Joe and Patty Ashlock, who had come to Alaska for the trans-Alaska pipeline construction boom and ran the pipe-coating firm Surfcote, opened Dimond Center on August 12, 1977 in what was then a sparsely populated part of south Anchorage, starting at roughly 180,000 sqft with Safeway and Pay ‘n Save as anchors. A 1981 expansion added 231,000 sqft, pushing the property past Anchorage’s existing Northway Mall to become the largest shopping center in the state, a position it has held ever since.
A six-story professional office tower, added in 1986-1987, brought a food court, athletic club, bowling alley and ice rink into the same building as three floors of office space, now home to Anchorage’s iHeartMedia radio cluster. The mall added a nine-screen movie theater in 1996 and its first major international brand, H&M, in 2015; Dave & Buster’s opened in 2018 in the redeveloped west end, alongside Best Buy and a 9-screen Regal Cinemas as major anchors.
Dimond Center remains family-owned: Joe and Patty passed control to the next generation of Ashlocks in 2012, who oversaw a remodel of the west end that brought in Olive Garden, Chili’s and Ulta Beauty, and initially converted a former Lamont’s/Gottschalks department store space into a Forever 21, which has since closed and been re-tenanted. The property now totals 728,000 sqft, still the largest enclosed mall in Alaska, though the open-air Tikahtnu Commons in northeast Anchorage has a larger gross leasable area.
That continuity of family ownership across nearly five decades, uncommon for a shopping center of this scale, has let Dimond Center evolve gradually rather than through the ownership churn and receivership cycles that have reshaped many US regional malls of similar vintage.
