Stanford Shopping Center

Address: Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto, CA, 94304

Hours:

10:00 - 21:00 ( Mon - Fri )  10:00 - 19:00 ( Sat )  11:00 - 18:00 ( Sun )  

Stanford Shopping Center is an upscale shopping mall located on El Camino Real at Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California. It is adjacent to the Stanford University campus and the underlying land is owned by the university. However, both the shopping center and the neighboring Stanford University Medical Center are actually part of the city of Palo Alto. The shopping center buildings are owned by Simon Property Group, which manages the property and leases the land from the university.

The outdoor center is 1.4 million square feet (130,000 m²) and includes four major department stores: Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom.

Leland Stanford and Jane Stanford endowed Stanford University with "inalienable land", meaning the university cannot sell any of its original 8,800 acres (35.6 km²). After a drop in student enrollment and tuition revenues during World War II and then the sudden boom in enrollment after the war, Alf Brandin, the vice president for business affairs at Stanford, decided to look at real estate development as a way to generate revenue for the university.

In 1954, excavators broke ground on what was once Leland Stanford's vineyards. Nine buildings housing 45 businesses were built. The Roos Brothers clothing store opened as the first retailer in September 1955 and Blum's restaurant opened on October 22, 1956, marking the completion of the center. Board of trustees Chair Lloyd Dinkelspiel and university President J.E. Wallace Sterling presided at the opening and Shirley Temple Black cut the first slice of a nine-tiered cake. San Francisco department store The Emporium and luxury specialty department store I. Magnin & Co. were the original anchors.

The center opened with great success and became one of the largest sources of unrestricted income for the university.

Macy's California joined the center in 1961 and Saks Fifth Avenue opened a store in 1962. Further expansion came again in 1972 with the addition Los Angeles-based Bullock's, owned by Bloomingdale's parent company Federated Department Stores. Bullock's only lasted 11 years, closing its northern California stores in 1983 and selling its Stanford location to Nordstrom, which opened in November 1984. Neiman Marcus became the sixth anchor in August 1985.

Saks Fifth Avenue closed its store in 1994 and was replaced by Crate and Barrel and Andronico's food market. By 1995, Federated Department Stores had acquired the Macy's, I. Magnin, and Emporium chains. As part of the company's rationalization, the I. Magnin chain was closed, and the location at Stanford became a separate Macy's men's store in 1995. The Emporium store was shuttered and rebranded as Bloomingdale's in November 1996, this being the first northern California location for that division of Federated.