Where it all began, sort of

Here are site photos of 280 Metro, the world's first big box mall, in Colma, California. It's a combination necropolis, shopping mall, and landfill. Enjoy!

Above, just down the road from San Francisco International Airport, and sandwiched between the Woodlawn and Greenlawn cemeteries, is the root of modern retail: 280 Metro Center—a nondescript open-air mall launched in 1986, which eventually became known as the world’s first “power center,” or big-box mall. 

Below, the very first Old Navy outlet at 280 Metro, partial proof of its historical status. 

Below, whole armies of dead people, right behind the mall. Colma is actually a “microcity” on the southern, peninsula edge of San Francisco that boasts more dead residents than living ones: There are 17 cemeteries within Colma’s tiny 2.2 square mile footprint. 

Think of Colma as a pioneer city for the twenty-first century: relying on service-sector industries like retail and burial, it has never manufactured anything of note, and its 1,200 living residents enjoy free cable TV that is paid for by the steady streams of tax revenue that its postindustrial business mix generates—as long as people keep shopping and dying. 

One can sometimes detect some crematory smoke from the cemeteries wafting above 280 Metro’s stores. But the rotten-egg smell isn’t the dead people. The center’s Home Depot store was built on the site of what had been one of San Francisco’s largest solid-waste disposal sites, the Junipero Serra Landfi ll, which closed in 1983. According to one engineering report, the “store and parking lot [were] constructed over 1,348 piles, each driven approximately 160 ft (49 m) deep into the landfi ll.” An enclosed gas flare vents the methane gas created by 25 years’ worth of garbage that is rotting deep beneath the Home Depot to reduce the possibility of an explosion or the formation of a subterranean methane bubble. This means that on any given day, Colma’s big-box shoppers are breathing in trace amounts of human ash or gasified garbage—yesteryear’s consumers and products—from up and down the San Francisco peninsula. 

Below, Colma's Home Depot, with methane vents mid-ground from buried landfill, ready to explode!

Finally, the view from space, below. Note that gravesites and parking spaces form an oddly similar pattern. Unofficial motto in Colma is "Shop 'til you drop!"