I disagree about making it into a typical "suburban mall". One feature of the expanded mall was Bristol Farms (I believe it was split into two stores). Bristol Farms was the result of Albertsons wanting to expand the brand into Northern California, but by the time it actually opened, was owned by SuperValu and the NorCal expansion got scrapped; meanwhile the NorCal division of Albertsons went with LLC. Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom are more upscale than the typical mall fare at the time of its opening (Sears, JCPenney, etc.) and I believe there was some office space that was connected as well.rwsandiego wrote: ↑June 20th, 2023, 7:40 am Bringing this back to the topic, Westfield over-expanded San Francisco Centre and turned it into a middle-of-the-road shopping mall. It failed. Their hubris blinded them from seeing that a mall in the middle of San Francisco isn't the same as a mall in the middle of a suburb. When they redeveloped the site of The Emporium, they should have added residential and hotel space. (Think Water Tower Place in Chicago). The stories about feces in an elevator says more about Westfield's lack of investment in maintenance than it does about the city. (I also do not believe it was a recurring problem) I'm not saying defecation in an elevator is Westfield's fault, but staffing maintenance in a way that the feces remained in the elevator is Westfield's fault. Side note: the bathrooms in the mall always smelled terrible, not because people defecated on the floor but because they were designed without ventilation and were not adequately cleaned. The same issue persists in other Westfield properties.
Of course, that was in 2006-2007, and a lot of those tenants have fled. A&F, Bristol Farms, Nordstrom, and the theaters...all gone.