It was October 1988 in San Francisco. The Nordstrom Building opened at Fifth Street and Market Street, and San Francisco was very skeptical about its chances of success.
Among them were the owners of the shop.
“Who says we’re confident?” Co-Chairman Jim Nordstrom told The Chronicle on the eve of the store’s opening day. “We’re not that confident.”
The SF Nordstrom — which spanned 336,000 square feet across four floors of the Westfield San Francisco Center — was an incredibly dangerous business venture, but it had lasting repercussions.
Huge sales in the first year encouraged other projects, from car parks to museums to the Metreon. An area once considered the city’s Skid Row and warehouse district suddenly became rich with opportunity as the city center shifted south of Market Street. Nordstrom left so Salesforce Tower, East Cut, and China Basin could run.
When Nordstrom announced it would be closing its Westfield store and a Nordstrom Rack location across the street this summer, it was flagged as another symbol of failure in the city and the latest major loss for downtown San Francisco. This analysis is not entirely wrong. Indeed, the Westfield San Francisco Center has plunged into uncertainty and possible chaos. (I’ve never been happier that I don’t own a Foot Locker franchise there.)
And yet, from 30,000 feet up — with the help of The Chronicle archives — it’s hard to see Nordstrom’s tenure as anything but a savage success.
Dec 8, 1970: The Emporium on Market Street was a popular place for working class people in San Francisco.
Arthur Frisch/The Chronicle
To appreciate Nordstrom’s success, we need to talk about what used to be there.
This corner of Fifth and Market was once home to a large JCPenney and a much larger Emporium retail store. It was the shopping district for the poor, with Market Street acting as a sort of invisible line between classes – the social crowd to the north frequented Union Square while the working class shopped at “The Big E” (as the Emporium was known). then went down the street to a burger at Foster’s Diner.
My grandparents, Mexican immigrants, were in the latter group. My grandfather Ray Leal bought his first suit at The Big E in 1928 for $14, my mom tells me. He later wore Penney’s work clothes to his union welding job. Immediately south of these businesses, including the grounds of SFMOMA and Moscone Center, was urban squalor. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff’s grandfather, a supervisor in San Francisco who worked with transit and helping the homeless, commissioned a documentary about the poor conditions there.
So in the 1980s, when Nordstrom – an upscale department store! – in Union Square for a building on the wrong side of the market, it was considered madness. The Chronicle’s architecture critic at the time said the project could send wealthy buyers into “a war zone” and the paper suggested it was unsafe as “the wolves” come out of the tenderloin at night. It was a “filthy crossroads” and “home to shrieking preachers, beggars and sack ladies.”
On the other hand, progressives, including the ACLU, feared the area would turn into a second Union Square, driving the buskers, performers, chess players and unlucky ones away.
Oct. 7, 1988: The Nordstrom department store on Market Street in San Francisco opens to the public for the first time.Frederic Larson/The Chronicle
The Nordstrom owners have taken a Billy Beane/”Moneyball” analytical approach to the project to their credit.
BART and Muni Metro by the 1970s had cemented the city’s backbone on Market Street, which had much more room to expand and support larger crowds than Union Square, which was plagued by the congested cable cars and the 38 Geary bus route was served. Reportedly, 300,000 people—roughly the population of Sacramento in 1988—passed through the intersection of Fifth and Market each day.
The intersection was also more highway accessible. And as Jim Nordstrom pointed out, there were more hotel rooms within a three-block radius of downtown (or Center) than in all of Washington state.
“The San Francisco Center is … a symptom,” said Matt Orvick, the mall’s general manager. “It’s sort of part of an attempt to open up the city’s upscale shopping district and move it south.”
Oct. 7, 1988: The Nordstrom department store on Market Street in San Francisco opens to the public for the first time.Frederic Larson/The Chronicle
Skepticism in San Francisco had never vanished faster than on opening day at the Nordstrom.
Thousands queued outside the store when it opened at 9:30 a.m., and any hasty predictions of the sinking were immediately erased.
Critics and some Nordstrom executives had questioned the store’s design, which used curved escalators (and a few express elevators) to slowly filter the crowds toward Nordstrom’s merchandise on the top three floors. It broke all retail rules for easy access and impulse buying.
But the San Franciscans embraced the layout like ants serving their queen. Photos from day one show delighted shoppers moving upstairs and queuing for everything, including acquiring the store’s credit card.
“By midday, 60,000 shoppers had come to browse and shop, making the escalator line about as long as that for the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland,” wrote San Francisco Examiner columnist Rob Morse the next day. “It was a wild scene of mass consumerism. As a friend of mine said, Nordstrom isn’t a business, it’s a cult.”
The mall hired 18 valet attendants, but that wasn’t enough. The upscale store, complete with a champagne bar, spa, fireplace and piano player, had sales of $2 million on day one. It had what Nordstrom officials later called “without a doubt…our strongest opening in Nordstrom history.”
Oct. 7, 1988: The Nordstrom department store on Market Street in San Francisco opens to the public for the first time.Frederic Larson/The Chronicle
I returned to San Francisco in 1999 after 11 years on the Central Coast and Hollywood to discover that some of the largest post-Nordstrom dominoes were falling south of Market.
The Metreon and the Old Navy Flagship Store (with sandwiches) were completed that year, and city leaders had moved an old Playland-at-the-Beach carousel to Yerba Buena Gardens. Opened in 1996 on Howard and Fourth Streets, SFMOMA was another upscale hit on Market’s “bad side”. Next up was the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Mission Street.
Perhaps more importantly, the “San Francisco-ness” of this block of Market Street has remained, with authentic characters including the preachers, the guy who puts your name on a grain of rice, kids selling rap CDs, and a few the same street artists were there in the 1980s.
The store in 2023 remains the only Nordstrom in the Bay Area — maybe in the entire world? — where you can step outside and buy a bacon-wrapped hot dog within half a block. I think that’s a very good thing; a situation that in 1988 would have been considered an almost impossible best-case scenario to achieve.
What’s next for the San Francisco Center?
Maybe it’ll bounce back with a new anchor. Maybe after Big E and Nordstrom there’s a third act that we’re not even thinking about. (See Ferry Building, Pier 39, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and a dozen other San Francisco institutions pronounced dead before dramatic rebirths with much hand-wringing.)
Or maybe it is indeed doomed, with more retail theft, violence, and fleeing retail chains.
But the problem with taking all good things that come to an end as a sign of the apocalypse is not knowing the bigger picture. Nordstrom brought incredible momentum to the South of Market. After it’s gone, we’ll continue to benefit from museum visits, bike trails, carousel rides, Giants games, jazz at Yerba Buena Gardens, and IMAX movies at the Metreon.
The Chronicle wrote in 1988: “(Nordstrom) is being hailed as either the sharpest business decision since the marketing of sliced bread or the worst commercial blunder since Titanic’s maiden voyage.”
There was and is no iceberg on Fifth Street and Market Street. Just a complicated corner where Nordstrom thrived for 35 years — and made this town better over time.
Reach Peter Hartlaub: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
