Puente Hills Mall

Puente Hills Mall

File:PuenteHillsMall.jpg South Exterior
Location	Industry, California
Opening date	1974
Developer	Victor Gruen
Owner	Kam Sang Company
No. of stores and services	155
No. of anchor tenants	7
Total retail floor area	1.1 million square feet
No. of floors	2

Puente Hills Mall, located in the City of Industry, California, United States, is a major regional shopping center in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles County. It is most famous for serving as the filming site for the Twin Pines/Lone Pine Mall for the 1985 movie Back to the Future starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.

History

Puente Hills Mall was built in 1974 after the completion of the Pomona Freeway a few years earlier. It opened with four primary anchors in a cross-shaped design by architecture firm Victor Gruen Associates. One of the mall's original tenants was the first Foot Locker store.

Two anchors departed in 1996, The Broadway (at the time purchased by Macy's) and JCPenney. At the time of JCPenney's departure, the mall had about a 50% occupancy. [1] The mall was extensively renovated afterwards and now features a 20-screen AMC Theatres multiplex, and stores traditionally found in power centers such as 24 Hour Fitness and Burlington Coat Factory, in addition to the remaining two original anchors, Macy's (formerly Robinsons-May) and Sears. It also includes popular stores such as Forever 21, Hollister, Old Navy, Hot Topic, Zumiez, Aéropostale and G by Guess. On August 28, 2010, the Japanese sports entertainment chain Round1 opened Round1 Bowling & Amusement, a state-of-the-art video game arcade and bowling alley with karaoke rooms, as a new anchor to Puente Hills Mall, marking the Japanese company's first store overseas. The newest addition to the mall, Toys R Us, opened its doors in June 2011.

Today the mall is almost fully occupied and is the regional hub of a shopping and entertainment district that includes restaurants, auto dealerships, big-box stores, and a go-kart track.

The center of the mall previously featured a large cubed water fountain, then a merry-go-round attraction built in 1990, but it was later removed by the mall's owners, Krausz Companies, as they were losing money in its operation. An East Asian-style koi pond replaced the carousel, but was removed as of 2006. The koi were moved to Sycamore Lake at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier. The mall underwent a full interior makeover in 2007, shortly after the removal of the koi pond.

Due to the large and influential Asian immigrant populations residing and/or operating businesses in nearby areas (notably in Industry, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, Walnut, and Diamond Bar), past owners of the mall redesigned some elements of Puente Hills Mall in order to conform to feng shui principles. There are also outlets of the Filipino chain restaurants Max's of Manila, Jolibee, and Chow King in the mall, designed to attract the large Filipino-American population in the Rowland Heights, Walnut, and West Covina areas. Puente Hills Mall also caters to a large Latino population that primarily reside in the La Puente, El Monte, Hacienda Heights, Diamond Bar and West Covina areas.

Back to the Future

Puente Hills Mall served as a filming location for the fictional Twin Pines Mall (later Lone Pine Mall) in the 1985 film Back to the Future. In the film, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) uses the mall's south parking lot (visible in the above photograph) to stage his time travel experiments with the DeLorean time machine. A JCPenney store and Robinson's features prominently in the background. A Ross Dress For Less store can be seen in a strip mall across the street. The scenes were filmed in January 1985. According to the DVD audio commentary, screenplay writer Bob Gale says that several fans gathered at the Puente Hills Mall in the early hours of October 26, 1985, the date given in the film as the present day, to see if anything would happen.

Puente Hills Mall featured replicas of the Twin Pines Mall sign, the time machine, and Dr. E. Brown Enterprises truck in its parking lot in October of 2015.

Nobel Son

Nobel Son, a 2007 American comedy featuring Alan Rickman, Mary Steenburgen (who was coincidentally in Back to the Future Part III), Bryan Greenberg and Danny DeVito was filmed at Puente Hills Mall in 2005.

Anchors

• H&M 21,000 square feet (2,000 m²)
• AMC 20 85,000 square feet (7,900 m²), formerly The Broadway
• Burlington Coat Factory 82,000 square feet (7,600 m²), formerly JCPenney
• Forever 21
• Macy's 152,000 square feet (14,100 m²), formerly Robinsons-May
• Ross Dress For Less, formerly JCPenney
• Round1 Bowling & Amusement 60,000 square feet (5,600 m²)
• Sears 196,165 square feet (18,224.3 m²)

Former Anchors

• Robinsons-May (converted to Macy's in 2006)
• JCPenney (closed 1996, replaced by 24-Hour Fitness, Burlington Coat Factory, Ross Dress for Less, and Linens 'N Things/Round1 Bowling & Amusement)
• Linens 'n Things (closed 2008 due to entire chain liquidation, replaced by Round1 Bowling & Amusement in 2010)
• The Broadway (closed 1996, and expand to the larger theater space and became AMC Theaters)

External links

• Official Puente Hills Website