Eastmont Town Center is a shopping mall and social services hub located on 33 acres (130,000 m2) bounded by Foothill Boulevard, Bancroft and 73rd Avenues, and Church Street, in the Eastmont neighborhood of East Oakland. The mall opened in 1970 on the site of a 1920's-era Chevrolet truck factory. Architect William Pereira designed the building. It is physically almost next to, and by entry access a few blocks away from, the similarly sized Evergreen Cemetery.
Originally known as Eastmont Mall, the mall was a popular and heavily-used shopping destination during most of the 1970s and 1980s; but declined by the 1990s due to a huge drop in the average income level, and a concurrent increase in the crime rate in the mall and the surrounding neighborhoods.
Eastmont's primary anchor tenants were JCPenney, Mervyns, Woolworth's, Safeway, and Kinney Shoes, one of the nation's leading shoe retailers at the time. The mall also housed a movie theater with four screens.
Eastmont Mall became the only remaining indoor mall in Oakland after the closure of the MacArthur-Broadway Center in North Oakland in the mid-1990s.
JCPenney and Mervyns closed their Eastmont locations in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, the mall was only 30 percent leased and had fallen into bankruptcy. Local real estate developers purchased the mall in 2000, and emphasized a focus on neighborhood and community services; many of the abandoned retail stores were converted into office space. The Mervyns location was converted into a substation for the Oakland Police Department and the JCPenney location was converted into a joint City of Oakland/Alameda County social services center. A handful of existing retail tenants stayed on, and a few new ones were attracted due to the success of the renovations, including Gazzali's market, the only supermarket to serve the surrounding neighborhoods. In the spring of 2007, the mall was sold to a group of real estate investors based in Oregon.
Currently, the mall houses the supermarket, a Social Security office, a branch of the Oakland Public Library, a primary care medical clinic operated by the Alameda County Medical Center, General Assistance and WIC offices, and other small businesses and social service organizations.