Graffiti is scrawled on the walls. Light fixtures have been torn out. The roof is partially collapsed and code violations abound – from plumbing to electrical.
Welcome to Hawthorne Plaza, an historically ill-fated shopping mall that, with the exception of a few intact office buildings on the property’s north side, hasn’t had a customer step foot inside it in more than two decades and is now so dilapidated that descriptions of its woes, from city officials, portray a hellscape. There is even an area that homeless people use as an open-air toilet – which one city inspector called a “wall of feces.”
But now, after a recent court ruling, there’s hope among city officials that Hawthorne Plaza could be reborn.
That’s because a Los Angeles Superior Court judge recently ordered the property’s owner to revamp the long-abandoned mall.
That order, which Superior Court Judge Steve Cochran issued last month, requires Arman Gabaee, of the Charles Co. real estate developer, to break ground on a project to either demolish or redevelop Hawthorne Plaza, 12000 Hawthorne Blvd., no later than Aug. 31, 2026.
Neither Gabaee, who has owned the dilapidated mall for most of the century, nor his attorney responded to multiple requests, over several weeks, for comment about the Superior Court ruling, Hawthorne’s yearslong effort to restore the site and the plaza’s future.
But for the city, the ruling could be a reason to hope.
“Graffiti, evidence of repeat break-ins, the (illegal) occupancy – the culmination of that is what made the city say enough is enough,” said Hawthorne City Attorney Robert Kim. “There are families living right behind this mall where this is happening.
“My primary concern,” Kim added, “is to bring some relief to the residents and the community overall.”
If the past is any indication, however, hopes for such relief may need to be a bit tempered. After all, Hawthorne officials – and, indeed, Gabaee – have seen their aspirations for the mall fizzle before.
Hawthorne Plaza, which opened in 1977, was never particularly popular, according to historical records, having existed in the shadow of Torrance’s Del Amo Fashion Center and Redondo Beach’s South Bay Galleria. But the Hawthorne mall – with its major department stores, such as J.C. Penney and Macy’s – chugged along for 22 years. Then, in 1999, it shuttered.
And its descent into dilapidation began.
Homeless encampments sprung up. Break-ins became common. The stench of human waste grew overpowering.
And all the while, the city and Gabaee struggled to agree on how best to redevelop the property. Plans and proposals repeatedly fell through. Tensions rose. Both sides, at various times, blamed the other for the continued blight. Then, four years ago, the city filed a lawsuit against Gabaee in an attempt, Hawthorne officials said, to reinvigorate the 35-acre site.
And so, Hawthorne Plaza waited – and continued decaying.
“What was once a bustling and booming Los Angeles shopping center in popular downtown Hawthorne has become a graveyard of departed stores,” the city’s initial lawsuit said, belying its past struggles. “What remains is a shell of a building, its interiors completely gutted, partially demolished and deconstructed, faintly reminiscent of the grand shopping center that once stood in its place.”
But now, with Cochran’s ruling, the wait for improvements has an apparent deadline. The next year, it seems, could help determine whether Hawthorne Plaza’s future is brighter than its history or its present – or whether the mall’s past was prologue.
AN ILL-FATED HISTORY
When the shopping mall initially opened in the city’s downtown in early 1977, it received plenty of acclaim, according to Hawthorne Historical Society records.
Hawthorne had wanted to redevelop the area for more than a decade. So as the mall got closer to becoming a reality, there was plenty of optimism.
Hawthorne officials, for example, participated in a ceremony in January 1974 – with the mall’s groundbreaking taking place later that year – to bury a time capsule at the site, according to an article in the Hawthorne Press-Tribune. The plan was to dig up and open the capsule for the city’s 100th anniversary – in 2022.
Hawthorne Plaza’s officials were also confident the shopping center would succeed: Major brick-and-mortar department stores like J.C. Penney and Macy’s were, after all, still at their peak.
“Tenants were chosen who will provide the ideal mix by industry standards,” Fred Collings, the center’s manager at the time, said during a November 1976 press tour, according to the Hawthorne Historical Society. “For every men’s store, there will be two women’s stores as 83% of the shoppers are female.
“If all goes well,” he added, “the center should gross $100 million in sales per year.”
(Adjusted for inflation, that estimate would be more than $558 million today.)
About 100,000 people reportedly attended the ribbon-cutting center in March 1977, according to Hawthorne Historical Society documents.
But after the initial buzz, concerns quickly surfaced.
Visitors didn’t like the mall’s parking structure or that there was no post office annex, according to the historical society, and shopper safety and low occupancy for the various storefronts were other issues. It never competed with Del Amo or the Galleria.
So Hawthorne Plaza stumbled through the decades.
The late 1970s and early ’80s saw downturns in the national economy, an apparent rise in crime, destructive social disruption and other forces that financially weakened the mall and lessened its appeal, according to the historical society.
The 1990s saw the shopping center sold twice, damaged during the Los Angeles Riots and reduced to 87 stores. In 1998, its last anchor store – J.C. Penney – closed. The mall itself followed a year later.
While the shopping center was a source of pride for Hawthorne for a time, an unnamed Hawthorne Historical Society member wrote in 2022, in hindsight, the odds were stacked against it from the start.
“The mall,” the society member wrote, “was a wishfully conceived, overly ambitious, ill-timed answer to changing economic and societal conditions that were developing throughout the country and that continue to affect downtown commercial districts (including Hawthorne’s) into present times.
“The project’s potential was misjudged,” the writer added, “its inception was sluggish, its execution was lagging, its success was brief and its vulnerability was broad.”
And so, Hawthorne Plaza was abandoned.
It remains so to this day.
DERELICT AND DECAYING
Gabaee, who seems to also goes by Gabay, bought the property in 2001, two years after the shopping center closed, for $7 million, according to the historical society.
But for the next several years, not much happened. A few proposals were announced here and there, but nothing materialized. So Hawthorne Plaza withered.
In 2008, however, there was the first spark of hope that the plaza could be reborn.
That’s when Gabaee proposed a “lifestyle center” that would have included retail stores and offices in the mall, and 285 condominiums on top of the back parking structure.
By then, the property was already in ruins. Some of the light fixtures had been ripped from the ceilings. The aluminum storefront gates were twisted and disfigured. Almost everything was blemished by graffiti.
Dozens of building, plumbing, electrical and other code violations from unpermitted structural work, illegal business conduct and insufficient maintenance posed a threat to anyone who enters the property, and remain an issue.
Still, when Gabaee’s proposal went to a vote, the Hawthorne City Council rejected it, saying it wasn’t a good fit for the town – particularly the housing aspect.
Sarah Maga a-Withers, then the director of development for the Charles Company, said at the time that the proposed project was the best alternative – and that the company couldn’t afford to build a development without the condos.
“We feel that the project we have now is the highest and best use for the space,” she said. “We’ve had nine architects do different schemes; you name it, we have a site plan for it.”
But the city didn’t budge. And neither did the developer.
“When we’re met with this dissatisfaction that – at the end of the day – is for no good reason,” Maga a-Withers said, “it stinks.”
Unless the lifestyle center could move forward, she added, the property would remain as is.
And so it did.
Then, eight years later – and three years after a fire caused the center’s roof to partially collapse – Gabaee’s development company renewed efforts to revive the property.
The company filed plans with the city in late 2016 to begin work on a $500 million overhaul, starting with a new $25 million office building, but also including a movie theater, gym, bowling alley and shops.
And homes – more than 600 residential units, in fact.
This time, the council approved the plans. But still, nothing happened.
So in 2018, the city canceled the development plans.
“We did everything we could to make this happen,” Arnie Shadbehr, Hawthorne’s former city manager, said at the time. “We felt like we were light-years ahead but, again, it just fell through the cracks.”
A Charles Company spokesperson, at the time, said the delay was because of changes in the real estate market, adding that a new proposal was in the works “that’s more in keeping with the market.”
But Hawthorne officials said they were done with the property’s blight.
“We want to do everything in our power and ability to address the blight,” Shadbehr said. “We can cite him for unsightliness, trash, blight, homeless issues and stray cats. We want to make him take care of these things.”
The blight, however, persisted.
In 2021, the city sued Gabaee and his associates.
GOING TO COURT
By the time Hawthorne sued Gabaee, city officials said, the developer owed the town more than $1 million in citations – and he was an inmate.
Around the time the city revoked the property’s development plans in 2018, Gabaee apparently tried to make money off the property under the table, Hawthorne officials said.
In 2018, in fact, the FBI arrested him on charges of paying bribes to Thomas Shepos, who was previously a principal real property agent for LA County, to secure a 10-year, $45 million lease to rent space inside Hawthorne Plaza.
Shepos accepted gifts from Gabaee, who apparently offered to buy him a $1.1 million home and pay him $1,000 a month in bribes.
In 2023, Shepos was sentenced to two years of probation. A year earlier, Gabaee pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
Gabaee is currently serving the remainder of that sentence at the Residential Reentry Management Long Beach in San Pedro, a halfway house at the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, according to federal inmate records. He is scheduled to be released on Nov. 28.
The guilty plea wasn’t Gabaee’s only problem, however. He also owed Hawthorne some serious money – which is what led to the lawsuit.
As of 2021, the city had issued Gabaee more than $1.1 million in administrative citations for illegally leasing out parking spots to Tesla for vehicles that were to be sold, and as a distribution center for Amazon, said Kim, who became Hawthorne’s city attorney that same year. Those types of uses at the property, Kim added, were not allowed under city laws.
That was the impetus for Hawthorne to initiate the lawsuit for nuisance abatement in 2021, Kim said.
“The owner has been unable or otherwise unwilling to remediate (Hawthorne Plaza) and halt all nuisance conditions on site,” the lawsuit said. “For years, the owner has claimed a willingness to develop the (property) or sell (it) to someone who would take such action, but the owner has yet to do so.
“The city has given the owner every opportunity to take action to halt the nuisance conditions,” the complaint added, “but none of the owner’s claims have come to fruition.”
More than 154 residents also submitted declarations to the court describing the negative impacts the site has caused them, said Valerie Escalante Troesh, a public entity enforcement attorney with Civica Law who worked with Hawthorne’s city attorney on the case. Those complaints, Escalante Troesh said, included being accosted by people hanging out there and being afraid to walk by with their children.
Kim and the city’s planning department tried to work with the owner to come up with some type of development, she added.
Many of those project proposals, though, didn’t fall under the permitted uses at the mall site, Escalante Troesh said, and in the past few years, Hawthorne even amended its municipal code to allow a commercial-residential mixed-use development that Gabaee never followed through with.
“After all this,” Escalante Troesh said, “(Kim) decided it was time to bring the court in to mandate something to make sure the property is safe.”
About a month before Cochran, the Superior Court judge who oversaw the case, issued his ruling, the two sides agreed to an initial injunction that required some immediate fixes to the property, such as installing lighting and surveillance cameras, and hiring security within a month, and installing perimeter fencing within 45 days.
As of the mid-August deadline, Escalante-Troesh said, at least some of the required cameras and lighting have been installed.
The few things that have clearly been done, though, have still been mired by the ongoing situation.
Hawthorne code enforcement officer Oscar Lugo, who has been the lead inspector for the plaza since 2021, said that in his most recent inspection, during the week of Aug. 11, “no dumping” signs that had been installed around July 4 had been vandalized. And the fencing, which he said would be critical in preventing future unsafe access and damage, still had not been put up.
“It continues to be damaged,” Lugo said. “It’s very minimal effort (being put into the property by the owner).”
There is even a “wall of feces” at the site, Lugo said: an area piled high with waste and toilet paper – clearly a place that homeless people who live in the encampments clearly use as a restroom.
This, he added, presents a public health issue, with the odor of human waste wafting toward people waiting at the bus stop nearby.
Cochran, meanwhile, issued his summary judgement on Aug. 11, requiring the developer to begin either demolishing or redeveloping the property within a year.
Because he and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment, however, it’s not clear how Gabaee plans to comply with the summary judgment – or if he will be able to.
Demolishing or redeveloping the property will likely be costly, and it’s unknown how he’d pay to get the work done.
And Hawthorne Plaza isn’t the only property Gabaee owns that has apparently irked local officials.
Valley Plaza on Victory Boulevard, in North Hollywood, has been in similar disrepair since 2014, when Gabaee purchased the property with the intention to redevelop the site into a mixed-use building, said Los Angeles Councilmember Adrin Nazarian, whose Second District includes the site.
Los Angeles’ Board of Building and Safety Commissioners recently declared the property as a public nuisance, Nazarian said. The commission will now identify contractors to demolish the building and will send the demolition bill to Gabaee, he added.
As for Hawthorne Plaza, status review hearings on the progress of stabilizing the site will take place on Nov. 5 and March 10.
Whether Hawthorne Plaza will get any closer to its long-awaited renaissance before or after those hearings is anyone’s guess.
But until then, it seems, those who want to see that rebirth can only wait – and hope.