Sunrise Mall was ‘Mainstreet, USA.’ Sacramento-area residents remember its heyday
Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights is the backdrop of a happy memory for Sue Murphy — when her young son wore an heirloom Robin Hood costume to a contest held there around Halloween 1980. The base of the outfit had also been worn by her and her mother.
During its heyday, the mall hosted various contests and events that shaped the social fabric of Citrus Heights and the surrounding area. Tennis stars Serena Williams and Martina Hingis appeared at the mall in 2011. More than 3,000 people came to the mall in 2003 to try out to be “Wheel of Fortune” contestants. And there were contests like the one Murphy’s son took part in.
“I made him a hat with a feather and a bow and arrow and I got these reindeer fur boots with curled toes,” Murphy said as she sat on the porch of her Orangevale home. “And I think that the shoes just put it all together.”
These days, things are pretty bleak at the old mall, which has many vacancies, is startlingly empty of shoppers and appears slated for redevelopment. But for many people who live in the vicinity of the mall, it still holds a lot of memories. For a time, the mall even billed itself as “Mainstreet, U.S.A.,” creating a world unto itself for those who ventured over.
‘More than just another retail outlet’
In February 1973, roughly 10 months after Sunrise Mall opened with great fanfare and at a cost of $30 million on former farm land, then-center manager Ken Kinsley weighed in with a piece in the Sacramento Union.
Kinsley wrote that the mall was already supporting more than 3,000 full-time jobs and would pay more than $1 million in property taxes. He also noted, though, that the mall was more than just a place to shop.
“More than just another retail outlet, it is a world all its own,” Kinsley wrote. “It’s Mainstreet, U.S.A. – it’s Santa’s Village – it’s the New Car Show – it’s an Art Gallery. It’s a meeting place, the Town Hall for some, an entertainment center where you may have an evening out on the town without even having to step outside its doors.”
There were major retailers at the beginning, with The Sacramento Bee noting in June 1971, while the mall was under construction, that it would “contain four major department stores – Weinstock’s, Sears, Penney’s and Liberty House and about 100 other stores.”
Murphy was in attendance the day the mall opened, April 19, 1972.
“It was a big deal to have a mall so close,” Murphy said. “I think they had dignitaries and cut the ribbon… It was super-crowded for like the next two weeks.”
By this point, the mall had also factored into nearby development. An ad in The Bee in December 1969 touted the Woodmore Oaks development as being near the future site of the mall.
Orangevale resident Ed Gruver lives in the house that his parents, who are deceased, built during the development. Gruver said his family had previously lived in south Sacramento. He remembered his parents shopping for a home for some time before coming to Orangevale.
“It was pretty rural back then,” Gruver said. “I couldn’t tell now, but I think that kind of intrigued them.”
In the early days of the mall, Gruver and his friends would get on their bikes and cut across then-undeveloped fields to ride to Sunrise Mall. For teenagers in Gruver’s neighborhood in the ‘70s, the the mall and vacant nearby fields were popular hangouts on weekend nights.
The mall could mean different things to different people. Stephen Walker, a retired high school librarian who has lived in Citrus Heights since 1978, said his wife shopped at the mall and would take their two children to have their pictures taken there.
“I can remember all the restaurants on the other side of Sunrise and the mall being busy all the time, the parking lots being full,” Walker said.
Larri Ayers, who said she’d lived in Citrus Heights “forever,” remembered Sunrise Mall’s Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour, part of a now-defunct chain with more than 100 locations across the country. Locally, the chain is primarily known for its 1972 plane crash at a location near Sacramento Executive Airport that killed numerous children.
But the former Sunrise Mall location holds positive memories for Ayers.
“We celebrated many birthdays there with my kids,” Ayers said, emotion evident in her voice as she spoke.
A long, slow decline
It’s difficult to say when precisely Sunrise Mall began to fade in prominence, with people interviewed for this article expressing differing views.
The slide has been going on for some time, possibly decades. Gruver traces it as far back as the 1980s.
“It changed so much from what we were used to as kids growing up and being a teenager there,” Gruver said. “It was just different, overbuilt in some respects. But it wasn’t the gathering place it used to be.”
That’s not to say Sunrise Mall didn’t have financial importance for many years thereafter. The mall remained a critical piece of local infrastructure ahead of Citrus Heights’ incorporation as a city on Jan. 1, 1997.
Sandy Smoley, 89, who served on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors from January 1973 until January 1993, remembered the battle over Citrus Heights’ incorporation with it being partly about who “would get the revenue” generated by the mall.
“Many of us worked to defeat incorporation because those of us that represented the unincorporated area, we’re trying to defend funding for our area,” Smoley said.
Roberta MacGlashan, who would go on to serve as mayor of Citrus Heights and later on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, was on the other side of the fight over incorporation.
“The whole irony here is that the mall was the reason for the 12-year battle between the county of Sacramento and those of us who wanted to incorporate as a city,” MacGlashan said. “And now it’s irrelevant.”
The mall has endured much over the years, from the rise of online retailers like Amazon to the Great Recession of 2008 to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A serious inflection point for the mall might have come with the 2000 opening of the Galleria Mall in Roseville. Orangevale resident Suezette Thomas had lived in the area for a few years around the early 1980s before her family moved to Southern California. Her family moved back in 2001 and she noticed Sunrise Mall was going downhill.
“It still had quite a few stores in it, but they were slowly going out,” Thomas said. “Sears was there for quite a while. I was bummed when Sears went out.”
Charles Kerr, who is 75 and has lived in his home in Orangevale for roughly 45 years, said that the mall had once been a nice place for his family to go. He called Sears’ departure from the mall, which occurred in July 2018, a big loss. “You lose some big anchors like that and it’s kind of like dominoes,” Kerr said.
Orangevale resident Cindie Braden, who remembered bright days for Sunrise Mall in the early ‘90s when it was still a popular destination for teenagers, estimated that the mall started to decline 10 years ago.
“I noticed that the stores started shutting down, then the big restaurants started shutting down, and then they stopped doing the Fourth of July thing,” Braden said. “You walk in there now… it’s really, literally like a ghost town.”
The mall’s starkly empty parking lot has become a popular place for children to ride their bikes, though Braden said that police sometimes hassle riders. Braden’s son Chris Garcia, 15, said that a back area at the mall has become popular for graffiti.
Thoughts on what comes next
Citrus Heights resident Ted Bourdaniotis noted as he took a break from doing work in a neighbor’s yard that he’d bought the shirt he was wearing from Macy’s at Sunrise Mall just last year.
Bourdaniotis hadn’t been aware that the city of Citrus Heights had red-tagged the men’s Macy’s at Sunrise Mall on Sept. 5, declaring it unsafe for people to enter. The city also red-tagged the women’s Macy’s at the mall that day.
Bourdaniotis was unperturbed, too, about the prospect of the mall being redeveloped. He hoped it could have one or two anchor stores. “Otherwise, they might as well close it down and build whether it will be condominiums or apartments or homes,” Bourdaniotis said.
Walker didn’t mind the prospect of the mall being turned into something else. “It needs to be either taken down or redeveloped,” Walker said. “It’s an eyesore now.”
That doesn’t mean that local residents have given carte blanche for the mall to be turned into anything. “I’m just hoping it doesn’t become some housing project… rather than elevating the community,” Kerr said.
What’s clear is that the mall’s best days have long since passed.
“It was there, it served a purpose and we had fun while it was there,” Gruver said. “It’s just, things move on. So, what you gonna do?”
This story was originally published September 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
