“Best Shoeshine in the World” according to Vanity Fair magazine in 2012 may be among the sadder flexes still posted to a wall in 2023, but that’s what greets visitors to the lower level of the Crocker Galleria in Downtown San Francisco. The shoeshine stand, however, is long gone.
So are VIP Luggage & Leather, Aricie Lingerie, Tomboy Tailors, Giorgio’s Pizzeria, Abigail’s Flowers and almost everything else. These days, Crocker Galleria’s three levels house only three commercial tenants among them, two of them fast-casual restaurants.
In fairness, the Galleria is scheduled to undergo redevelopment in 2025, managers confirmed with The Standard. But the well-publicized Nordstrom-lessness of the nearby San Francisco Centre—until recently, a Westfield—plus the drawn-out demise of Stuff, Valencia Street’s highly curated house of retro-cool vendors, underscore how difficult the situation for retail has become.
And it seems that Downtown’s other, emptier mall is in dire shape indeed.
Along with One Montgomery Tower, which it’s connected to, the Crocker Galleria was completed in 1982. At 500 feet, the tower is still among the 25 tallest buildings in San Francisco. People still stroll through the Galleria to get from Sutter to Post streets, walking under its barrel-shaped glass ceiling, passing beneath the grand clock that could have been swiped from a century-old train station.
Reached for comment, a leasing agent confirmed to The Standard that the mall has been slated for redevelopment since before the pandemic, but details were slim.
“The retail complex is getting redeveloped physically, and it will alter the building itself,” Kazuko Morgan of Cushman & Wakefield said. “I’m waiting for a date. Probably 2025.”
If accurate, that timeline means at least 14 more months of running on empty, or close to it.
Currently, the Galleria’s only extant businesses are La Luna Cupcakes, Julie’s Kitchen and one of the Bay Area’s 10 locations of Ladle & Leaf. An employee at the latter said business had picked up, referring further inquiries to the corporate office. Ladle & Leaf did not respond to requests for comment by publication time. La Luna Cupcakes was not open at any time The Standard visited.
The pavilion is open until 5 p.m. six days a week, but both fast casual restaurants are only open for lunch on weekdays. So the mall is essentially a nonentity in the late afternoon and on Saturdays, its escalators running all but free of riders barely one block away from bustling Montgomery BART.
Downtown San Francisco has dozens of privately owned public open spaces (or “POPOS”), and Crocker Galleria has two. One, a garden, has been closed for some time. The other is a rooftop terrace that The Standard visited over the summer, finding a variety of greenery and plenty of seats, but also standing water and a tangible sense of neglect.
In spite of the building being mostly empty, a sign indicates that Montreal firm Alvéole maintains honey bee hives on site.
“We have not had much interaction with the commercial tenants who are there but have had workshops and hive tours,” said Dylan McNair, Alvéole’s Bay Area manager. “We're lucky that this hive gets so much attention despite the almost vacant building it sits on.”
Correction: An original version of this article incorrectly stated the number of tenants at Crocker Galleria. There are three.