Making East Hills alive again
| Saturday, May 31 2008 11:52 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 12:58 PM
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At East Hills Mall, customer Ian Payne tries on a pair of sunglasses during a visit to KMA Sunglasses. The store is stocked with sunglasses, including a big selection of high-end brands.
At KMA Sunglasses in East Hills Mall, owner Kanchana Mattlin, with her baby Jaden, 8 months, in her arms, helps customer Ian Paynes choose a pair of sunglasses.
Robert Young at Country Apple in the East Hills Mall hopes the upcoming changes will result in a surge of customers.
Gilbert Barrera likes East Hills Mall for all the wrong reasons.
“Hardly nobody’s here compared with Valley Plaza,” Barrera said one afternoon last week on his way to buying a pair of shoes in the northeast Bakersfield mall.
With any luck, East Hills will no longer be the “nice and quiet” mall the mover and his family enjoy. But how soon is anybody’s guess.
Change is, by all indications, coming to East Hills. A new theater, restaurants, another department store or two, standalone stores, interior renovations and national tenants are all in the works.
Problem is, similar changes have been discussed for a decade or more to little effect. Some merchants have all but given up hope that they will live to see the improvements.
Primavera Bridal has rented space at East Hills since 1999, and all that time manager Antonia Campos has waited for the advertising campaigns and remodeling work she said were promised by mall management.
But she does see hope. Last week, one of the mall’s anchor tenants, Gottschalks, announced it would consolidate its two major East Hills stores to one. That would make room for another large tenant, although who will occupy it remains to be seen.
“Probably that’ll be the start of everything,” Campos said of Gottschalks’ plan to vacate an 80,000-square-foot space at the end of August. “But you never know.”
Lately things are looking up, East Hills general manager Tommie Sparks said. Foot traffic through the mall and car traffic nearby have increased markedly, she said. And several national chains recently signed letters of intent to rent space in and around the mall, although she declined to name them with the exception of a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop.
Until the national names move in, the mall will have to make do with the kind of mom-and-pop stores that have carried it for years.
“Those (small, independent) tenants we have now beat the heck out of a vacancy,” Sparks said.
But even she concedes there may be a limit to how much good the planned changes can do.
There’s a general rule in commercial real estate that says retail success depends upon having enough homes nearby. That could be a problem for northeast Bakersfield, where whole neighborhood developments are on hold because of the housing slump.
Sparks said the number of homes that existed near East Hills when it was built in 1988 did not justify the mall’s construction — and it still doesn’t.
“It should never have been built here in the first place,” she said.
That has not stopped East Hills’ owner, BH Mall LLC, a Los Angeles company managed by Nick Danesh, from proceeding with a number of investments around the central mall structure.
The owner has purchased or is in the process of purchasing several properties around the mall property’s perimeter.
One will become home to a Rite-Aid and a Bank of the Sierra, while elsewhere a new theater is to be built that will free up space in the mall for what Sparks said will become a small department store. Several restaurants and small retail spaces are planned as well.
Inside the mall, she said, new floors and lighting are to be installed, as are big-screen televisions that will advertise mall tenants.
As for what will become of the soon-to-close Gottschalks space, it’s hard to say. Sparks and the regional vice president for Gottschalks said they had no information about what the property’s owner had in mind. That company, which is not the mall owner, could not be reached for comment.
For all the uncertainty, some East Hills merchants are exercising patience.
“We think the pieces are falling into place, from what I have seen,” said Ken Mattlin, who has maintained a presence at East Hills for 10 years and now helps manage his children’s store there, KMA Sunglasses & More.
Robert Young, who manages the mall’s Country Apple gift store for his son, sounded confident that positive change will come.
“I think you just gotta be patient,” he said.
