Finance
Google Rents the Mall From Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ Video
Los Angeles’s Westside Pavilion gets a makeover and new life as an office complex.
A screen grab from the music video for Tom Petty’s song Free Fallin’.
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Three decades ago, Tom Petty strummed his guitar while riding the escalator at Westside Pavilion in his Free Fallin’ music video. He couldn’t have picked a more iconic scene for 1980s Los Angeles or that era’s mall culture. Every weekend, teenagers hung around the bright atrium and wandered the three floors.
Over the years, the mall faded. Then this month, something surprising happened. Westside Pavilion’s owners, Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. and Macerich Co., said they’d found a tenant to lease the building—Google.