The Town That Tore Down Its Main Street for Hawthorne Plaza — Then Sued to Tear It Down

Hawthorne Plaza was open for twenty-two years and empty for twenty-seven. Why did a dead mall outlast every plan to replace it? In 1974, the city of Hawthorne, California, lifted a church off its foundation and sold it for $200. The town was clearing its own downtown for a shopping mall, and it borrowed against property taxes the mall hadn't paid yet. In February 1977, Hawthorne Plaza opened with The Broadway, J.C. Penney and Montgomery Ward under one roof, a six-screen movie theater and a garage for more than four thousand cars. Its backers talked about a hundred million dollars in sales a year. The mall ran on two kinds of money: the paychecks of the aerospace plants around it, and a city's bet on taxes it hadn't collected yet. This film follows both. What Proposition 13 did to that bet fifteen months after opening day. What happened in Hawthorne on April 23, 1991. How the anchors went, one after another, and why a mall that cost about $50 million to build sold in 2001 for $7 million. Then come the empty years: film crews in the silent corridors, a rocket company moving in two miles away, an outlet mall that was announced and never opened, a half-billion-dollar plan, a house in wine country at the center of a federal bribery case, and a city that spent nearly five years in court trying to make someone tear its mall down. The story is pieced together from the Hawthorne Historical Society's chronicle, local history writing, federal prosecutors' records, the city's announcements on the court orders, state economic reports and decades of press coverage. It tries to be fair to everyone in it: the city, the owners, the merchants across the street, and the families who spent their Saturdays there. The conclusions are yours to draw. If you shopped or worked at Hawthorne Plaza, tell us which store was yours, and what year. Chapters: 0:00 Open 22 Years, Empty 27 2:56 A Church Sold for $200 7:20 Count Nate Cuts the Ribbon 11:20 Paychecks From the Airplane Plants 14:16 June 6, 1978: Proposition 13 17:36 Three Malls on One Boulevard 20:29 April 23, 1991 23:34 $27 Million, Not $100 Million 27:15 The Last Anchor 30:07 Sold for $7 Million 34:38 The Rocket Factory Down the Road 38:40 A House in Wine Country 42:00 Broken Promises, Parked Cars 45:49 The Judge's Calendar Selected sources: Hawthorne Historical Society — The Story of The Hawthorne Plaza Sam Gnerre — Hawthorne Plaza, South Bay History, Daily Breeze (2010) U.S. Attorney's Office, Central District of California — Developer Sentenced to 4 Years in Federal Prison for Offering a Million-Dollar Bribe to Secure a $45 Million L.A. County Lease (2022) U.S. Attorney's Office, Central District of California — Real Estate Developer Arrested in Federal Bribery Case (2018) California Legislative Analyst's Office — California's Regional Economies (1998) California Legislative Analyst's Office — Understanding California's Property Taxes (2012) Christian Science Monitor — Northrop's ATF Contract Loss Shakes California (1991) ABC7 Los Angeles — Hawthorne staging comeback with outlet mall (2014) CBS News Los Angeles — City of Hawthorne Sues Owner of 'Dead' Mall (2021) Roger Vincent, Los Angeles Times — Abandoned Hawthorne mall must be redeveloped or razed by next summer (2025) City of Hawthorne / PublicCEO — City of Hawthorne Secures Court Order for Hawthorne Mall Demolition (2026) Karen Garcia, Los Angeles Times — This L.A. mall was dead longer than it was alive (2026) This is a documentary for historical and educational purposes and is not financial advice. Some scenes are illustrated with reconstructions. #HawthornePlaza #DeadMalls #AmericanHistory About this film: some scenes are AI-generated reconstructions, used only where no original footage or photographs exist, and they are marked on screen as reconstructions. The narration is an AI voice. The script is researched and fact-checked against the sources listed above.