In spite of the Lefty Fundamentalist hatred of commerce, San Francisco will get one of the greatest monuments to commerce ever built, this year.
Opening in September will be the Westfield Centre at the center of retail downtown, Powell & Market. It is probably the biggest indoor mall in the United States. Westfield snuck in to this Trotsky paradise by agreeing to remodel the abandoned and glorious old Emporium. They then bought all the surrounding property and built a giant mall. Just recently, Westfield bought the largest adjacent shopping and movie center, the Metreon, from Sony.
My guess is that Westfield had so much demand for space in their main center that they can use the additional space for overflow.
Westfield is an Australian company, now global, founded in the 1950s. The company runs on pure nepotism.
The Westfield Centre is an idea that will work. San Francisco is at the transportation hub of a 4 million person metro region with no malls of this size and compactness. Big, compact, exciting and with great depth of merchandise is what succeeds in retail. It is what people have been demanding of markets from the open markets in West Africa in 1750 to the first 1850s department stores in Philadelphia to the 1950s suburban shopping malls.
The structure is currently called the San Francisco Center; I doubt the name will remain.