For most of the last three decades, Hawthorne Plaza has been the thing everyone in town has an opinion about but nobody actually visits. It sits on 35 acres along Hawthorne Boulevard between 120th Street and El Segundo Boulevard, closed since the late 1990s, and this month it is finally being torn down under a court order that gave its owners no more room to stall. Here is the part that matters more than the demolition itself: Hawthorne did not wait around for that to happen. The town's actual weekly rhythm, the farmers market, the brewery calendar, the Sunday morning routines, already rebuilt itself somewhere else entirely, and it did so without a single square foot of the mall's footprint.
That is not a small distinction. It changes what this demolition actually means for the people who live here.
A building more famous for film crews than for shopping
Hawthorne Plaza opened in 1977 with three anchor stores, Montgomery Ward, The Broadway, and J.C. Penney, at the height of an aerospace-fueled local economy. When that industry contracted through the 1980s and 90s, the mall's customer base thinned out along with it, and shoppers increasingly drove to South Bay Galleria, Manhattan Village, or Del Amo Fashion Center instead. By the time it closed for good in the late 1990s, Hawthorne Plaza had already spent years losing ground to malls a few miles away.
What happened next is the part longtime residents actually talk about. Gutted and mostly empty, the building became one of the more recognizable abandoned interiors in film and television, showing up in Minority Report, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Gone Girl, and Westworld, along with music videos for Taylor Swift and Drake. A dead shopping mall spent more years as a backdrop for other people's stories than it ever spent as a functioning part of this one. That is the kind of detail that tells you something real about how long this building has been sitting there doing nothing for the people who actually live around it.
Meanwhile, parts of the property found their own quiet second lives. The old Montgomery Ward space now houses a police training center. The Hawthorne School District runs an administrative annex on the north side. The southern parking structure and its adjacent lot have spent recent years storing Tesla vehicles. None of that is redevelopment. It is a 35-acre property finding small, practical uses for itself while the bigger question of what it should become went unanswered for twenty years.
Every plan for this site has failed before this one
If you have lived in Hawthorne for any stretch of time, you have probably heard at least one version of "the mall is finally getting fixed." The pattern is worth laying out plainly, because it explains why this year feels different:
- 2006: A filing proposed roughly 1.5 million square feet of office, retail, restaurant and related uses, plus 610 residential units. Nothing broke ground.
- 2014: Word surfaced that Hawthorne Plaza would be revitalized as an outlet mall.
- 2016: The city adopted the Downtown Hawthorne Specific Plan, designated the site "Transformative Project T1," and environmental reports estimated about 608 housing units and 2.5 million square feet of nonresidential development. A $500 million redevelopment plan followed and was approved by the City Council.
- 2018: The city withdrew that approval after construction never began.
Two decades of proposals, one approved and later pulled back, and not a single shovel in the ground. That history is why this year's deadline landed differently. In September 2025, the city secured a permanent court injunction against the owners, the Charles Company and its affiliate M&A Gabaee, requiring redevelopment or demolition of the property no later than August 31, 2026. If that deadline passed without action, the city said it would ask the court to appoint a receiver to take control of the site. This was not a request. It was an order, and according to current tracking of the property, demolition is now underway in phases moving south to north across the site, with completion expected before the end of the month.
What actually filled the calendar this year
Here is where the real story sits, not in what is coming down, but in what already went up somewhere else. None of it required the mall's redevelopment to happen first.
The city launched a brand-new Hawthorne Certified Farmers' Market this year, debuting April 19 at the Betty Ainsworth Sports Center parking lot on El Segundo Boulevard. It runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and by its third weekend the city had already added live music and expanded the vendor mix. One operator involved in running it put it simply, saying the market has "brought a wonderful energy to Hawthorne, creating a space where neighbors can connect." That is not marketing copy written for a press release about a mall that might exist someday. It is a description of something that is already happening on Sundays, a mile from the demolition site.
A few blocks over on the same corridor, Common Space Brewery has built out a weekly calendar dense enough that it functions as its own small civic institution. There is a Wednesday 5K Run Club, a free monthly comedy night on the first Wednesday hosted by Dave Williamson and Sean McBride, a Silent Book Club on the second Monday of the month, and an LA Synth Club jam session on the first. Food trucks rotate through most nights, from Tripp Burgers to Gochu Gang BBQ to Victory Shawarma. Through early September, the taproom is running watch parties for the Leagues Cup, and an Oktoberfest is already on the books for later this fall. This is not a brewery waiting for foot traffic from a rebuilt shopping center. It has built its own draw entirely on its own terms.
Even the city's other community programming this year points the same direction. Hawthorne Eats, the city's first restaurant week back in January, drew participation from local restaurants specifically framed around building customer engagement and long-term visibility for businesses that already exist here, not around anchoring future retail near the old mall.
The reason none of this waited
Put these pieces next to each other and the pattern is hard to miss. Hawthorne's actual gathering places this year, the farmers market, the brewery, the restaurant week turnout, all cluster along El Segundo Boulevard, not Hawthorne Boulevard where the mall sits. That is not a coincidence of geography. It is what happens when a town stops treating one large, stalled property as the thing standing between it and a livelier weekly rhythm, and instead builds that rhythm somewhere it can actually control.
The mall's failure to relaunch for twenty years was never really a mystery. Redevelopment on that scale needs financing, entitlements, and an owner willing to move, and none of that aligned until a judge set a hard deadline. Hawthorne's daily life, on the other hand, needed a parking lot, a Sunday morning, and a handful of vendors willing to show up. One of those things took two decades. The other took a spring.
What to actually expect this month
If you live anywhere near Hawthorne Boulevard between 120th Street and El Segundo Boulevard, expect the visible signs of active demolition through the rest of August, equipment on site, fencing, and likely some truck traffic as work moves from the south end of the property northward. None of that overlaps with the Sunday market on El Segundo Boulevard or the brewery's weeknight programming a few blocks away, so the parts of the week residents actually rely on should carry on uninterrupted.
What eventually replaces the mall is still an open question. Given the site's history, from a 2006 mixed-use filing to a withdrawn $500 million plan in 2018, it would be reasonable to expect that whatever comes next takes its own time to materialize. What is not in question is that Hawthorne is not waiting on it. The town already found a way to build a livelier calendar without it, and that is worth remembering the next time someone tells you Hawthorne is still waiting on that mall to come back.
If you are watching this stretch of Hawthorne Boulevard change shape and wondering what it means for property values, prep timelines, or where the next wave of interest in this part of the South Bay might land, Tim Meza is a good person to ask. Schedule a Consultation whenever you are ready to talk specifics.
