Fashion Island

The mall that arrived at the wrong moment, and lived on in memory long after the wrecking ball. This is the rise and fall of Fashion Island, and the ice rink that outlived it all.

If you grew up on the Peninsula in the '80s or '90s, you remember it: the sprawling single-story mall off Highway 92 with the strange white tent roof, the ice rink you could see your breath in, and the dark arcade where afternoons disappeared. Fashion Island was never the mall that won. It was the one you loved anyway.

The dream

The story starts on a muddy field near the old Bay Meadows racetrack. The first concept, floated in 1972, was called the Bay Meadows High Fashion Mall, and it imagined Nordstrom as an anchor. That version never got off the ground. The soil was so unstable that when the project was finally revived by developer Ernest W. Hahn, engineers had to sink piling foundations under each building just to let them flex.

Fashion Island held its grand opening on September 24, 1981, under the slogan "Look to us." It bet everything on four anchor stores: Bullock's, Liberty House, Montgomery Ward, and JCPenney. The most distinctive of them was Bullock's, wrapped in a Teflon-coated fabric tent roof meant to signal upscale ambition. It was reportedly guaranteed to last a hundred years. As more than one local remembers, it also leaked when it rained.

What it felt like

At 844,000 square feet and just one story, Fashion Island was a lot of mall to walk. Between the anchors sat the stores that define the decade in amber: The Limited, Miller's Outpost, Waldenbooks, Thom McAn, Oshman's Sporting Goods, See's Candies, KB Toy & Hobby, Radio Shack, Foot Locker, Pier 1, and a Round Table Pizza, among many others. Hing Wong served the Chinese food people still bring up by name. The Wherehouse sold records. A video store sold VHS tapes from behind glass for around a hundred and twenty dollars apiece.

The heart of it

Here's the thing everyone agrees on: the retail was never really the point. The soul of Fashion Island was the entertainment cluster at its center, and that part was genuinely great.

The Ice Capades Chalet was one of only a handful of indoor ice rinks on the whole Peninsula, and it was beloved. It would turn out to be the most durable thing the mall ever built. The Gold Mine Arcade was a dark, atmospheric cave of a place where local teenagers vanished for hours; regulars still name the games, Gravitar chief among them. When it later rebranded as Tilt! with a wider, brighter entrance, the regulars mourned the lost gloom. The General Cinema multiplex (the old Mann 6 Theaters) pulled moviegoers who never set foot in a store. And the food court, Sbarro, Orange Julius, Häagen-Dazs, 1 Potato 2, Great Hot Dog Experience, Pups on a Pole, kept the middle of the mall alive long after the wings went quiet.

The Red Robin stayed busy even as the storefronts emptied around it. People kept coming for the center of the mall long after they had stopped coming to shop it.

The slow fade

The trouble came from every direction at once. The anchors fell like dominoes: Bullock's closed in 1986, its tent roof making the store hot and hard to shop. Liberty House followed in 1987. Its replacement, the Berkeley counterculture store Whole Earth Access, never even connected to the mall interior, killing foot traffic in that whole wing. The old Bullock's space became All American Sports Club, which went bankrupt in 1989. JCPenney left in 1991. Whole Earth Access closed in early 1994, by which point the place was described as virtually empty.

The bigger problem was one Fashion Island couldn't fix. Nordstrom, the aspirational anchor it was originally built around, went to Hillsdale Shopping Center instead, and that sealed it. Hillsdale was closer, busier, and had the store everyone wanted. Highway 92 construction choked off access in the mall's critical early years. And the whole Bay Area had simply built too many malls in the '80s; by 1993 a retail analyst told the San Francisco Examiner the region couldn't absorb them all. That same year, Fashion Island was more than 80 percent vacant.

There was one last swing for the fences. In 1989 the mall rebranded as "The Island," complete with tropical themes, festivals, a farmers' market, and a manager who called himself the "Island chief" and wore Hawaiian shirts for the press. It didn't take. The name reverted to Fashion Island by 1991.

The end

Sand Hill Properties bought the mall in 1995 and concluded that renovation wasn't worth it. In September 1996, the San Mateo city council approved the demolition. Fashion Island closed for good that November, fifteen years after it opened with such high hopes.

What locals remember

For a mall that struggled almost from day one, Fashion Island inspired a loyalty that outlasted it by decades. The memories aren't about the shopping. They're about being fifteen with somewhere to go.

One person described going back years after the demolition and sitting on the floor of the surviving rink building, feeling a tear roll down their cheek at the familiar tile and the old entrance. That's the register these memories live in. Not bitter, exactly. Elegiac. Fashion Island was a mall built on assumptions about retail that were already going out of style, and somehow that's exactly why people loved it. It was the underdog, and it was ours.

People still argue about what might have saved it. If Nordstrom had come instead of going to Hillsdale. If Target had taken the Montgomery Ward space. If it had just added a McDonald's the way Hillsdale did. The fact that locals still run the what-ifs, thirty years later, tells you how much the place meant. And the ones who worked there, at Bullock's, at Red Robin, at Round Table, tend to write just as warmly about the coworkers they met as about the mall itself. It was the backdrop to a formative few years, and that is what people are really holding onto.

A few things that stuck

Odds and ends that say as much about the era as any vacancy report:

• Building the mall took a small army of architects. Charles Kober Associates did the main structure, with Bullock's and Montgomery Ward by Environmental Planning & Research, JCPenney by Millard Archuleta, and Liberty House by Chaix and Johnson.
• Bullock's Teflon tent roof came with a reported guarantee to last a hundred years. The store itself did not get fifteen.
• When Sand Hill Properties sold the mall out from under its tenants in 1995, the Tilt! arcade sued for breach of contract, a fitting last stand from the place that had been the heart of it all.
• In the early '80s, the mall's video store sold VHS tapes from behind glass for around $119.99 apiece, and blank tapes ran $20 to $30. Nothing captures the era quite like that.

Sources: a community retail history compiled from period reporting (San Francisco Examiner) and public mall records, plus firsthand recollections shared in local San Mateo history groups. Memories are quoted anonymously out of respect for the people who shared them. Know a detail we got wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it, getting it right is the whole point.