Shopping center expansions shift the looks of The List.

Media City Center, Santa Anita Fashion Park both grow

Two shopping centers on this week's List expanded during the past two years, adding square footage that bumped them up to higher rankings.

The Media City Center in Burbank leaped from the No. 10 spot on the 1993 List to No. 4 this year by increasing its square footage from about 1.1 million square feet to 1.45 million square feet. The Business Journal did not publish a List of shopping centers in 1994.

The indoor mall added a 240,000-square-foot Bullock's department store and 70,000 square feet of specialty stores during 1993, said Fred Bruning, senior vice president of Manhattan Beach-based Alexander Haagen Co. Inc., the mall's owner.

In addition, both an Office Depot and Circuit City have been built on the perimeter of the mall since the last List was published, Bruning said. The Circuit City is 30,000 square feet and the Office Depot is 28,000 square feet. These stores are not attached to the rest of the mall.

Two restaurants, California Pizza Kitchen and Chevy's have also opened adjacent to but not attached to the mall during that time, Bruning said.

As a teaser, Bruning added that four additional major tenants would open outlets at the center by Christmas 1995. He would not specify just what tenants, except to say they are "some internationally known names."

Looking eastward, last summer Santa Anita Fashion Park unveiled a $34-million expansion that included a 136,000-square-foot Nordstrom department store, a new wing with 15 upscale specialty shops and a new food court, said mall General Manager Diane Naftzger. The mall moved up on The List from No. 11 to No. 10.

The expansion included a lot of reconfiguring, and ended up increasing the mall's size from 980,000 square feet to 1.1 million.

Three-quarters of the former Buffums department store was gutted and converted into a wing of specialty shops, and Nordstrom was attached to this wing, Naftzger said. The remaining quarter of the old Buffums was torn down. Buffums went out of business in March 1991.

Meanwhile, the three largest shopping centers on this year's List all maintained their ranking from the 1993 List. The 3-million-square-foot Del Amo Fashion Center retains its No. 1 ranking, followed by Lakewood Center Mall and Northridge Fashion Center.

The Northridge Fashion Center is the only mall on The List still recovering from the Jan. 17 temblor. Four of its department store anchors have yet to re-open, in addition to all of the mall's specialty shops. The Sears Roebuck & Co. and Broadway Stores Inc. outlets opened there in November.

Bullock's is slated to open in August, JC Penney & Co. in June, and the mall's two Robinson's-May anchors are targeted to open this spring, said mall General Manager Lloyd Miller.

The mall itself is targeting a March 15 opening, Miller said. The Sears Roebuck & Co. and Broadway Stores Inc. outlets opened last November.

Valley comes back

All of the other San Fernando Valley malls on this week's List have fully recovered. All of their department stores and specialty stores have reopened, sources said.

Unrelated to the earthquake, Hawthorne Plaza is struggling with a 30 percent vacancy rate. That mall has 250,000 square feet of vacant space.

Mall Marketing Director Karie Najemnik said she attributes the large vacancy factor to a transition the mall is undergoing to adapt to the changing ethnic composition of its customer base.

When Hawthorne Plaza opened in 1977, the surrounding region was primarily filled with white, middle-class residents, she said. But now it's 42 percent black and 47 percent Hispanic, and the average household income is $28,000.

The mall used to be filled with national name-brand tenants but over the years many have had trouble catering to the changing ethnic base. Their buyers brought in merchandise that was going into all their stores nationwide and they had trouble tailoring to the specific, changing needs of Hawthorne Plaza shoppers, Najemnik said.

Thus, many national tenants left when their leases expired, and they are slowly being replaced by mom-and-pop stores more in tune with the local shoppers' needs. Many owners of these shops live in the surrounding area, she said.

Filling the mall with smaller stores is a slow process, though, and the transition has led to vacant space in the meantime, Najemnik said.