San Francisco’s downtown mall may be dead, and Union Square may remain beleaguered and full of vacant storefronts, but that seems poised to change in the not-too-distant future.<\/p>\n
Several well known retailers have reportedly been on the hunt for new space in and around Union Square, as the SF Business Times has it<\/a> via real estate sources. Those include Nordstrom, whose closure announcement at the former Westfield Mall started all the dominoes falling for that property, which officially shut all the lights off in February.<\/p>\n Nordstrom, which had a 35-year presence in that Market Street mall, may have its sights on the former Saks Fifth Avenue location at Powell and Post streets, which was abandoned by Saks<\/a> last year. Last fall, Nordstrom revived its San Francisco presence via a small boutique on Fillmore Street<\/a> in Pacific Heights, which is mainly just a customer-service counter taking returns, offering order pickups, and clothing alterations.<\/p>\n Also potentially seeking new space that’s not in a mall is Bloomingdale’s, according to the Business Times.<\/p>\n A representative for Bloomingdale’s would not confirm that they have any specific plans to move back to Union Square, but they said, “San Francisco remains an important market for Bloomingdale\u2019s, and we continually evaluate opportunities that support our long-term growth strategy.”<\/p>\n Nationally, Bloomingdale’s has been faring better on a store by store basis than parent brand Macy’s. And it remains unclear what will be the fate of Macy’s flagship store on Union Square \u2014 we learned in November that the company had partnered with local developer TMG Partners<\/a> to explore the future development of the 600,000-square-foot store property, which could include some continued presence for the store.<\/p>\n And, somewhat suprisingly, Barnes & Noble has reportedly been sniffing around Union Square for new space as well. While the bookstore chain has mostly been known for closing locations around the country in the last decade, they appear to be in some sort of expansion phase again. A new Barnes & Noble is coming to a former Party City space in Cupertino this fall, as we learned last week<\/a>, and the company still has almost a dozen stores around the Bay Area, including in malls in Emeryville and Corte Madera.<\/p>\n The last SF location of Barnes & Noble, at Fisherman’s Wharf, closed in 2010. And they are closing their location at San Bruno’s Tanforan Mall next month, per the Business Times.<\/p>\n In other Union Square retail news, Chanel will be opening a new multi-level store<\/a> in the former Williams-Sonoma this year, Zara has a new flagship<\/a> opening across the street from the former Saks, John Varvatos<\/a> and Bang & Olufsen<\/a> are both returning to the neighborhood, and Super Duper will be opening a burger outpost<\/a> in the middle of Union Square Park. And down on Market Street, the massive former Old Navy will be coming alive again as Uniqlo returns to the area<\/a> as well, later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco’s downtown mall may be dead, and Union Square may remain beleaguered and full of vacant storefronts,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-266335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}