When Bill Armour, president of the spa chain Burke Williams, gathered staff this week to announce the shutdown of its San Francisco Centre location, employees cried and hugged. But it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
The downtown mall has lost tenant after tenant in recent years, and the spa had seen a precipitous drop in appointments, according to Armour. Amid the general retail exodus, massage therapists and aestheticians had started fielding questions about the spa’s future.
“They’ve had guests at their tables saying, ‘You’re not leaving, are you?’” Armour recalled.
Well, they are.
When Burke Williams was recently faced with renewing its lease “for a long period,” Armour decided it was time to wind down. The location will close April 28 after nearly 20 years.
“While we held on as long as possible, the reality is that we can no longer operate in a location where the city fails to provide for the safety and well-being of its people and businesses,” Armour wrote in a letter to customers viewed by The Standard.
The beginning of the end, according to Armour, came when Nordstrom announced in 2023 that it would leave the mall, which was owned by Westfield at the time. Shortly thereafter, Westfield itself withdrew, surrendering the mall to its lenders and kicking off a flurry of retail departures.
The death knell came in January, when the final anchor tenant, Bloomingdale’s, announced that it would shutter its five-floor flagship store in April.
When Armour, who is based in Southern California, visited the mall to tell staff the news, it felt like a ghost town.
“You could shoot a cannon in there,” he said. “Nobody was in the mall.”
While malls around the country are struggling, Armour blames San Francisco for the poor conditions in the surrounding neighborhood, which made workers and customers feel unsafe, he said. When his company realized that its SF Centre location had lost 60% of its revenue, it started surveying customers about why they had stopped visiting. The overwhelming answer was safety (or at least the perception of it).
“When you allow people to defecate on the sidewalks in front of your mall, when people have to step over bodies to get into the location, when you pull into the parking garage and the sign that greets you is, ‘Don’t leave anything of value in your car, because it could be broken into,’ that doesn’t feel like safety,” he said. “It boils down to employees and guests not feeling comfortable.”
Workers told of being accosted or chased down the sidewalk, he said, and a few quit or ask to be transferred to other locations. The spa was broken into at night several times over the last three years, he said, with thieves making off with retail goods.
For customers, the experience of entering and leaving the mall took away from the spa’s intended sense of tranquility and relaxation, according to Armour.
“We even hired our own security guards to escort our guests from the street, through the empty mall, so that they would feel safe,” he said. It wasn’t enough to stop the revenue bleed.
San Francisco’s overall crime rate fell to its lowest level in 20 years in 2024, but several violent incidents near Union Square have made headlines. Meanwhile, downtown SF suffers from empty office buildings and vacant retail spaces, which makes the area feel hollowed out, Armour said.
Burke Williams, overall, is doing well, he added, and customers shouldn’t be worried about the fate of its other California locations. The company intends to expand, even as it shutters in San Francisco.
“This is a blip in the radar of the company, a testimony to poor city policy, not the health of our company,” he said.
He’s hopeful about Mayor Daniel Lurie’s ability to rehabilitate the area around the mall but doesn’t expect change soon enough to save his business prospects.
“Once you’ve poisoned the water, you don’t rebuild that overnight,” he said, estimating that it will take three to five years to change the area’s image. For now, the spa’s closest location will be in San Jose. However, Armour can imagine a time when Burke Williams reopens in San Francisco. “Would we ever return? The answer is unequivocally yes. We love the city.”