Ala Moana Center is racing to beat the clock to open its $570 million Ewa wing expansion on Nov. 12, two weeks before Black Friday, the start of the lucrative holiday shopping season.

Thirty-nine stores, including the state’s first Bloomingdale’s, are scheduled to open next month in the former Sears space, which has been extended down to Ala Moana Boulevard and Piikoi Street.

The center will reopen 2,400 full-size parking stalls in the mauka-Ewa parking structure near Longs Drugs, and near Bloomingdale’s, resulting in a total of 11,000 parking spaces. The mall’s Piikoi Street entrance also will reopen, as will the three-lane ramp entrance on Ala Moana Boulevard.

“Historically, Ala Moana was always behind a wall of parking,” said Francisco Gutierrez, Ala Moana’s senior development director. “If you were driving it was OK, but if you were walking it was almost intimidating. With so many residents in Kakaako, we want to really make it easy for them to walk back and forth to the mall.”

Even though construction is heavily underway with many storefronts still unfinished, Gutierrez said the build-out will be completed on time.

“It may seem like it’s not, but we’re actually feeling very confident. This is actually quite far along,” he said. “All the systems of the building are working, which is the biggest challenge. All we’re doing now is cleaning and doing the final touches, putting the landscape in and getting water inside water ponds.”

The project, which is expanding the former Sears space to 650,000 square feet on three levels, will include 21 more stores opening after November, including Shirokiya’s $35 million Japan Village Walk, the new Nordstrom and Foodland Farms.

Nordstrom will relocate to a new 185,000-square-foot space in the Ewa wing in March, while Foodland Super Market Ltd. — one of the center’s original tenants — is returning to Hawaii’s largest shopping mall in July. Shirokiya is slated to open its Japanese food village on the ground floor June 1.

Meanwhile a 215-unit luxury condominium project known as Park Lane Ala Moana is scheduled for occupancy in early 2017.

Ala Moana also has added new finishes, lighting, flooring and paint throughout the center.

“The reason for doing that is we want this to be very seamless so on Nov. 12 when this construction finishes and we take this wall down, we want the existing and the new to really flow together as one,” Gutierrez added.

In November 2013 the mall finished the redevelopment of Center Court, adding 2,000 square feet of space and larger breezeways, a new Centerstage, guest services and tenant spaces, as well as updated common areas and restrooms.