Mission Valley Mall's Grand Reopening Is October 9. Its 1961 Anchor Building Opens in 2027.

What exactly is reopening at the old Mission Valley mall on October 9? The center at 1640 Camino Del Rio North now goes by The Valley. Owners Lowe and Real Capital Solutions bought it from Westfield in 2023, and the grand reopening, called The Valley Celebration, runs Friday, October 9 through Sunday, October 11. The weekend celebrates the plazas, lawns and first wave of restaurants. The building that started the mall in 1961 is the last piece, and it isn't scheduled to open until 2027.

The order of that work explains what the reopening covers and what it doesn't.

What You Can Walk Into Today

As of early October, five of the 13 tenants below are open. Seven have forecast opening dates, and Round1 has no date yet. Most of the forecast dates come from a San Diego Union-Tribune restaurant roundup published August 26, so any of them could slip.

The mall's own social feed confirmed The Stand is open and serving burgers, shakes and fries. Philz is less clear. The reopening schedule has Philz handing out samples "outside of their store," but no opening date has been published. Plan on samples that weekend, not a full order.

How the Celebration Is Organized

The weekend starts at a check-in booth outside Nordstrom Rack. The booth hands out a Valley swag bag with Bath & Body Works and Dairy Queen coupons, stickers and a map of the weekend's events. If you show the bag at Lane Bryant, you get 10% off. From there, the schedule runs in three blocks:

1. Taste of The Valley, 12 to 2 p.m. Free samples from The Stand, NOVO Brazil Brewing Co. and Panera Bread, free garlic knots from Pesto Italian Kitchen, 5-ounce Blizzard samples from Dairy Queen, and Philz samples outside its storefront. Milkissimo's Gelato is offering 20% off.
2. Family Fun, 2 to 5 p.m. A Slime Kitchen activity, a soccer challenge from San Diego FC and Eighteen Threads, a Nordstrom selfie station, a Calsun prize wheel and a custom tote activity at Tillys.
3. Happy Hour, 5 to 7 p.m. NOVO beer with free kombucha samples, free sangria samples at Pesto, food and drink samples at The Stand, and happy hour pricing at Yard House from 3 to 7 p.m.

Some offers run all three days. Broken Yolk Cafe has 10% off entrées and a $7.99 mimosa flight. Papa Joey's is holding a mini Trade Night with local sports and trading card game vendors. Kura Sushi Rewards members who spend $70 or more between October 9 and 12 get a 15% off coupon they can use November 16 to 30. CandeeLand will run a pop-up outside its future space on Saturday and Sunday ahead of its winter opening.

Why the Lawns Came Before the Big Tenants

The table above follows the renovation plan. Lowe's May 6 news release laid out the sequence. Work began in 2025 with a new arrival plaza near Nordstrom Rack and Bloomingdale's The Outlet Store, built around a large lawn with shaded seating, lounge areas and firepits. Cava, Tendergreens, Pesto and Mendocino Farms line its edges. Next came the central plaza, the largest new open space, with an open meadow surrounded by restaurant tables, open-air bars and counter seating. The last phase refreshes the shopping promenades with new walkways, planters and seating.

That release expected all the work to wrap by summer 2026. FOX 5 reported the planters, walkways and seating went in over the summer. The Union-Tribune's August report says renovations will continue into 2027. So the October reopening celebrates the finished outdoor spaces, not a finished center.

Many of the new food tenants are built around those spaces. Encuentro Café plans to sell picnic baskets for the lawn in the center square. The Stand's 200 seats are split between indoors and outdoors. The monthly farmers market sets up at the Oasis in front of AMC. Lowe executive vice president Todd Majcher described the goal as a place where visitors "can spend an hour, or the day." According to the release, about 274,000 square feet of new leases have been signed over the past three years.

The 1961 Building Reopens Last

The center opened on February 20, 1961, as Mission Valley Center. The next morning's San Diego Union reported that "tens of thousands" of people came out for a "modern-as-tomorrow" development of 80 acres, anchored by a May Co. department store and 41 other shops. Lowe's release gives the debut year as 1960, and the Union-Tribune's August restaurant roundup says the center was built in 1981. The contemporary newspaper account of opening day puts it in 1961.

The May Co. store later became Macy's. In a 2017 article on its closing, the Union-Tribune called it San Diego's first post-war national department store. Its opening began the move of major retailers from downtown out to regional shopping centers, and most did not return downtown until Horton Plaza opened in 1985. The building, designed by William Lewis Jr. with precast concrete hexagonal panels, was named City of San Diego Historic Site No. 1203 in 2016, the year before the store closed in March 2017.

DICK'S House of Sport will move into that historic former Macy's building. It will be the company's first House of Sport in California: a two-story, 158,000-square-foot store with a climbing wall, golf bays with TrackMan simulators, an outdoor track and field, and a batting and training cage for baseball, softball, lacrosse and soccer. Lowe says it worked with the City of San Diego on a redevelopment plan that keeps the building's historic qualities. FOX 5 reported on August 31 that the store is set to open sometime in 2027.

So the building that brought crowds to Mission Valley in 1961 is the last one scheduled to reopen.

On the Calendar After the Reopening

Saturday, October 31 is the next date to plan around. The Valley's farmers market, held on the last Saturday of each month at the Oasis in front of AMC, runs special Halloween hours from noon to 5 p.m. The events calendar also lists Trick-or-Treating at The Valley the same day. If the forecasts hold, Encuentro Café and Bacio di Latte will be open by then. Pepper Lunch follows in November and CandeeLand in December. The center's website, mission-valley.com, will have the confirmed dates as each tenant opens.

The May Co. building has been part of Mission Valley since 1961. If you're curious how a decades-long project like The Valley could affect your own plans in Mission Valley, I'm glad to talk it through in English or Spanish. Conchita Lopez has followed San Diego neighborhoods through more than 30 years of change. Let's Connect.