A dead mall
The city of Sacramento may not have as much to offer leisure travelers when compared to other large cities in California like San Diego and San Francisco, but there is still quite a bit to see. While downtown and Old Sacramento pull in enough tourists, my favorite part of the city is a seemingly tired strip of mid-twentieth century buildings lining the main thoroughfare running through the neighborhood of Arden-Arcade.
1- Country Club Plaza’s main mall entrance. 2- The front face of the mall. 3 & 4- Winco, formerly Gottschalks and JCPenney before that. 5 & 6- The front façade looking toward the former Macy’s store. 7 & 8- The recessed entrance abutting what was originally Weinstock’s store.
There are plenty of mid-mod, brutalist and googie examples from the past century on Watt Avenue to feed the eyes, including the AT&T "Watts" Facility and the Country Club Lanes. But the old school anchor of the strip is one of the earliest enclosed shopping malls in the city, the barbell shaped, single level retail facility known as Country Club Plaza.
Country Club Plaza lease plan ca. 1975. View the full PDF version here.
Usually these early generation retail facilities follow a certain template. A single anchor at each end with a straight as an arrow corridor running between the two with nothing but right angles featured in the floorplan. But Country Club Plaza’s layout is very, well, unique. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s not in a good way.
The minimal brutalist exterior of what was first Weinstock’s then Macy’s and now vacant.
Featuring curved concourses and varying angles, it was obvious that the complex had seen a number of changes during its more than fifty years of existence, which I found fascinating. And when I finally saw photos of the building once housing Sacramento based Weinstock’s department store before changing to Macy’s, I knew that I had to take a look for myself.
It was a rather warm morning in September when I finally made that visit. I knew that Country Club Plaza had been altered far beyond its original look not unlike many of its peers, but this was extreme. There was absolutely nothing that said first generation retail facility as the façade was dressed in the colors of its tenants. And the interior was something else entirely.
1- The northern rear recessed entrance to the mall. 2- The closed off entrance to Country Club Plaza’s underground service area. 3 to 5- Luxury cinemas. 7 to 10- The flanking face of the center.
The enclosed concourses, under exposed ceilings high above our heads, hung over what looked to be haphazardly slapped together storefronts. Most were vacant while others looked like they had never hosted a tenant. The hastily fabricated walls rose from polished concrete floors in varying shades of faded greens, gray and browns. It all amounted to several layers of hideousness.
Country Club Plaza lease plan ca. 2003. View the full PDF version here.
It wasn’t until I reached to former mall entrance to Macy’s that I could make out some of those old school retail elements. While definitely needing some maintenance, the court area in front of the darkened anchor sat in between two recessed entrances and under a single skylight with the dark marble walls on either side of the vacant space’s label scar reflecting the ample natural light.
Having finally seen a sign of something close to the original facility’s aesthetic, I wanted more. And the exterior of what was originally Weinstock’s was ready to provide. Dressed much the same as the minimalist former Marston’s at Chula Vista Center with its broad, mustard colored walls of stylized protruding brickwork, it was truly the one highlight to Country Club Plaza. But, man, I would have loved to have seen the original mall.
Country Club Plaza pamphlet ca. 2019. View the full PDF version here.
Country Club Plaza opened as an open-air retail destination in 1970. Located across Watt Avenue from an earlier built indoor facility, Country Club Centre, it was preceded by a Sacramento based Weinstock-Lubin store on the northern end of the property with open air shops located on the west and south ends of the site. By the early seventies, the center was fully enclosed while JCPenney, having moved from across the street, opened as the plaza’s second anchor on the southern end.
Country Club Plaza’s southern half interior.
By the mid-nineties, the declining Country Club Plaza saw its first major changes. Anchor JCPenney was lost to the recently competed Arden Fair Mall located not far to the west in 1994 before being replaced by Gottschalks later that same year. Weinstock-Lubin, which had been rebranded as simply Weinstock’s decades before, was taken over by Macy’s in 1996.
Still seeing a large loss of tenants by the turn of the century, Country Club Plaza’s new owners embarked on a major re-imagining of the thirty year old shopping facility. The entire eastern half of the building was laid to waste and replaced with the redesigned hodge-podge of corridors and retail spaces that remains to this day. Adding junior anchors such as Bed Bath & Beyond as well as Sports Chalet, the grand reopening celebration was held in 2003.
Center court.
Not seeing much return on their investment as vacancies continued to increase, the mall was sold again just a few years later. The late aughts and Great Recession caused further pains as Gottschalks departed in 2009 with Macy’s scuttling plans for a traditional department store replacement, furthering the center’s decline. The few national brands left at Country Club Plaza made their hasty retreats at around the same time.
Country Club Plaza pamphlet ca. 2025. View the full PDF version here.
WinCo, a warehouse supermarket, took over JCPenney’s original space in the mid-2010’s adding much needed traffic to the moribund complex. However, any hopes for a comeback were extinguished when Macy’s called it quits in 2016, leaving the classic brutalist former home of Weinstock’s to rot.
The northern corridor and Macy’s former entrance.
New owners in 2022 announced a (you guessed it) mixed-use redevelopment for the site involving a full demolition of Country Club Plaza’s enclosed concourse. It is to be replaced with residential, retail and office spaces. Truth be told, it wouldn’t be much of a loss in my opinion. The real Country Club Plaza died when that monstrosity of a rebuild was carried out more than two decades ago.
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