Hahn Co

The Hahn Co., San Diego, has announced plans to build the East Hills Mall in Bakersfield and has selected Millard Archuleta, Los Angeles, to design the new retail complex. The regional center will be a 313,000-square-foot, enclosed, one-level mall with two major department stores of 75,000 square feet each. The mall will be on a 37-acre site and bounded by Highway 178 on the north, Oswell Street on the east and Bernard Street on the south.

First City-Santee Town Center, a joint venture, has purchased 22.5 acres at the corner of Mission Gorge and Town Center Drive in Santee from The Hahn Co. The developers, First City-California II and Santee Town Center Associates, a limited partnership with La Jolla Pacific Development Group, are planning to build a $23-million, 235,000-square-foot shopping center on the site.

Ernest W. Hahn, a German immigrant's son who helped invent the suburban shopping mall and became one of America's wealthiest men in the process, died early Monday at his Rancho Santa Fe estate after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 73. Along with developers Edward DeBartolo, Leonard Faber and James Rouse, Hahn refined the concept of the modern shopping mall to something beyond mere commercial centers.

Bad welds appear to be the cause of the June 15 collapse of a canopy at Robinson's department store in University Towne Centre, which injured one girl and nearly buried several other people. "The canopy failed because it was not constructed according to plans. Welding of the metal studs to the steel beam was not done to the specifications on the plans," according to a press release from the San Diego Building Inspection Department.

Santa Anita Fashion Park in Arcadia, a regional shopping center that opened next door to Santa Anita Park race track in October, 1974, will undergo a $10.5-million redesign and renovation, according to the Hahn Co. and Santa Anita Realty Enterprises Inc., partners in the project.

Work is under way on a $5.5-million renovation of Fox Hills Mall in Culver City. The 900,000-square-foot regional mall, owned and managed by the San Diego-based Hahn Co., was built in 1975. This is its first major remodeling. The Seattle-based Callison Partnership is architect for the project, and Bayley Construction, also headquartered in Seattle, is general contractor.

A door-to-door voter registration drive is slated for Northwest Pasadena in advance of the Board of Directors election March 5. The $40,000 drive is funded by the Hahn Co., which operates the Plaza Pasadena shopping center. The money is part of the recent settlement of a lawsuit against Hahn by Pasadena Citizens for Representative Government. The group sued five years ago after its members were denied permission to gather signatures in the mall for a voter initiative.

North America's largest public real estate company, Trizec Corp., announced Tuesday a major debt restructuring designed to pull it back from the brink of bankruptcy. The Calgary-based real estate giant, which owns La Jolla-based shopping center developer Hahn Co., lost $424 million last year and is $4.3 billion in debt. It has been trying to avoid a collapse caused by dropping real estate values.

A local cable television show modeled after the MacNeil-Lehrer news program will be produced on the city's public access station, KPAS, under a $40,000 grant accepted Tuesday by the City Council. The money was part of the settlement of a 1985 lawsuit filed by attorney Dale Gronemeier against the Hahn Co., operators of the Plaza Pasadena. Gronemeier sued Hahn on behalf of a citizens group that was barred from collecting signatures in the shopping mall.