Airplane Park, Pumpkin Park, and the Mall That Just Changed Hands

By eight on a Saturday morning, the corner of Del Amo Boulevard and Clark Avenue fills with folding tables of California-certified produce, cut flowers, prepared foods, and handmade crafts. The Lakewood Farmers Market runs there every Saturday, year round, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and it has for years. Nobody checks a calendar to confirm it's happening. That's the point.

This is the part of Lakewood that hasn't needed a headline in decades: a weekly rhythm built into the geography itself, repeating on a schedule so stable that residents plan around it without thinking. But one piece of that rhythm changed hands last year, and most people who live here haven't clocked what it means yet.

Two parks, two childhoods, same city

Ask a longtime Lakewood parent where they're taking the kids and you'll get one of two answers, and the answer tells you something about the kid.

Del Valle Park, on Henrilee Street, is known locally as Airplane Park. The nickname comes from a decommissioned F3D-2 Skynight fighter jet mounted at the park as a climbing structure, part of a Veterans Memorial Plaza honoring residents who served. Kids scale the fuselage. Parents sit near the Veterans Memorial Wall. During summer, a splash pad runs seasonally from mid-June through early September, open Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., a schedule that skips Tuesday and Thursday entirely rather than running daily.

Across town, San Martin Park draws a different crowd. Locals call it Pumpkin Park for its Cinderella-themed playground, built around a pumpkin carriage that has been replaced with a newer version over the years to keep the fairy tale intact. Where Airplane Park leans toward sports fields, memorial ground, and a jet fuselage kids treat like a jungle gym, Pumpkin Park leans toward toddlers and princesses and a slower kind of afternoon.

Two parks, a few miles apart, built for two different registers of childhood. That split isn't accidental. Lakewood was platted as a postwar planned community, and its park system still reads like a master plan: recreation distributed by age group and activity type rather than clustered around a single town square. The farmers market gives the town its adult commercial hub. The two parks split its children's imaginative life in half.

The clock nobody posts

Here's what a resident actually has to track if they want to use Lakewood's public amenities on their own terms this month:

The concert series, eight acts booked across Thursday evenings from June 11 through August 6, wrapped just days before this was written. The splash pad keeps running into early September. None of this is posted on a single unified calendar anywhere a new resident would think to look. It lives split across a city bulletin, a parks page, and word of mouth, which is exactly how a 70-year-old planned community keeps its rhythms intact without needing to advertise them.

The mall at the center just changed hands

Everything above orbits a fixed point: Lakewood Center, the enclosed regional mall at Lakewood Boulevard and Del Amo Boulevard that has anchored the city's retail life since it opened in February 1952. At more than two million square feet across roughly 150 acres, it's still counted among the largest shopping malls in the country by leasable area, built around anchors that include Costco, JCPenney, Macy's, Target, and a Round1 bowling and arcade complex.

In August 2025, Macerich sold Lakewood Center to a joint venture of Pacific Retail Capital Partners, Lyon Living, and Silverpeak for $332 million. The new ownership group has signaled plans for substantial changes to the property, with the mall potentially reworked into a mixed-use development rather than continuing as a straight retail box, according to reporting from Shopping Center Business.

That's a bigger deal than it sounds like on paper. This mall has had essentially the same retail identity for most of its 74 years, through department store consolidations, a 1978 enclosure, and decades of anchor turnover, but it has never changed hands into ownership that's publicly discussing a fundamental reformat of the property. If a portion of that 150-acre footprint becomes housing, plazas, or mixed commercial space instead of parking and big-box retail, it changes the physical center of gravity that the farmers market, the two parks, and the whole weekly rhythm currently orbit.

What that could plausibly mean, based on what's been reported so far:

• Parking acreage that currently sits empty most weekdays could become housing or new commercial frontage, since redevelopment plans at this scale typically monetize underused surface lots first
• A mixed-use conversion tends to extend a property's active hours beyond typical mall hours, since housing and restaurants keep foot traffic moving after the department stores close
• Any construction phase would likely affect access routes near Lakewood Boulevard and Del Amo Boulevard, the same intersection anchoring the mall today

None of this is confirmed on a construction timeline yet. But the ownership change itself, dated and on the record as of August 2025, is the first concrete signal in over two decades that the fixed point of Lakewood's weekly routine is no longer fixed.

What actually changes, and what doesn't

The farmers market at Del Amo and Clark isn't going anywhere. Airplane Park's jet fuselage and Pumpkin Park's carriage aren't part of anyone's redevelopment plan. The splash pad will keep running its Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday schedule through early September whether or not a single brick changes at the mall three miles away.

What's different is that the piece of Lakewood's rhythm most residents treat as permanent, the enclosed mall that's been there since before most of the surrounding houses were built, is now owned by a group actively discussing what else it could become. For a city built on a stable weekly pattern, that's the one variable worth watching. Everything else on the schedule this month is exactly what it was last year.

If you're a Lakewood homeowner curious about what a mixed-use conversion at Lakewood Center could mean for property values or foot traffic on your street in the years ahead, that's a conversation worth having before the redevelopment plans firm up rather than after. CART Group, Inc. works this market block by block and can walk you through what a project like this has meant in comparable Southern California cities. Schedule a strategy call when you're ready to talk specifics.