Inside the last holiday shopping season at San Francisco's largest mall

For generations of children growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, December meant "going downtown." For many, no trip downtown was complete without strolling through the San Francisco Centre, where sparkling holiday decorations were visible from every floor of the nine-story vertical mall. That's no longer the case.

This year, the traditionally busiest shopping window of the year right after Thanksgiving was marked by security guards in yellow windbreakers appearing to outnumber shoppers at the mall. Workers at the last remaining open stores kept busy socializing or scrolling on their phones.

The downtown mall, the city’s largest, is celebrating what could be its last holiday season with barely a sprig of artificial mistletoe. The mall’s ownership has not formally announced its closing, but the handful of shops still doing business there say they have been given notice to close by the end of January.

“They didn’t tell us what’s going to happen to the mall, they just said ‘leave,’” Pri Sandhu, assistant manager of Shoe Palace on the mall's third floor, told CoStar News as employees packed merchandise into cardboard boxes instead of stocking the shelves or helping customers.

This holiday season at San Francisco Centre symbolizes the struggles facing some retail locations across the United States. In Dallas, Neiman-Marcus could be celebrating its last holiday season as parent company Saks Global prepares to shutter the downtown flagship property and redevelop the site into different uses. In Chicago, owners of the Water Tower Place mall are planning on slashing the retail space from eight floors to three and bringing in a buyer for the upper floors in a deal that could dramatically change the face of one of the nation’s best-known multistory malls.

And in Southern California's Orange County, a former JCPenney department store is being demolished to make way for nearly 200 homes.

At San Francisco Centre, tenants received eviction notices last month, shortly after a group of lenders foreclosed on the struggling 1.2 million-square-foot shopping mall and listed it for sale as a “blank slate” that could be converted to housing, offices or other uses. At the time, it was less than 10% leased. In the future, the property could still have some shops, but it isn't being sold to remain as the city's biggest purely retail center.

Sandhu said most of the Shoe Palace employees would transfer a few blocks away to work at the chain's new 16,000-square-foot store in Union Square. In contrast with the padlocked, papered-over storefronts at San Francisco Centre, the city's premier downtown shopping district barely a five-minute walk up Powell Street is enjoying a comeback after several difficult years of disappearing foot traffic after the COVID-19 pandemic.

San Francisco is heralding Union Square’s nascent rebound this year with amped-up holiday programming featuring traditions like an outdoor ice rink and live puppies and kittens frolicking in the windows of Macy’s and adding such offerings as a rotating food market and pop-ups by local businesses as part of the city’s “Vacant to Vibrant” program.

But just across Market Street, San Francisco Centre’s holiday décor consists of a small Salvation Army Christmas tree and a walk-through globe strung with lights that no one turned on.

America in the 21st century is littered with so-called zombie shopping malls, once-bustling retail palaces that have fallen to the forces of e-commerce and the decline of big box stores. Yet for years, the mall in San Francisco’s downtown shopping center — one of the nation’s largest located just steps from Salesforce Tower and Twitter’s one-time headquarters — kept thriving, mirroring the seemingly never-ending rise of the nation’s tech capital.

Like a loved one with a terminal illness, its end came gradually and then all at once.

The mall went dark from the top down. The real trouble began in 2023, with the exit of Nordstrom, its signature anchor tenant, after office workers disappeared from downtown San Francisco and reports of crime mounted in the area. Nordstrom had been a driving force behind the mall dating back to its opening in 1988, and its closing instantly shuttered more than 300,000 square feet across the building’s upper five floors.

The mass exodus of tenants that followed prompted the Westfield San Francisco Centre, as it had long been known, to lose its very name a few months later, when its owners, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield Properties, stopped making payments on a $558 million loan tied to the property.

Rebranding efforts followed to rescue the failing mall. The name was changed to “Emporium Centre San Francisco,” an homage to the vanished middle-class department store that operated there for a century beginning in the 1890s. City officials tried to drum up business by sponsoring an effort to lease spaces at discounted rents to local nonprofits and small businesses.

For a while, it looked like such efforts might work. A handful of local business owners had already taken advantage of plummeting rents following the crash of San Francisco’s commercial real estate market by snapping up space at a storied retail venue previously accessible only to national chains and luxury brands.

Among them was Mohammad Waqar and his wife, Rabia, who had operated a food truck in the city for five years. The couple jumped at the chance in 2022 to open Mashaallah Halal Pakistani Food in the mall’s basement food court.

Up until last year, the Waqars said they enjoyed a steady if somewhat diminished crowd of city employees, construction workers, college students, tourists and professionals on their lunch hour who showed up to order their fresh masalas and roasted meats.

“It was beautiful, you’d just open the doors, and people were here,” Waqar said. “You didn’t have to spend any extra money on marketing.”

Then in March, Bloomingdale’s shuttered, marking the departure of the mall’s last remaining anchor tenant. Waqar said after that, it was like someone had pulled the plug. The mall had lost both department stores, its movie theater, its day spa and most of its stores. In September, Mashaalah Halal dismantled its custom tandoori oven and relocated to a spot a few blocks away in the rising SoMa, or South of Market Street, district, where the couple hopes to cater to a growing population of AI startups.

Earlier this month, workers at the mall’s last remaining restaurant, Panda Express, were busy shoveling sticky Orange Chicken into takeout containers for a small fleet of helmet-wearing delivery drivers ferrying food to other parts of the city on e-bikes. A handful of diners eating lunch in the dimly lit food court were reminiscent of moviegoers who’d stayed late to watch the credits.

As the mall’s owners now pitch the property for redevelopment, including a focus on nonshopping uses, the property’s current beleaguered status stands in contrast to the mall’s early years, when shoppers flooded the Incredible Christmas Store on the mall’s lower level and snacked on deep-fried “snow balls.”

The mall’s tradition of going big for the holidays dated back to The Emporium, a celebrated San Francisco chain whose Market Street flagship stood next door in the mall’s early years.

For half a century before it closed in 1995, families flocked to The Emporium’s rooftop Christmas Carnival to ride the roller coaster, carousel, Ferris wheel and giant slide atop the building. One year, the attractions included a trained baby elephant. Santa’s arrival outside on Market Street was an event akin to a World Series victory parade.

The mall embraced the over-the-top attitude exhibited by its neighbor.

On the mall’s opening day in the fall of 1988, crowds cheered as 4,000 balloons were released through the mall’s retractable skylight while the cast of the city’s famous musical review, “Beach Blanket Babylon,” sang “San Francisco.” By noon, an estimated 60,000 shoppers had crowded into the new mall, which one reporter likened to the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

After The Emporium closed, Westfield kept up the tradition of going all out for the holidays. In 2016, it spawned a national trend with its 50-foot upside down crystal Christmas tree.

The mall’s $460 million expansion in 2006 into the space formerly occupied by the now-closed Emporium essentially gutted the old department store building and rebuilt a modern store around its landmarked neoclassical sandstone facade and historic 1908 dome, restoring the windows of the skylight that had remained blacked out since World War II.

The newly branded Westfield San Francisco Centre boasted being the largest urban shopping center west of the Mississippi River, with 170 shops including two department stores, a multiplex, restaurants, a spa and a huge swath of office space across two buildings totaling 1.5 million square feet with a dedicated underground entrance to public transit.

On opening day, then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and California’s first lady at the time, Maria Shriver, cut a red silk sash carried in by aerial dancers who rappelled from the historic glass dome from 1908 and tuxedo-clad musicians from the San Francisco symphony performed from the escalators for a celebrity- and politician-studded crowd. Bloomingdale’s reported its first-day sales topped $100,000 per hour.

Almost 20 years later, the store’s closeout sale this past spring offered souvenirs of brighter times from its two-decade run, including reduced price Waterford crystal goblets and unclothed mannequins for $20.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said veteran downtown San Francisco retail broker Kazuko Morgan of Cushman & Wakefield. She witnessed the mall’s rise and its extended fall that was drawn out over the past year as lenders postponed a foreclosure auction of the property at least nine times before paying $133 million for the deeply discounted mall.

Ideas for the mall’s future have ranged from turning it into housing — an idea dismissed by some experts for reasons including the structure’s large windowless floor plates, to tearing it down and building a soccer stadium, or converting it to lab space, or making it a theme park.

“We can only hope its next iteration will be something good,” Morgan said.

Social media channels are filled with people sharing their own holiday memories at the mall. Others are less sentimental.

Sam Argueta, who has owned the Shoe Wiz in the mall’s basement for nearly a decade, has been waiting for the end for months. He said he considered joining the exodus and moving his store, but he doesn’t have the money to fund a relocation. Having let his staff go months ago, he was alone behind the counter hammering a loafer. He plans to keep working until the end.

“It’s just been so hard,” he said.