The Great Mall of the Bay Area (often simply called The Great Mall), is a large indoor outlet shopping mallin Milpitas, California built by Ford Motor Land Development and Petrie Dierman Kughn in 1994, then acquired byMills Corporation in 2003, and is now owned by the Simon Property Group since April 2007. It contains approximately 1.4 million square feet of gross leaseable area.The Great Mall of the Bay Area sits at the intersection of Great Mall Parkway (which becomes Capitol Avenue when it crosses Montague Expressway) and Montague Expressway. The Parc Metropolitan apartments lie to the north of the mall. A few inns are also located at the south entrance of the mall. Great Mall, unlike many other malls (but like most Mills malls), is a "flat" mall and the 2nd largest mall in northern California — it has only one story but takes up a large amount of land. The mall is currently laid out in this fashion because the existing main structure used to be a Ford automobile assembly plant and was not designed to serve as a shopping center.