A huge, mall-shaped cake was created to celebrate Vallco Fashion Park’s grand opening in 1976. Beyond the actual edible structure itself, the footprint of the gigantic cake also included surrounding lawns and roads. Back then, the Cupertino shopping center was lush and fountain-filled. Inside, it featured a handful of themed “parks” honoring the city’s history, including “De Anza Park, Orchard Park, and the futuristic Electronics Park, each planted with trees to bring a slice of nature indoors,” as one mall blog described it.
In the 1980s, a typical trip to the Vallco mall could include lunch at Wolfe Creek Cafe or spending your allowance at King Norman’s toy store — before it became KB Toys.
But times changed. Shifts in consumer behavior led to the mall being largely demolished in 2018. Developers now hope to use the space to create a town center for Cupertino, which doesn’t have a real downtown.
A long-awaited and controversial multibillion-dollar revamp of the once-beloved, now-flagging shopping center is slated to include more housing, nearly 2,700 units total, but 60% fewer lower-income ones than originally expected. This is a blow to the city of roughly 60,000, which was relying on the redevelopment to fulfill a significant portion of its state-mandated affordable housing goals.
Now it’s falling short of those goals…