Westgate Center is a shopping center at 1600 Saratoga Avenue in West San Jose, California. Its biggest stores have their own doors onto the parking lot.
The center opened in 1960 and was enclosed seven years later. It was Westgate Mall for decades, and the roof over the middle of it is still there.
Walmart Neighborhood Market closed the grocery space in 2019. It stayed empty for five years.
T&T Supermarket opened there on June 18, 2026, its first store in California. Upstairs, a 42,700-square-foot box is empty and still being marketed. The food court below is planned to become something else.
Westgate opened one store at a time
Westgate Center opened as Westgate Shopping Center, an open-air suburban center on a corridor that was still mostly orchards, and it trades today as a roughly 650,000-square-foot power center of exterior-facing stores wrapped around a remnant of enclosed mall.
A 1957 rendering by San Francisco architect John Savage Bolles shows the first version: low buildings behind a field of surface parking, walkways open to the sky, and a tall freestanding sign at the road reading "WEST GATE."
Construction was under way by 1958.
The first major store opened in November 1960, Thrifty followed on May 11, 1961, and JCPenney opened on October 12, 1961.
The center kept building until roughly 1966.
For six years people parked next to stores that were trading and walked past parts of the site that were still going up.
JCPenney took about 62,000 square feet in that first build. Penney outgrew it inside seven years.
A roof and cold air, 1967 to 1968
In 1967 Westgate began roofing its walkways and air-conditioning them. The open-air plan lasted seven trading years.
JCPenney gave up its 62,000-square-foot store for a new building at one end of the center.
It opened on March 6, 1968 at 159,800 square feet, more than two and a half times the floor area it left behind.
Hart's took over the space Penney had emptied.
When the work was finished the mall held more than 60 stores, and shoppers moved along an interior corridor instead of walking between separate buildings.
A dome theater and a Montgomery Ward
Century Theatres opened Century 25 at 1694 Saratoga Avenue on May 28, 1969, a freestanding dome at the edge of the property with a single screen.
It was divided into two auditoriums in November 1974, 625 seats between them.
Westgate added its second full-size department store eight years later.
Montgomery Ward opened on August 3, 1977 in a building of roughly 164,000 square feet, bigger than the JCPenney of nine years before.
Nothing larger went up at Westgate until Target replaced it.
Neither the theater nor the Ward store depended on the corridor.
By 1977 the property carried the original open-air buildings, the enclosed mall, the enlarged JCPenney, a dome theater, and a department store, built in stages to different plans.
Doors cut straight to the parking lot
JCPenney and Woolworth's were both gone by the late 1980s, and Westgate's role as a conventional regional mall went with them.
A renovation was under way by 1988.
The bigger change came in 1995, when large parts of the enclosed interior were converted into single big stores with their own doors from the parking lot.
That fixed the anchor problem for a while.
A large tenant no longer needed shoppers to walk the corridor to reach it, and the mall no longer had to fill the corridor to fill its boxes.
The old JCPenney building was divided among later tenants, and by the 2000s Burlington Coat Factory, Nordstrom Rack, Old Navy, and Michaels held large spaces around the property.
Montgomery Ward's building did not survive the shift.
The chain left, the building came down, and Target opened a new two-level store on the site on October 13, 2002.
Federal Realty Investment Trust bought Westgate on March 31, 2004 for $97 million in cash.
The center measured 637,000 square feet and was 98 percent leased.
The buyer kept the layout it had bought and, eight years later, started rebuilding the interior that was left of it.
The $15 million interior
Federal Realty announced a $13 million renovation in April 2012 and said the property would drop "Mall" from its name.
The work ran through the following year with the center open. By July 2013 the cost had reached $15 million.
The program reworked five entrances with freestanding screen elements to make them easier to find, laid new tile, replaced the lighting, put lighted monument signs at the road, rebuilt the central plaza with cafe tables and fountains, and added palms at the entrances and drought-tolerant planting along the street.
Inside, it added a food court near the front entrance, a 670-square-foot soft-play area for children, updated restrooms, and furnished common areas.
The interior now had places to eat and sit.
By July 2013, Barnes & Noble was gone, and Nike Factory Store opened in 17,000 square feet of the former bookstore on October 31.
Westgate Center reopened under its new name on November 2.
The dome comes down
The Retro Dome had run in the Century 25 building since September 2009, an independent operator showing classic films and staging live performances in a theater that had opened 40 years earlier.
The operator lost the Westgate lease in 2012, and the theater closed at the end of January 2013.
Preservation Action Council of San Jose objected to the loss of the Westgate dome and pressed publicly for the mid-century domes still standing in San Jose.
The building got no protection.
The city approved the replacement in December 2013.
The dome, roughly 9,960 square feet, and the 76 gas station beside it were demolished in January 2014, and about 14,400 square feet of new retail went up on the corner.
Vitamin Shoppe opened there on December 13, 2014, with Verizon, Veggie Grill, and Corner Bakery Cafe also taking space in the building.
The facade, interior, food court, and pad program together stabilized at $21 million.
Two empty boxes at Westgate, two answers
Walmart Neighborhood Market had taken the grocery space in 2012, roughly 38,000 square feet of it.
Walmart announced in March 2019 that the store would close, and the box then sat empty for five years.
T&T Supermarket announced on August 15, 2024 that it had secured the space for its first California store at a planned 55,000 square feet, aiming at fall 2025.
Construction and utility delays pushed the opening into the following year. The doors opened to the public at 9 a.m. on June 18, 2026.
The Burlington box went the other way. Burlington was gone from its upper level by early 2024, and the space was cut in two.
Sky Zone signed for 34,800 square feet in the first quarter of that year, and the remaining 42,700 square feet is still being marketed.
At June 30, 2026 Westgate was 91 percent leased. In 2019 it was 99 percent.
In May 2026 Target was renewing its lease at nearly six times its previous contracted rent, and the owner set out a plan for the interior: convert the food-court area into an anchor box.
The food court is 13 years old this November and four of its stalls are vacant.
Anyone using the corridor in August 2026 is walking the last stretch of enclosed mall Westgate has, and the plan is to hand most of it to one large store that has not been named.
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