Mall Memories: Santa Anita Fashion Park and Michael’s Toys & Hobbies

There was a time when the mall wasn’t just where you shopped — it was where you hung out, killed time, and got your first whiff of independence. For me, that place was Santa Anita Fashion Park in Arcadia, California.

Located right next door to the famous Santa Anita horse racing track from which it got its name, and right across the street from the Arboretum, a botanic garden famous for-among other things-being the filming location for the TV series Fantasy Island, the mall opened in 1974, and catered to a very specific mix of middle-class suburbanites and racetrack regulars. Anchors included The Broadway, JCPenney, and Buffums — all classic SoCal department store names, most of which are either memories or quickly fading.

It had that unmistakable 1970s mall look: sunken conversation pits, planters with real ficus trees, and the ever-present echo of tile floors under soft Muzak mixed with the sound of cascading water from its many fountains. The mall wasn’t just stores and anchors — it had its own landmarks, the kinds of things that lodge in a kid’s memory long after the receipts and signage are gone. In the central court there was a playground made of polished wood, smooth enough to slide on without catching a splinter. The centerpiece was a pair of sculptures: an elephant and a girl named Anita, the mall’s unofficial mascot. They weren’t flashy, but they gave the place a kind of charm — something you could climb, something you could remember. And if you tilted your head back, there was the airplane: a full-scale “First Flight” biplane hanging from the ceiling, suspended in the skylight’s glow as if it had just taken off inside the mall itself. And there was the Lichtenstein sculpture, the weird bright blue thing that had the letters “F.P.” (for Fashion Park) integrated into the design that sat right outside the Buffums department store. For kids, it was part playground, part daydream; for adults, it was just one more reminder that this mall was different: a little more creative, a little more “avant-garde” than usual.

My first exposure to the place was in 1977 at the tender age of 6; at that age I was always accompanied, but this mall was the first place I was ever allowed to wander off either on my own or with a friend without parental supervision around the age of 10, and as such it holds some pretty special memories. The best of these memories is of one particular store: the place where I bought my toy cars and later, my plastic aircraft models: a place called called Michael’s Toys & Hobbies. Sitting right between one of the big box stores – I think it was Broadway – and a children’s clothing store called “The Little Folks Shop” where my mom always shopped for clothes for my little sister, it was very similar in size and style to the Kay Bee’s we all remember so well, but it seemed more inviting somehow, probably in part because of the carpeting, which – if I remember right – was a neutral greenish-gray low-pyle outdoor type rather than the almost blindingly intense bright blue deep pyle rugs that KayBee was known for.

Michael’s was really cool for several reasons; for one, they sold Matchbox cars in boxes and in blister packs, so you had your choice! For another, they had an excellent selection of WWII era models; an entire wall of the store as far as my childhood eyes could see of cool fighters and bombers, tanks, ships, and soldier sets; like many kids my age in the ‘70s I was fascinated by the herosim and machinery of WWII. They also had a large selection of RC cars, which were “big boy toys” too expensive for me to be into at that young age, but I always stopped to look at them! Their 1:43 scale Corgi’s and Models of Yesteryear were kept in a lit glass cabinet as display models, and I always looked at those too, even though my folks insisted I keep my eyes on the <$1 MBX and Hot Wheels 1:64’s due to price concerns (it was the ‘70s and inflation was rampant).

Toward the end of my tenure as a resident of the Arcadia and Temple City area, Michael’s eventually closed, disappearing quietly to be replaced by-what else but-Kay Bee, but I remember it well, and I know it was real. But here’s the strange thing: Michael’s T&H barely exists online. Try to search it, and you’ll find almost nothing. I found a couple of mentions on various threads indicating there were stores by the same name at other SoCal malls I don’t remember, the Northridge Mall and the “800 lb gorilla” of SoCal malls, the Galleria in Sherman Oaks. But there are no photos, no ads, no Wikipedia stub.

For me, Michael’s T&H is a ghost. I can still picture the racks of Matchbox cars on the pegs, the balsa wood airplanes in their plastic sleeves, the RC kits behind glass. But the internet — that vast “memory” of everything — has nothing to say about it. It’s as though the store was a dream. But it wasn’t a dream: it was real — a small toy and hobby shop in the mall that carried die-cast cars, slot cars, model kits, and the kind of odds and ends that lived in a kid’s memory forever.

That’s what makes memories like this so haunting: in the pre-internet era, so many standalone stores just disappeared without leaving a trace. Longtime readers may remember my earlier post about Toytown in Rosemead, CA — another half-forgotten store that once lit up my childhood. Toytown at least left behind a faint digital footprint: a newspaper clipping here, a few collector forum mentions there. Enough to prove it existed, even if the details are hazy.

Michael’s T&H is different. It’s almost completely vanished, leaving only the memories of those of us who walked its aisles. That contrast is what fascinates me: Toytown survives in the margins of the internet, while Michael’s T&H might as well be a dream. Together, they remind me why I keep digging into this kind of “cultural archaeology” — because without memory, these places are gone forever. Unless you lived it, you wouldn’t even know it existed.

The irony is that now we live in a time where everything gets documented — Instagrammed, TikTok’d, archived. But back then, the everyday places that shaped us were ephemeral. They lived and died in the moment. Cultural archaeology is about holding onto those fragments and saying: yes, this was real, this mattered.

By the 1980s, Fashion Park had grown into one of those community hubs where everyone you knew ended up at least once on a weekend night. Mall culture was in full swing by then! The giant Lichtenstein head was removed sometime in the mid-80s when the mall changed hands, and in the 1990s, destructive changes began, with anchor stores changing and closing, all the substrate being redone, and eventually-in the early 2000s-part of the original structure was actually demolished to redo a section of it as an outdoor mall.

The Santa Anita Fashion Park I knew is long gone now; today its called “Westfield Santa Anita,” gleaming with modern storefronts and food courts. Sadly, there are virtually no pictures of it anywhere online from the era that I remember, save for the one photo of Lichtenstein’s “Modern Head” that appears toward the opening of this post. But for me, the memory will always be of the late 70s and early ’80s mall of my childhood; the excitement of going there with my mom on summer days or with the rest of the family in the evenings; of the way the California sun slanted through the skylights, and of Michael’s T&H — a store the world seems to have forgotten, yet one that planted seeds I’m still chasing to this day.