Santa brings Christmas spirit to deserted mall

LOS ANGELES — Christmas was coming, and Santa Claus was trying to pump some life into a dying American mall.

Most of the stores — big chains such as Sears, H&M and Forever 21, as well as little toy shops and boutique clothiers — were empty, dark and drafty, their metal gates permanently down.

An acrid smell, like that of a long-extinguished gas stove, hung in the air outside a closed seafood buffet. A thick coat of dust covered faux leather chairs in a shuttered hair salon.

People slept — older folks in pay-by-the-minute massage chairs, a homeless man on a vinyl bench — while instrumental Christmas music played overhead.

The scene at Puente Hills Mall in City of Industry, best known as the Twin Pines Mall from the 1985 movie “Back to the Future,” was not exactly merry.

But even here, the Christmas spirit refused to disappear thanks to Santa — also known as Albert Sanchez.

“Making people smile, that brings joy to me,” he said on a Tuesday a few weeks before Christmas.

It’s his first year in the red suit, and this 40-year-old rookie Santa lacks the paunch and natural white beard of older, more experienced Kris Kringles.

But his laugh, which comes easily, is punctuated by a natural “ho, ho, ho!” He is soft-spoken and patient, listening intently to kids asking for Barbies and Hot Wheels — and to adults struggling with inflation, homelessness or loneliness this holiday season.

Sanchez works for his friends’ small photo company, Tinseltown Holiday Photo, posing for portraits from a cushy red chair between the escalators in the central court.

Shoppers are so scarce that, on a typical weekday, fewer than 10 families pay for photos during Sanchez’s five-hour shift.

“To be honest, it’s a little worrisome,” Sanchez said. “At this rate? Who knows how long this mall’s gonna last.”

Elizabeth Rodriguez-Alvarado, who owns Tinseltown Holiday Photo, said people often ask why she bothers to do Santa portraits at the San Gabriel Valley mall.

“I feel like we’re supposed to be here,” she said. “It’s like we’re bringing a little bit of light.”

Sanchez walked onto the mall’s center court — in head-to-toe red, belly-length beard, wire-rimmed glasses and tall black boots — at promptly 1 p.m.

Nobody acknowledged him.

But that hardly dampened his spirits. The quiet, he said, allows him to spend more time with each visitor.

Sanchez, who lives in Ontario, said he usually has a job in a warehouse, but that work has slowed of late. When his friends Rodriguez-Alvarado and her husband asked if he could be their Santa, he was delighted. He’s so close to the couple that he was a groomsman at their wedding.

Sanchez — who is engaged and has several nieces and nephews but no children of his own — started on Black Friday. He’s been Santa six days a week, for $20 an hour, ever since.

A few minutes into his Tuesday shift, about two dozen kids, probably 8 or 9 years old, waved at him from the second-story balcony as he shouted, “Merrrry Christmas!”

“Santa, I want a Lamborghini!” one yelled.

“Merrrry Christmas!” Sanchez repeated, adding, as an aside, that he wanted one too.

The first paying customers arrived at 2:13 p.m.

Warren Barragan, 6½ years old, smiled his biggest smile — with three missing front teeth — when he saw Santa, who knelt to the child’s height and shook his hand.

The bespectacled boy shyly told Santa he wants a Hot Wheels hauler that transforms into a Tyrannosaurus rex, eats toy cars and poops them out.

His mom, Eliza Barragan, 36, of San Dimas, likes bringing Warren to meet Santa at this mall, she said, because there’s no line and they don’t feel rushed.

Warren’s grandma, Glory Bacon, came too.

“It’s cool to me to see his eyes light up,” she said of her grandson. “And he’s such a sweet Santa.”

When Bacon, 67, was younger, she and her sisters and friends drove often from Rancho Cucamonga to the then sparkling mall, where they would circle the always-full parking lot, trying to find a space.

“When it first opened and it was brand new,” Bacon said, “it was big and it was beautiful.”

And now?

“Heartbreaking,” she said. “Is it going to maybe not be here for much longer? It’s part of my growing up — not my childhood, exactly, but my growing up. My memories.”

Just after Warren’s mom finished buying portraits, another family sat their baby boy in Santa’s lap. He wailed. His parents chuckled and bought a photo, memorializing his unhappy expression. Santa laughed.

More than two hours passed before the next paying customer.

Earlier that Tuesday, Joshua Hair and two friends, all 18, walked past the dimly lit upstairs food court and a gift shop with a sign announcing, “STORE CLOSING EVERYTHING MUST GO!” in front of a huge display of Funko Pop! figures.

The teenagers were on a macabre walking tour, peering through empty stores’ locked metal gates. As a kid, Hair often came here with his mom, waiting while she got her nails done, begging, unsuccessfully, for movie tickets and toys.

“It used to be really alive,” said Hair, who wore his green letterman jacket from Bonita High School in La Verne. “COVID really killed it. It’s a little creepy.”

Hair was shocked to see Santa.

“How much are they paying him?” he asked, laughing.

Some of the foot traffic at Puente Hills Mall comes not from shoppers but from people fascinated by languishing shopping centers — an obsession chronicled by websites such as DeadMalls.Com and YouTubers who film themselves walking among retail graveyards.

This particular shopping center also draws movie buffs. Inside is the sign for the fictional Twin Pines Mall in “Back to the Future.”

Its faux electronic clock is permanently set to 1:16 a.m., the time Marty McFly arrives in the mall parking lot on a skateboard to see Doc Brown’s time machine built from a spruced-up DeLorean. In the scene, a JCPenney stands out in the background, but that, like so much else, is also gone.

Opened in phases in 1974 and 1975, Puente Hills Mall was once one of Southern California’s biggest, most bustling shopping centers, with 1.2 million square feet of commercial space.

Its decline — like that of scores of enclosed shopping malls battered, in large part, by the rise in online shopping — was hastened by the pandemic. One of Puente Hills’ last anchor stores, Macy’s, closed last year.

The managers of Puente Hills Mall could not be reached for comment.

St. Nick’s territory extends well beyond shopping malls, said Timothy Connaghan, head of the International University of Santa Claus, which trains aspiring Santas.

Since the pandemic, Santa increasingly visits children via Zoom, on conference calls that include far-flung family members, and in private home visits. People are even using artificial intelligence, Connaghan said, to create personalized Santa videos.

But most people still associate Santa with shopping malls, Connaghan said.