While Westfield Centre flounders, Stonestown Galleria thrives
A tale of two malls in San Francisco.
By Adriana Roberts
With holiday shopping season upon us, I decided to do a thing I haven’t done in years. To quote the infamous Robin Sparkles song from that one episode of How I Met Your Mother: “Let’s go to the mall!”
Cultural style comes and goes, and retail trends are no different. Big enclosed shopping malls have fallen out of fashion in America, especially in tech-savvy cities like San Francisco, where everyone orders everything online. The shopping mall culture of the late 1900s has slowly eroded in the new millennium, to the point where U.S. malls have lost nearly 50 percent of their value since 2016.
So I was ready to manage my expectations on a recent field trip to Stonestown Galleria, originally built in 1952 and at the time was the country’s 4th biggest shopping center.
As soon as I walked in, I was immediately emotionally teleported back to my childhood — mostly due to the dated 1980s mall architecture, still intact after its 1987 conversion from a shopping plaza into a proper mall, complete with a food court, skylights, and marble floors.
The other thing that triggered my sense of time travel back to the late 1900s: it was busy. On a random Thursday afternoon, people hustled and bustled with hardly any vacant storefronts. Where was the “dead mall” vibe? Not at Stonestown!
Meanwhile the death rattle is happening smack in the middle of San Francisco’s busiest tourist area. The former Westfield San Francisco Centre isn’t quite dead dead, but with a 45 percent vacancy rate, it’s well on its way.
I visited here too, and oh dear, Westfield. How did this glittering gem of a shopping mecca — replete with a gorgeously-restored historic dome and some of the world’s only curved spiral escalators — get like this?
Westfield sunk a half billion dollars into renovations when they first took over San Francisco Centre in 2002, merging it with the Bloomingdale’s next door and raising the original 1908 dome 58 feet into its present position. That dome used to rise above an entire rotunda of restaurants. Today, there are literally zero under the dome.
Meanwhile, the The Café food court at Stonestown Galleria is bustling.
It’s mostly with hot new Asian eateries, like Uncle Tetsu serving Japanese cheesecakes, and Café Maiko, the first dedicated matcha café in SF, earning the mall its reputation as “the new Japantown.”
With interest in Asian pop culture at an all-time high, it’s no surprise to see young people going to popular Japanese shops Daiso and Misimo, and hanging around places serving Korean barbeque, and Taiwanese street snacks. These shops have breathed new life into the mall, following renovations made while Stonestown was closed for a year during the pandemic. The mall is now doing better business than it was in 2019.
The same, sadly, can’t be said for the former Westfield mall. Retail has dried up in downtown, despite the hordes of tourists who still visit. And when malls start to fail, they fail hard. Due to their size and difficulty in adapting to anything other than what they were custom-built for, it’s near-impossible for malls to recover once they start their death spiral.
It’s hard to imagine anything these days that could successfully fill the four now-vacant top floors left by Nordstrom, the big department store that vacated the mall in August, leaving Bloomingdale’s as the sole anchor tenant. Perhaps San Francisco Centre can take a cue from Grapevine Mills, a large mall in the Dallas area that has begun filling its big empty store spaces with tourist attractions like Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based brand known for creating large-scale interactive art installations. Think next-level Burning Man art but with a strong populist sense of catering to the masses.
Despite having the same issues that every mall in America faces, Stonestown Galleria has cunningly persevered, mostly by focusing on shops and services that cater to the young people of the area, including — perhaps critically — the students of San Francisco State which is just next door, and the suburban kids coming over from Daly City and South San Francisco. Big draws like Regal and Target fulfill all your college needs, while classy grown-ups get their shop on at mainstay Trader Joe’s.
But the area of downtown where San Francisco Centre sits isn’t particularly residential, and tourists would apparently rather ride cable cars and see sea lions than hang out inside a mall. Could it adapt in a similar manner that Stonestown has?
Only time will tell if the former Westfield can find new owners and get a new lease on life. If a 1980s time capsule like Stonestown Galleria can find a way to reinvent itself for a new generation, then perhaps the same can be eventually be done for San Francisco Centre. In the meantime, do an Instagram shoot under the dome and catch a ride on the spiral escalators while you still can.
Adriana Roberts is a DJ and performer with her Bootie Mashup parties, as well as a writer and trans influencer.
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