A Day at Two San Francisco Malls, One That Died and One That Thrived
When an even fancier Bloomingdale's opened there in 2006, California's first lady, Maria Shriver, cut a ribbon carried by aerial dancers.
A few miles west and another world away, out toward the ocean and low-slung single family homes, Stonestown Galleria sat forlorn. It was your typical suburban-style mall, though still in the city limits, with a run-down movie theater and unlimited breadsticks at the Olive Garden. If the first lady ever went there, she did not brag about it.
Then, their fortunes reversed.
The downtown mall, long referred to as Westfield Centre for one of its owners, became a national symbol of the city's pandemic-battered downtown. It lost its movie theater, its day spa and nearly all of its stores. Its Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's anchors are gone.
It even lost its name when Westfield Corporation, the shopping mall firm, abandoned the space in June 2023. The 1.5 million square foot behemoth has lost $1 billion in value and is being held in receivership. It is scheduled to be put up for auction later this month. It remains open with a handful of stores still operating but is a shadow of its former self.
Stonestown, on the other hand, has become 800,000 square feet of fun. People wait two hours for tables at its most popular restaurants. It is often hard to find an empty parking space in a sea of 3,800 of them. Some tourists head there straight from the airport.
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