Turning Food Courts Into Office Space

A dying mall in Los Angeles gets a makeover as Google plans to move in

- Noah Buhayar & Lily Katz

Three decades ago, Tom Petty strummed his guitar while riding the escalator at Westside Pavilion in his Free Fallin’ music video. He couldn’t have picked a more iconic scene for 1980s Los Angeles or that era’s mall culture. Every weekend, teenagers hung around the bright atrium and wandered the three floors. Over the years, the mall faded. Then this month, something surprising happened: Westside Pavilion’s owners, Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. and Macerich Co., said they’d found a tenant to lease the building—Google.

The deal is the result of an ambitious half billion-dollar plan to turn the indoor mall into 584,000 square feet of “creative” office space called One Westside. It’s also a chapter in a much bigger tale about the places Americans go to shop. For all the talk about a “retail apocalypse” sparked by Amazon.com Inc., developers are finding ways to reinvent hollowed-out malls and strip centers. For properties near public transit and in cities that need more housing, hotels, or offices, redeveloping the hulking retail space of a bygone era can be profitable. But it takes imagination. “People drove by and didn’t know what it could be,” Hudson Pacific Chief Executive Officer Victor Coleman says of the mall. Still, he says, “you can’t replicate this in urban environments everywhere.”