The largest remaining tenant in San Francisco's largest mall just called it quits. Bloomingdale's which is owned by Macy's announce it will be closing its doors in March.

The store, which occupies 330,000 square feet in the beleaguered San Francisco Centre, is slated to close at the end of March. Bloomingdale’s is by far the mall’s largest remaining tenant, and it is closing the brand’s second-biggest store after its New York flagship...

Bloomingdale’s, which opened in 2006 in the former Westfield mall, is the second anchor tenant to bail on the 1.5 million-square-foot property at Fifth and Market streets. Nordstrom’s flagship store closed in 2023 after 35 years in business...

The closure of Bloomingdale’s deals another setback to the struggling San Francisco Centre mall, which is about half vacant after an exodus of retailers since the pandemic.

This mall has been on the edge of collapse for a while now. The owners of the mall walked away from it in 2023:

The San Francisco Centre is being managed by a receiver after its previous owners, Westfield and Brookfield Properties, walked away from the property in 2023. 

The 800,000-square-foot mall was supposed to be sold in a public auction late last year, but the process has been delayed twice by lenders.

The approved narrative on this is that the decline of the mall, which was caused by a decline in downtown foot traffic connected to the pandemic, was a blow to the city's downtown but one which would eventually heal. But that's not what has happened so far. 

A few small stores have been leased in the mall but none of those will come close to making up for the 5-floors of space that Bloomingdale's had leased until 2046. There is supposedly a theater chain interested in taking over a theater that also closed at this location but that deal hasn't been completed yet.

The trend for San Francisco's downtown is still a bad one. Tourism also didn't recover as hoped last year, though people are once again optimistic for 2025. And who knows maybe tourism will recover but will it be enough to help the mall recover? Will it be enough to keep the BART trains from needing to cut services substantially? Or will it take some time to turn this around?

As we've been telling you, San Francisco continues to navigate a difficult recovery downtown. Though crime is down, the tents are pretty much gone and some companies are now requiring employees to come back in person five days a week, the area has yet to bounce back...

George Chen owns China Live in nearby Chinatown. He no longer opens for lunch on weekends, meaning no dim sum, because, again, the perception among many families is that downtown is not safe.

"It's a ghost town. I think people didn't want to come downtown because they are afraid of whatever may happen, and it has a negative energy to it... and so why go downtown?" explained Chen.

It has a lot to do with what people are actually seeing.

For example, the Muni bus stops in the Financial District have been vandalized over and over again. There is no glass. There is graffiti. When people see this, they think this area is sketchy, they don't feel safe. Same problem BART canopies. Many glass panels have been shattered. So, the question right now is what is BART doing about it? What is the SFMTA doing about it?

San Francisco's problems aren't the kind likely to go away quickly. It could take a long time for the downtown to fully recover and this news about Bloomingdale's suggests they may not even have hit bottom yet.