Westfield Oakridge is an enclosed regional mall at 925 Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose.
It opened in February 1973 as Oakridge Mall, with W.T. Grant and Montgomery Ward as its original anchors.
Neither original anchor remains. Bullock's, Nordstrom, and Sears later occupied the same large building in succession.
Borders and Linens n' Things arrived as junior anchors during the 2003 expansion and later disappeared too.
The cleanest way to count this history is not by brand names, because several shared the same structure, but by major retail spaces.
Oakridge has lost or transformed five of them, and each site has been absorbed, reused, divided, or rebuilt at least once.
That distinction matters. Oakridge did not survive by finding a direct department-store replacement every time.
It survived by changing what its largest spaces were allowed to become.
Two anchors and a fast first vacancy
The Hahn Company opened Oakridge as a mostly single-level mall serving the subdivisions spreading across South San Jose.
Its original setup was simple, with W.T. Grant and Montgomery Ward providing the main draws.
Grant filed for bankruptcy in 1975 and liquidated in 1976, leaving the three-year-old mall with one of its two original anchors gone.
The vacancy did not receive a like-for-like replacement.
Instead, the former Grant area became part of a larger rebuilding program that changed the scale of the property.
The 1978 expansion moves Oakridge upmarket
The expanded mall opened in stages in 1978.
Macy's arrived first, followed by Bullock's later that year.
Bullock's occupied a 148,000-square-foot store, while the longer concourse created more room for specialty retail.
The project moved Oakridge beyond its original smaller, two-anchor format.
Macy's supplied an established regional department-store name, and Bullock's added a more fashion-oriented anchor.
The Grant space had not simply been refilled.
It had helped make room for a larger mall.
One building carries three successors
The Bullock's building became the most frequently reassigned major box on the property.
Federated closed Bullock's Northern California division in 1983, and Nordstrom opened in the building in 1985.
Nordstrom added a larger store at Valley Fair in 1987 and operated both San Jose locations for several years.
In June 1994, the company announced that Oakridge would close the following March.
Sears then took over the building and opened there later in 1995.
Bullock's, Nordstrom, and Sears therefore represent three departed nameplates but only one physical anchor space.
That is the central counting problem in Oakridge's history - and the reason claims about the mall losing six or seven separate anchors are misleading unless the writer defines exactly what is being counted.
Westfield buys in and plans a larger mall
Ownership changed while the anchor building changed names.
Trizec acquired the Hahn shopping-center business in 1980, and Oakridge later became part of TrizecHahn.
In 1998, Westfield acquired a western U.S. portfolio from TrizecHahn in a transaction valued at about $1.4 billion.
The completed deal added 12 shopping centers, 11 in California and one in Washington, and made Westfield the state's largest owner of regional malls.
Oakridge was renamed Westfield Shoppingtown Oakridge, a label later shortened to Westfield Oakridge.
The more important change came in the physical plan.
Westfield prepared a major expansion that included the Montgomery Ward end of the mall as the chain went out of business.
Montgomery Ward gives way to Target
Montgomery Ward entered bankruptcy for the second time in December 2000 and closed its remaining stores in 2001.
That removed the last original Oakridge anchor.
The Ward building was not preserved for another traditional department store.
It was demolished, and a two-level Target was built on the site.
This was redevelopment rather than replacement: the old box disappeared, but its position in the mall's circulation and parking system remained valuable.
Construction began in 2002. The main phase opened on October 3, 2003, after a reported $141 million investment.
Oakridge grew from 801,000 square feet to more than 1 million.
Macy's expanded, two parking structures added about 1,500 spaces, and the mall gained a new wing facing Blossom Hill Road.
The redevelopment also added more than 70 tenants, a 20-screen Century cinema, a food court, and a restaurant row.
Borders and Linens n' Things joined as junior anchors.
Target opened after the main celebration in 2004, completing the transformation of the former Ward end.
The 2003 junior anchors fail, but their boxes refill
The expansion looked modern when it opened, but two of its largest new chains were gone within eight years.
Linens n' Things liquidated in 2008. Borders closed in 2011.
Those losses did not produce permanent vacancies.
Nordstrom announced a 30,000-square-foot Nordstrom Rack for the former Linens n' Things space in 2009 and opened that fall, returning the Nordstrom name 14 years after the full-line store had left.
Forever 21 moved from a smaller storefront into most of the former Borders box.
H&M also opened in 2011 in space assembled from several smaller stores and part of a corridor.
The pattern was becoming clear.
Oakridge was no longer dependent on finding another full department store for every large vacancy.
Discount fashion, fast fashion, and enlarged specialty stores could absorb space left behind by older chains.
Sears closes, and furniture takes most of the building
Westfield acquired the Sears real estate in 2017, before the retailer closed.
On January 4, 2018, Sears included Oakridge among 103 stores scheduled to shut, and the location closed in March.
Because the mall owner controlled the building, it could divide the space rather than wait for another department-store chain.
Living Spaces agreed to occupy more than 100,000 square feet and opened in 2019.
The San Jose economic development office later cited the opening while discussing nontraditional businesses filling vacant big-box stores.
A fitness club later took another portion of the former Sears area.
The old Bullock's building had now moved through four nameplates - Bullock's, Nordstrom, Sears, and Living Spaces - while also shifting from a single department store to multiple uses.
A supermarket changes the tenant mix
On March 22, 2022, 99 Ranch Market opened inside Oakridge.
The store used a new mall-focused format for the Asian grocery chain, and more than 2,200 customers had visited by mid-afternoon on opening day.
Unlike Living Spaces, 99 Ranch was not a direct successor to one of the mall's historic department-store boxes.
Its importance came from diversification.
Grocery shopping creates more frequent visits than furniture or fashion, and the store gave Oakridge another reason to attract customers who were not planning a traditional mall trip.
Uniqlo added another international retailer in August 2024.
By then, the property mixed department-store retail, discount fashion, groceries, furniture, fitness, restaurants, and entertainment.
That lineup was less elegant than the old department-store model, but it was also less dependent on any single category.
The sale agreement that became a bankruptcy dispute
URW was created when Unibail-Rodamco acquired Westfield Corporation in 2018.
As the group later reduced its U.S. exposure, it entered an agreement in the second half of 2023 to sell Oakridge and received a $30 million nonrefundable deposit.
URW did not identify the buyer or purchase price when it disclosed the agreement.
The transaction was expected to close in the second quarter of 2024 but did not do so on the original timetable.
On July 11, 2024, URW extended the buyer's exclusivity period.
Oakridge Property CMBS LLC then filed for Chapter 11, and the proposed acquisition and escrow deposit became subjects of the bankruptcy case.
The proceedings remained active into July 2025.
A May 29 court calendar included the debtor's motion to assume and assign the sale, purchase, and escrow agreement.
A July 3 hearing concerned relief related to the nonrefundable deposit.
The court dismissed the case on July 18.
The transaction therefore cannot accurately be described as a sale that simply failed in 2023.
The clearest later ownership marker appears in URW's 2025 annual report.
At December 31, 2025, the group still reported a 55 percent interest and 55 percent control in Oakridge Mall LLC.
Still operating after five decades of turnover
Westfield Oakridge remained open in July 2026.
Its official pages continued to list regular operating hours and an active store directory.
The tenant lineup included Macy's, Target, Nordstrom Rack, Living Spaces, 99 Ranch Market, Uniqlo, UFC FIT, and the Century cinema, alongside the restaurants added during the 2003 redevelopment.
Calling all of those businesses "anchors" would blur important differences.
Macy's and Target are conventional large anchors.
Nordstrom Rack, Living Spaces, and 99 Ranch are large-format retail uses.
The cinema and fitness club serve as entertainment and activity draws.
Uniqlo is a significant tenant, but not a department-store anchor.
The count is striking without inflating it.
Five major retail spaces were vacated or fundamentally altered: the Grant area, Montgomery Ward, the Bullock's-Nordstrom-Sears building, Linens n' Things, and Borders.
One was absorbed into an expansion, one was demolished for Target, one was repeatedly reassigned and divided, and two were refilled by new large tenants.
Oakridge has stayed in business for more than half a century, repeatedly reworking its largest spaces along the way.
The mall kept operating on the same site while its biggest boxes changed with the retail market.
