, 2026, when its lease ended.
The old Sears building held the Hyundai and Genesis dealerships temporarily while their new site on Admiral Court was being built.
Genesis opened its new standalone San Bruno facility in August 2026.
The approvals have slowed too.
In July 2025, San Mateo County's airport land use commission found the plan's housing inconsistent with airport noise policy, and San Bruno moved to override that finding for the extra 500 homes.
By early 2026, the city and Alexandria were back at the table over a development agreement after talks stalled late the year before.
Neither the Planning Commission nor the City Council has taken final action, and no closing date for the mall has been announced.
Target is open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a Starbucks and a CVS pharmacy inside, and Century is still showing movies.
On the lower level, near the escalators by the car dealership, the Tanforan Public Engagement Center is where people came for the August 27 community meeting on the plan.
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