The rise and reinvention of Santa Anita Fashion Park, now The Shops at Santa Anita mall in Arcadia, CA

Westfield arrived at the mall in Arcadia, California, in 1998, and in 2004 it spent $113 million on a wing with a 16-screen cinema and a carousel. In 2005 the place became simply Westfield Santa Anita.

A year earlier, a rival began taking shape on the racetrack land next door: about 800,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, to be called The Shops at Santa Anita.

Arcadia approved it in 2007. Westfield went to court to stop it and paid for a second group's challenge as well. In 2008 a judge found faults in 11 parts of its environmental review, and in 2011 its builder walked away.

The center Westfield fought never opened a single store. Its name is the one on the mall Westfield defended, and how it got there is the part of the story that reaches today.

Fashion Park opens with one department store

On October 14, 1974, Santa Anita Fashion Park opened in Arcadia, California, at 400 S. Baldwin Avenue, across the street from Santa Anita Park.

The Hahn organization had built it for four department stores, and on opening day Buffums was the only one trading.

Inside stood a 30-foot painted-wood sculpture called "Modern Head," which Roy Lichtenstein had designed for the mall and which was dedicated that same day.

Before any of that, the center had needed a citywide vote.

In April 1970 Santa Anita Consolidated, which held about 400 acres in Arcadia, asked the city to rezone 72 of them for a regional shopping center.

The proposal divided the town, and the City Council handed the decision to the voters, who approved it in April 1971.

Traffic was what opponents took to court.

Baldwin Avenue was widened for the mall, and in October 1973 a residents' group called Plan for Arcadia went to federal court to stop construction, arguing that the cars the center would draw would push air pollution over federal limits.

The court threw out the case that December because the air-quality rules the group relied on had not yet taken effect.

A separate challenge to the environmental review lost in a California appeals court at the end of October 1974, after shoppers were already inside.

The other three department stores opened one at a time.

The Broadway opened that November, and JCPenney followed in August 1975.

J.W. Robinson's arrived in April 1976 with a 137,000-square-foot store, and the mall finally had all four of its department stores trading.

Buffums comes down, and Nordstrom moves in

"Modern Head" left the mall at the end of the 1980s, while the owners were remaking its interior.

In 1989 Lichtenstein let its design be used as the template for steel versions of the sculpture.

The stores were another matter.

By 1990 the owners were trying to pull Nordstrom into Fashion Park and push the tenant mix upscale.

Long leases made that slow work: many ran 15 to 20 years, and some retailers were offered buyouts before their terms ended.

The pressure came from the market outside.

Arcadia had been predominantly middle-income when the mall opened, but the households around it had grown wealthier while much of the old lineup remained.

Buffums closed in 1991 and gave the owners their opening.

A plan that October called for a $75 million expansion with about 430,000 square feet of new space, a Nordstrom, a May Co. store, and 50 to 60 shops.

Arcadia changed the zoning for the project, let the mall use racetrack parking for a new west wing, and put $3 million toward getting that parking.

On August 26, 1994, the $34 million west wing opened, with one new department store instead of two.

The Buffums building was gone rather than reused, and Nordstrom occupied a new 136,000-square-foot building.

Papyrus, Williams-Sonoma, Ann Taylor, and Maternite were among the specialty stores that came in with it.

Westfield adds a cinema and a carousel

The wing Westfield opened on October 1, 2004, gained one of its most visible attractions later that fall: a two-level carousel with painted animals, Victorian styling, and a price tag of about $500,000.

Westfield America had arrived in September 1998, when it bought a stake of about 40 percent in the mall from TrizecHahn, the company that had taken over Hahn's shopping centers.

Westfield took over management and renamed the place Westfield Shoppingtown Santa Anita.

By then the Broadway had become Macy's, in 1996, after Federated bought the Broadway's parent company.

Westfield later bought more of the partnership and ran the mall through its next expansion.

The northeast wing cost $113 million, against $34 million for the Nordstrom wing, and it leaned more on entertainment than the older enclosed mall did.

It brought a 16-screen AMC cinema, Dave & Buster's, five restaurants around an outdoor plaza, a two-story food court under a tall skylight, and about 30 shops, among them Sport Chalet and Borders.

In 2005 Westfield dropped "Shoppingtown" from the name, which left Westfield Santa Anita.

In 2006 the mall lost a department store: Robinsons-May, as the Robinson's store had been called since 1993, closed.

A rival center planned next door, then dropped

In 2004, the year the northeast wing opened, Caruso Affiliated began planning a shopping center of its own with partners at Santa Anita Park.

It was to sit on about 51 acres of racetrack land, next to a mall that had been built on 72, and hold about 800,000 square feet of stores, restaurants, and entertainment with about 4,000 parking spaces.

It also had a name: The Shops at Santa Anita.

Arcadia's City Council approved the project in April 2007.

Westfield sued in May to overturn that approval.

Five days later Arcadia First!, a group whose fight Westfield was paying for, brought a second challenge.

Both suits turned on traffic and environmental effects.

In July 2008 a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge found faults in 11 parts of the project's environmental impact report, among them air quality and traffic mitigation.

The city had to set aside its approval and fix the deficient work.

Magna Entertainment, the racetrack partner, went into bankruptcy in 2009 while the project was still tied up, and Caruso pulled out in 2011.

The center was never built.

The Promenade opens with one way in

Westfield's $120 million Promenade opened on May 7, 2009.

The open-air addition ran between Macy's and Nordstrom and started with about 30 shops and restaurants, including Banana Republic, Coach, Talbots, and Clarks.

Vacancy stood at 34 percent.

About nine-tenths of the space was fashion and the rest food, while much of the merchandise repeated what shoppers could already find indoors.

Access did not help.

Macy's and Nordstrom gave shoppers routes through their stores, but otherwise the enclosed mall had only one direct connection to the Promenade.

Westfield later said surveys found that shoppers had trouble finding the outdoor section.

In December 2011 Arcadia let more of the Promenade go to food, raising the restaurant space allowed there from 10,000 to 30,000 square feet, outdoor dining included.

For about six years after Robinsons-May closed, most of its old building sat idle.

In November 2012, Forever 21 left its first-floor mall space and took over most of the former department store.

Din Tai Fung and a second door to the Promenade

Hai Di Lao, a Chinese hot-pot chain, opened at the mall in 2013, its first location in the United States.

In 2016 the owners carved a new route from the indoor mall to the Promenade through one of the center's weakest leasing stretches.

They kept the concrete floors bare, added skylights and roof sections that could slide open, and hung cage lights and glowing signs reading "Eat" along the way.

Nine food businesses went into and around the passage.

Din Tai Fung moved its Arcadia restaurant into the mall that July.

Behind the new door, the Promenade leased up.

Westfield later reported that its vacancy had fallen from 34 percent to 7 percent, while food and services took much of the space that fashion stores had held.

It also said foot traffic on the Promenade rose about 90 percent in the year after the passage opened.

Arcadia was nearly 59 percent Asian by then, and Westfield said it was reshaping the tenant mix around the people who lived and worked nearby.

From October 2015 into spring 2017, the mall added 26 retailers and restaurants.

Sixteen had Asian roots or an Asian focus, including Muji, Uncle Tetsu Japanese Cheesecake, Wing Hop Fung, and Maido Stationery.

Westfield sells, and 99 Ranch moves in

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, the company that Westfield had become part of, sold the mall in August 2022 for $537.5 million.

The center then covered about 1.5 million square feet and was about 96 percent leased.

The buyer, a Southern California real-estate investor, renamed it The Shops at Santa Anita that September, the name the unbuilt racetrack project had carried.

On September 30, 2023, a 99 Ranch Market opened in 33,000 square feet of first-floor space that Forever 21 had used, with more than 10,000 items on its shelves.

Forever 21 closed the rest of its Arcadia store in 2025, during another bankruptcy of the chain.

Under its new name the mall is open, and all three of its department stores, Macy's, Nordstrom, and JCPenney, still trade there.

AMC runs its cinema, Lucky Strike holds the space Sport Chalet opened in 2004, and the mall carries more than 150 brands, among them Books Kinokuniya, Pop Mart, Lego, and lululemon.

The sale changed the owner and the name, and the mall kept operating through both.

The mall opened in 1974 with a decidedly middle-market lineup.

Now 99 Ranch sells groceries on the ground floor of a former department store, and 10 of the city's 25 biggest sales-tax producers trade under the same roof.