Puente Hills Mall

Puente Hills Mall in City of Industry, California, is a large shopping mall in the San Gabriel Valley, east of downtown Los Angeles. Opened in the 1970s, the mall once had the typical scale and layout of a major Southern California retail centre, with large anchor stores and a wide surrounding car park. For film fans, however, the most important part of the property is not the interior of the mall, but the south parking lot, which became one of the most famous mall locations in cinema history.

Puente Hills Mall is best known from “Back to the Future” (1985), where it appears as Twin Pines Mall and later Lone Pine Mall. The location is central to the film’s time-travel setup, because it is where Doc Brown demonstrates the DeLorean time machine to Marty McFly. The same mall changes identity within the story after Marty travels back to 1955 and runs over one of Old Man Peabody’s two pine trees, turning Twin Pines Mall into Lone Pine Mall by the time he returns to 1985.

In “Back to the Future” (1985), Puente Hills Mall is used for the night-time parking lot scene where Marty meets Doc Brown and first sees the DeLorean time machine in action. Doc sends Einstein one minute into the future, proving that the car can travel through time when it reaches 88 miles per hour. The scene then turns into chaos when the Libyans arrive in their van, Doc is shot, and Marty escapes in the DeLorean, accidentally travelling back to 1955. The wide, empty mall car park gives the sequence the space it needs for the time-machine test, the chase and the sudden jump into the past. Because of this scene, Puente Hills Mall remains one of the most iconic “Back to the Future” locations.

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