SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A once-bustling San Francisco mall that has since become a ghost town is officially shuttering its doors Monday, according to a report from KRON4.
The San Francisco Centre, formerly known as the Westfield Mall, was once filled with the likes of Lululemon, Coach and Zara.
The mall was foreclosed on last year, which allowed new owners to buy the property. The new owners soon started slashing costs and warned businesses they needed to vacate the mall.
It’s unclear what the plans are for the property. But it was listed online last year by the brokerage firm CBRE.
“When my kids were small. We would come down here, and I would put them in the stroller and just walk them all,” a former mall shopper, Carmella West, told KRON4. “And I remember when Westfield opened and being so excited about it, daunting to see so many places closed. But I want to be hopeful that something beautiful will rise up.”
The San Francisco Centre joins a list of malls slowly dying across California and the United States, thanks in part to changing consumer behaviors and the rise of e-commerce.
There were nearly 11,000 malls across the United States in 2010. Today, it is estimated that only 1,200 remain, and that number is only expected to decrease significantly in the next 10 years.