Dead mall, live Santa: A rookie St. Nick steps in at shopping center from ‘Back to the Future’

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.

“It’s a generational thing,” Connaghan, 76, said. “If you look at parents today, in their childhood, they probably met Santa at a mall or shopping center.

“Families still want to have their kids visit Santa. They want their children to continue to believe in the magic.”

Tinseltown Holiday Photo has been coordinating Santa Claus and Easter Bunny photos at Puente Hills Mall for three years.

Rodriguez-Alvarado, 35, started the photo company after a longtime friend retired and sold her his camera equipment.

The Puente Hills Mall gave her small business a shot — and for that, she is grateful. Other malls, she said, are hard to get into because they already have contracts with bigger photo companies.

Most mall Santas charge double or triple what Rodriguez-Alvarado does for a portrait. For her, the weekends are busiest — more than 40 families bought photos on a recent Sunday — and she turns a small profit each season.

Many families go for the cheapest option: a 5×7 print for $10.99.

“It’s an expensive time of year,” said Rodriguez-Alvarado, who also runs a hair salon in Upland. “There’s a lot of parents — they’re trying really hard to make it all happen. We offer them a picture for $10.99, they look relieved.”

Desiree Aguilera, 17, shoots the Santa photos several days a week. The high school senior, who has four little sisters, also works as a food court cashier at the Montclair Place Shopping Center, which tends to be busier.

“I’m not gonna lie — sometimes, I’m yawning. I get tired,” Aguilera said of the shifts at Puente Hills Mall. “But I find it kind of peaceful. I feel like other malls, because they’re so crowded, they don’t get that one-on-one interaction as much with the kids. Here, it’s just Santa and one kid, one-on-one.

“It does sometimes feel like magic.”

The visitors keep surprising Sanchez. They make him laugh. They make him cry.

He asked one young girl her favorite Christmas movie. She replied: “Die Hard.”

Another girl, age 3 or so, grinned when she saw him from across the room, then froze when he waved at her.

“Her jaw just dropped,” Sanchez said, laughing. He got up from his chair to offer her a cardboard hat decorated with colorful reindeer antlers, and “she turned around and booked it into Claire’s. Her parents had to run after her.”

When Sanchez’s 3-year-old niece posed with him, she was confused. She recognized his voice — but did not realize Santa Claus was Uncle Albert.

A few days ago, a man in his late 20s sat beside Sanchez and started crying. He’d had a tough childhood and had never taken a photo with Santa before.

Later, a father came in with his two young sons. It was the first Christmas since he and their mom got divorced, and he was trying hard to make them happy. It took a few shots, but in one photo — sitting with his children, Santa standing behind the chair — everyone smiles.

One cheery 7-year-old girl asked Santa not for a toy but for a sweater. And for her family to be together. Another girl asked to be with her dad for Christmas.

“You’ve got to reassure them,” Sanchez said. “But at the same time, it’s a balance. I tell them Santa will try his best for them, and just hope everything works out.”

On this Tuesday afternoon, a man caught Santa’s eye from the top of the escalator and shouted, “Hi, Santa!” Sanchez waved back.

He was older. He carried a tattered Hot Topic bag. And his bare feet stuck out through the top of threadbare shoes.

Aguilera greeted him warmly. He claimed he was once a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. That he was a driver for President John F. Kennedy. That he appeared on “Dancing With the Stars.”

That he was a father. A grandfather. An angel.

He visits every few days. Sanchez and Aguilera listen. His stories change; his belief in them doesn’t.

On this day, he brought a friend — a thin woman in an oversize Dodgers jersey, with dirt-caked fingernails and stringy hair — and introduced her to Santa Claus.

“I wanted her to meet the big man,” he said with reverence, stepping away so she could speak to Santa alone.

For several minutes, Sanchez stood and held her hand, letting her talk.

“She was talking to me and someone else who wasn’t there,” Sanchez said quietly afterward.

The third paying family that day came from El Monte — Flor Cruz and her three children, Dylan, 7; Amelia, 5; and Gael, 3. The boys are autistic, and Cruz wanted them to meet Santa in a quieter, calmer mall.

Amelia, wearing a red dress and a big green bow in her hair, asked why Santa gives bad kids coal. Sanchez, thinking fast, said it’s to remind them to be really good the next year.

She handed him a piece of paper. She had drawn Santa, in his big red coat, with snowflakes all around.

After the family left, walking past more shuttered stores, Sanchez said he would keep it forever.