Westfield Horton Plaza, sold recently to a French real estate company along with the rest of the Westfield chain, needs help.

Many tenant spaces are vacant and more are going empty as leases expire.

The fortress-like design no longer fits spruced-up downtown.

The retail world is changing and all shopping centers have to adapt to the age of Amazon.

Should the mall be razed or saved?

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Horton Plaza’s future: Here’s the full story.

Westfield Horton Plaza was a quiet place during the holidays: No Santa, no Christmas tree, few shoppers.


But there was big news that may mean big changes to the mall that spurred downtown’s revitalization over the past generation.

A French real estate company, Unibail-Rodamco, bought Westfield’s 35 malls in the U.S. and Britain for $15.7 billion to add to its 69 centers in continental Europe.

No plans have been announced but the step comes none too soon for 32-year-old Horton Plaza, which has lost numerous shops and restaurants in recent months.

Westfield had been mulling ideas for a decade or more and even razed one of its original departments in anticipation of a major makeover. But the company instead focused on a $600 million upgrade to its Westfield UTC property.


A panel of local planners, architects, a real estate economist and downtown civic leader gathered recently at the Union-Tribune’s office to ponder what might happen to the multi-tiered, 900,000-square-foot mall that rocked the retail world when it opened in 1985.

Their ideas? A lightly remodeled center with streets and view corridors reopened; a radical takedown replaced by a half-dozen mixed-use towers; or a more organic makeover that somehow captures current innovations in working, shopping and living in an urban center.

“Sometimes projects like that have an unusual life,” said Daniela Deutsch, an architect who worked on possible Horton redos a decade ago. “They kind of ignite and die quickly. It was a powerful thing and I think it can be revitalized and reinvented.”

Daniela Deutsch (Howard Lipin / U-T )


Vicki Estrada (Howard Lipin / U-T )

Gary London (Howard Lipin / U-T )

Gary Smith (Howard Lipin / U-T )

Frank Wolden (Howard Lipin / U-T )


Mike Stepner (Howard Lipin / U-T )

Real estate economist Gary London remembers Aug. 8, 1985, when thousands of San Diegans celebrated on the eve of the ribbon cutting.

“The best party that San Diego ever had was opening night at Horton Plaza,” he said. “I remember standing outside Nordstrom and seeing the downtown skyline. It reminded me of Manhattan. It was the most amazing thing ever. In the moment it was built, it was exactly the right solution.”

Veteran San Diego planner Mike Stepner’s memory goes back even further, to the early-1970s, when newly elected Mayor Pete Wilson enticed developer Ernest W. Hahn to try a new type of downtown retail center.


It would not only reintroduce shopping after years of a store exodus but also reinvigorate south of Broadway, then a no-go zone for respectable people because of all the X-rated bookstores, peep shows and bawdy bars and flop houses.

Frank Wolden, an architect hired by the newly formed Centre City Development Corp., soon moved over to the Jerde Partnership that Hahn hired to design the center. Jerde also designed the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984 and numerous Horton-inspired centers around the world.

“It was the first introduction of ‘experiential’ design into urban thinking,” Wolden said.

Jerde conceived of Horton as an Italian hilltown, where visitors would get lost as they wandered through five levels of shops and restaurants. They would encounter pastel-colored, Post-Modern architecture and a nod to historic buildings that stood there before.


Gary Smith, the president of the San Diego Downtown Residents Group who moved downtown two years before Horton opened, said he had to drive to Point Loma for the nearest grocery before Horton opened and a nearby Ralphs soon followed. Tourists, conventioneers and suburban shoppers came to take a look.

“Every weekend that place would be packed with people coming up from Mexico, tons of them, spending money right and left,” Smith said.

In subsequent years, the Gaslamp Quarter was cleaned and thrived. The San Diego Convention Center opened and expanded. New housing, office and hotels went up. Petco Park and the new Central Library jump started redevelopment in East Village. The downtown waterfront spruced up. New federal and state courthouses opened. The San Diego Trolley expanded.

Today, the Gaslamp and ballpark district are the hot spots downtown. Fashion Valley and Westfield UTC have been refreshed and expanded to capture top-market shoppers. The Internet, Amazon, Uber and Lyft have all transformed American life.


Horton Plaza tried to keep up but it lost three of its four original department stores, one of which was demolished to expand Horton Plaza park. The Gap has announced its closing and other retailers are said to be on their way out as their leases expire. The top-floor food court only has five eateries.

“For Westfield, it was clear for years that it didn’t work,” Deutsch said. “It ended up being a fortress because it didn’t work otherwise (when it first opened). Now it’s ready for a revision and crack it open to the city.”

The “fortress” is made of two huge parking garages on the south and west side, built not only to house shoppers’ cars but also to make access difficult for the riffraff that populated the Gaslamp Quarter in the 1970s and ‘80s. That defensive wall now discourages Gaslamp revelers from venturing into Horton.

“Ernie (Hahn) told me when Horton first happened that 20 years from now, it wouldn’t look like anything today,” Stepner recalled. “He projected it would be redeveloped a number of times.”


Vicki Estrada has operated her landscape architecture firm overlooking the mall for 31 years.

“For 25 years, the design worked fine,” she said.

Estrada offered one approach to Horton: open up its vistas and recreate the original street grid, when Second and Third Avenue ran through the site north and south, and E and F streets ran through east and west.

“You can see all the way through (the mall),” she said. “Instead of mall-type shops, you go urbanist. They look like streets and offices and you honor the blocks that were there.”


Deutsch said early redevelopment plans called for stripping away the colorful stucco and simplifying and modernizing the look but the geometry would remain largely in place.

“It was a palace, clean, state of the art, transparent,” she said. “But in my opinion it was luxurious but dry. It might have worked as retail. My question is would this work for the city.”

A later iteration would have inserted offices and housing in terraces above the ground level.

“They always wanted to have a mixed-use component, ‘Europeanified,’” she said, speaking from her upbringing in Romania and education in Germany.


London said what’s likely to happen is that the new Horton Plaza will include much less retail, perhaps only 200,000 square feet, about 75 percent less than today. Shops and restaurants would mostly occupy the ground floors of a half-dozen high-rise office, hotel and residential buildings.

“Whether it’s the new (French) company or they spin it (to another owner), it’s going to happen much quicker,” he said.

Whatever happens, Deutsch said, the original vision of Horton as a new kind of urban place should remain. “That’s why it’s been such a long, painful process — because we don’t want to lose this heart of the city.”

Westfield Horton Plaza was sold recently to a French real estate company. https://t.co/APsnBe8AC1 What do you think should happen to it? — Union-Tribune Ideas (@sdutIdeas) December 26, 2017


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roger.showley@sduniontribune.com; (619) 293-1286; Twitter: @rogershowley