In late November, trekking to a grocery store or a shopping mall on a weekend before a huge holiday ordinarily requires steely nerves. But on a recent Saturday afternoon, Orange County’s gargantuan Westminster Mall lay eerily silent. There simply wasn’t anywhere left to shop — let alone shoppers to wander the aisles.
Located right off Interstate 405 just below the Los Angeles County border, the mall’s few remaining storefronts have been steadily shuttering over the last few months, with one of its final anchor stores — JCPenney — closing forever last week. A Target is the sole surviving tenant of this dying mall, with a bank, a Best Buy and an Outback Steakhouse holding down other corners of the vast parking lot. Now, most entrances to the mall are locked and boarded up, with only the occasional roller skater and biker doing donuts in the mostly deserted parking lot.
That’s not entirely unexpected. The Westminster Mall has been sagging for a while. “It’s just been a slow bleed,” said John Sawyer, a bartender at the Outback Steakhouse in the same vicinity as the defunct mall. “It just started with smaller businesses not being able to keep up to, eventually, the inevitable takeover and sale of the whole mall, kicking people from … their contracts or letting their leases run out. It took a long time for that mall to slowly go down.”Some locals, such as the Huntington Beach-bred Alexis Malatesta, tried public stunts — such as creating the persona of mall manager Patricia Patterson online — to boost Westminster Mall’s profile over the last few years. Nothing much seemed to help.
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