Retail Watchers

This is a very upscale small mall high in the hills next to the rich gated community of Blackhawk in the suburb of Danville in the San Francisco Bay Area. Blackhawk is home to millionaires such as Chevron and Safeway executives.

The shopping center is a small mall with an outdoor garden area with man made ponds and rivers. It is dark at night and also a deathtrap. I was walking at night and literally you couldn't see anything. You could step off the path and fall into the fake lakes or rivers.

The place is a ghost town now. After the pandemic and the closure of Crunch Fitness in 2020, everything went downhill.

The stores and restaurants closed one by one with no replacements. The movie theater closed on December 3 after more than 30 years.

The landlord demanded extremely high rent increases and refused to budge. In fact, people are saying that the landlord was purposely raising rent so that everyone would leave. The landlord wants to turn the land into expensive residences.

The land is so valuable that the landlord wants to kill all the retail and demolish the shopping center. The shopping center is miles away from any freeway high in the hills. No one would dare drive way up out of the way to go shopping there. I once drove up there to find one of the last 3D showings of the movie Dr. Strange.

Let's see if it gets redeveloped. I am surprised Cinemark kept this open as long as they did. This was likely a property that Century opened in to play monopoly, as opposed to making a profit. There is no way this place would have ever been a profitable theater. Cinemark has been exiting such properties.

I've never understood how that mall ever made financial sense. Alpha's point about it being a deathtrap is so true. The theater was dated and small and never very busy 10 years ago. The new theater at the relatively new (and under performing) City Center mall in neighboring San Ramon must have taken all the business that was left after the pandemic.

It never made financial sense. It was sort of like an exclusive type of a mall, almost like it was designed (location wise) to never have much of a crowd... as long as tenants were willing to be there for the few customers who came around...