Every so often, I like to walk around the San Francisco Centre (née the Westfield San Francisco). It is, if nothing else, a good reminder of the slow creep of time, a reminder that entropy comes for us all.
In the past year or so reporting on the mall, I’ve talked with store workers at shops that no longer exist and business owners at shops that failed to even launch. The mall is full of signs for stores that never opened, or soft launches that never solidified.
The Centre is a 1.5 million-square-foot husk. Entire corridors are barren. The mall is fully hollowed out — recent exits include Zara, Oak + Fort, and Steve Madden. A majority of the regular foot traffic comes from the food court. Panda Express and Shake Shack are still draws.
But recently, I observed something curious: Tourists ambling around, peering at maps, taking videos of … nothing. They swivel their necks in awe of the emptiness, their cameras capturing how barren it all is. I passed by one person recording a 360 shot of the mall’s main floor, in apparent disbelief. I catch one group taking photos of the Centre’s fourth-floor dome, in all its sad majesty.
“It seems really fancy,” a visitor named Tom tells me, “but there's something so dystopian about the disunity of what it looks like and the feeling you get simply because nobody else is here.”
Tom and his companion, Sarah, are visiting San Francisco from Belgium as part of a three-week jaunt around the West Coast. They are in the city for three days but have made time for this.
I asked them why.
“The restrooms,” Tom offered.
Sarah added, “And the H&M.”
The San Francisco Centre possesses two competitive advantages over the wildly successful Stonestown: An H&M and an Aritzia. These are the only locations for the fast-fashion chains in San Francisco’s city limits. (That will change soon: An H&M is set to open in Stonestown later this year.)
Accordingly, H&M and Aritzia are the main retailers that have any semblance of foot traffic. No employees in either shop were willing to speak with me. “I can understand why,” one Aritzia worker who declined to speak said, sympathetically, when I asked to speak with someone at the store.
But even then, that foot traffic doesn’t carry over to the rest of the mall; most tourists are in and out within a half-hour.
“It's so empty,” said Daniela Campora, speaking with me outside of the Shoe Palace. “I don't know why, but it's so empty.” Daniela is visiting from Argentina with her daughter; she, too, was interested in browsing the H&M. She also wanted a look at the Steve Madden, which closed last month.
I asked the visitors I spoke with if they were aware of the narrative behind the mall; if they were aware of the mall’s place as the nucleus of the downtown “doom loop.” I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had: The Daily Mail publishes nearly as many takes on the San Francisco Centre as the Chronicle. (Fellow British rag the Sun’s US edition ran a story about Zara’s closure earlier this month, too.)
Amazingly, they hadn’t.
“It’s simply the fact that there are these abandoned malls all over America,” Tom said, a good reminder that dead malls aren’t unique to San Francisco.
Daniela suggested that the mall’s proximity to the Tenderloin may have something to do with it, but added that she would visit the San Francisco Centre in future trips “if the mall works and has more shops.” (Don’t book your tickets, Daniela.)
I asked how their stays have been so far.
“I like San Francisco,” Daniela told me. “We have been in Alamo Square, Golden Gate. It's beautiful; the city's beautiful.”
Tom and Sarah were just glad the sun had come out.
