San Francisco Centre to Close Jan. 26, 2026; Future of Site Unclear

San Francisco Centre, once the city’s largest shopping mall, will permanently shut its doors on Jan. 26, 2026, an employee at the site’s last remaining tenant confirmed. The planned closure caps a visible decline in the downtown retail hub that accelerated after the pandemic reduced foot traffic and corporate office occupancy.

The closure follows a sequence of major losses: Nordstrom left in 2023, Bloomingdale’s exited in 2025, and restaurants vacated early, with Panda Express - the food court’s final vendor - closing earlier this month. In November 2025, a group of lenders that had acquired the mall’s debt effectively took control of the property and served lease termination notices to remaining tenants. BART has already closed the mall entrance that connected the Powell Street Station directly into the complex, severing a high-volume transit link that once brought shoppers and commuters straight into the building.

At a practical level, the lenders’ move and the upcoming shutdown reflect the financial strain of operating a multilevel retail and office complex in the current downtown environment. A full shutdown would cut ongoing operating costs such as utilities and security, a calculation that real estate specialists said is part of the lenders’ decision calculus. Repurposing the Market Street property will be costly and technically complex; the building’s size, vertical layout and mixed retail-office design present substantial challenges for conversion to alternative uses.

For residents and workers, the closure has immediate local effects. Retail and service jobs tied to the Centre will disappear or relocate, and the loss of a direct BART entrance adds friction to weekday commutes for people who used the mall as a transit conduit. The Centre’s vacancy also reduces retail options in the core downtown shopping stretch and could further depress foot traffic for nearby businesses that relied on mall-generated flows.

The announcement adds another chapter to downtown San Francisco’s commercial transformation that began with pandemic-era declines in office occupancy and consumer patterns. Economists point to shifting demand toward centralized work hubs and e-commerce as structural forces that have made large enclosed malls harder to sustain without substantial reinvention.

What comes next is uncertain. With lenders holding the debt and lease terminations in hand, the site could be mothballed to limit costs or become the subject of a protracted redevelopment debate involving city planning, zoning and financing considerations. For San Francisco residents, the closure marks both an end to a familiar Market Street landmark and the start of a potentially long process to reimagine a prime parcel in the city’s downtown core.