For years, San Francisco Centre was a destination, an anchor of a buoyant downtown that seemed destined to keep on booming. Shoppers rode circular escalators up to Nordstrom to buy expensive shoes while a musician played a grand piano.

When an even fancier Bloomingdale’s opened there in 2006, California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, cut a ribbon carried by aerial dancers.

A few miles west and another world away, out toward the ocean and low-slung single family homes, Stonestown Galleria sat forlorn. It was your typical suburban-style mall, though still in the city limits, with a run-down movie theater and unlimited breadsticks at the Olive Garden. If the first lady ever went there, she did not brag about it.

Then, their fortunes reversed.

The downtown mall, long referred to as Westfield Centre for one of its owners, became a national symbol of the city’s pandemic-battered downtown. It lost its movie theater, its day spa and nearly all of its stores. Its Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s anchors are gone.

It even lost its name when Westfield Corporation, the shopping mall firm, abandoned the space in June 2023. The 1.5 million square foot behemoth has lost $1 billion in value and is being held in receivership. It is scheduled to be put up for auction later this month. It remains open with a handful of stores still operating but is a shadow of its former self.

Stonestown, on the other hand, has become 800,000 square feet of fun. People wait two hours for tables at its most popular restaurants. It is often hard to find an empty parking space in a sea of 3,800 of them. Some tourists head there straight from the airport.

It was long thought that a city was defined by the vibrancy of its downtown, and for many decades that was true of San Francisco. Suburban residents flocked downtown to shop at the mall’s signature Bloomingdale’s. Commuters browsed nearby boutiques on their lunch hour. Generations of families went ice skating in Union Square a couple of blocks away, then holiday shopping at the towering Macy’s that made the malls back home feel inadequate.

But in an era redefined by the Covid-19 pandemic and the internet, the energy of a metropolis no longer has to be concentrated in its core, not even in a region like the San Francisco Bay Area. A suburban-style mall can flip the script, drawing new audiences. And a downtown can wither, especially one that struggles with homelessness and open-air drug use.

The circular escalators at San Francisco Centre once symbolized the downtown mall’s ascendancy. Now empty, they reflect its downward spiral.

3 p.m.

Stonestown Galleria

Stonestown sits in the city’s southwest corner near San Francisco State University, several high schools and neighborhoods that are filled with Asian American families.

The mall has tapped into a successful formula, as Asian stores and restaurants have become popular among young consumers, no matter their ethnicity. Other malls in the Bay Area, as well as in New York and Canada, have found similar success.

At the Chinese retailer Pop Mart, customers scoop up collectible, limited edition Labubu dolls in such huge numbers it can be difficult to push through the crowded aisles.

Bryan and Maricris Buenaventura browsed the store with their Maltese Yorkie dog, Rocky, whom they had dressed like Harry Potter. The couple said they regularly have date nights at Stonestown, where Rocky likes to slurp a dog-friendly, soft serve ice cream from Matcha Cafe Maiko, a Japanese shop.

“It’s Asian-centric, but it’s diverse,” Mr. Buenaventura, 49, said of the mall. “It makes you feel young again.”

“They found stores and restaurants that people actually wanted,” he continued. “It’s not the same cookie-cutter stuff, the tried and true, the Orange Juliuses.”

While some of the stores are standard — Target, Whole Foods, Apple — others have more flair. At Candy Doll Beauty, young women pull up TikTok videos on their phones that show skin care trends from Korea and Japan and ask Elaine Wong, a store clerk, how to replicate the look.

Ms. Wong, who has worked at the mall for several years, said Stonestown keeps getting busier.

“The main reason is no one wants to go downtown,” she said matter-of-factly. “Stonestown is better.”

It may be that Stonestown is perfectly situated to tap into both a large customer base and the trendiness of Asian pop culture, given its proximity to students and Asian American families in the city’s west side.

“It makes perfect sense that it happened there,” said Nick Egelanian, a consultant who specializes in shopping malls and retail culture, of Stonestown’s success.

San Francisco Centre

The downtown mall is about the space of 23 football fields, and most of it is now cavernous and empty. Many of its store windows are covered by trash bags or butcher paper.

Directional signs still hang from the ceilings, pointing people to stores that no longer exist. The Bloomingdale’s logo is still faintly visible beneath layers of paint. Inside some vacant clothing stores, the torsos and legs of mannequins linger as remnants from the past.

It is strange to have a ghost town in the middle of a cosmopolitan city known as the birthplace of cutting-edge technology, but that is the feel inside San Francisco’s dead mall. Its location at Fifth and Market Streets is mere blocks from City Hall, Salesforce Tower, Union Square and the former headquarters of Twitter. The cable car turnaround, a San Francisco landmark, sits right across the street.

San Francisco’s office vacancy rate stubbornly hovers around 35 percent, one of the highest rates in the country, five years after the pandemic lockdown. Many employees at San Francisco-based companies have been able to continue working remotely, which means less foot traffic that can support downtown stores and restaurants.

On this afternoon, German shepherds patrolled the mall with the police K-9 unit. An unconscious man was standing, bent over at the waist, a telltale sign of fentanyl use, outside a shuttered Jamba Juice. Security guards scrolled through their phones.

Cindy Restrepo and Esther Rocha, both 31, waited at the mall’s entrance for an Uber. They had hoped for a fun day at the mall. They did not get it.

“It’s sad,” Ms. Restrepo said. “And boring.”

Other downtown malls around the country have suffered, but none has seen its reputation deteriorate as far and as fast as San Francisco Centre, Mr. Egelanian said.

“It’s the most dramatic fall of any mall in the United States,” he said. “That was a destination with grandeur, and it just fell like a rock.”

5 p.m.

Stonestown Galleria

Two words may best describe Stonestown’s success: claw machines.

Nordstrom has been selectively closing its department store locations. That included its Stonestown location in 2019, before the pandemic. But unlike at San Francisco Centre, the space at Stonestown was quickly filled by Target on the upper floors and a large amusement center, Round 1, on the bottom.

The massive arcade has billiards, karaoke, a bowling alley and seemingly endless rows of claw machines that dispense all sorts of stuffed animals, from Donkey Kongs to smiling pickles.

There are no windows, no clocks and no shortage of pleas from children to try just one more time. Yes, it is like a casino for kids.

Dairrion Simms’s 3-year-old daughter, Adalina, is already a super fan. She will wear only sparkly pink princess dresses for her regular visits to Round 1. It is easy to drop $55 on enough plays to win a stuffed animal, her father said, and win one she must.

“It’s definitely a journey,” he said with a sigh, following her from one machine to the next.

Dinner, too, is an experience. The most popular one seems to be at Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, where diners waited hours for a table where they could swipe little plates of sushi from a conveyor belt and be served drinks by a yellow robot.

Four generations of the Chu family packed into three tables, their empty plates piling up like Jenga blocks as they ate.

“Retail downtown is stale,” said Jason Chu, the father of 6-year-old twins. “It became for old ladies and old men, and that doesn’t appeal to the young folks. You have the Cartiers, the Guccis, the Tiffanys. This is more middle class.”

San Francisco Centre

As dinnertime approached at San Francisco Centre, there was one hive of activity. The shoe store Steve Madden was holding its closing sale, and preteen girls were vying for the last available pairs. At the entrance, a clerk had laid down the ground rules: $25 for shoes. $20 for everything else. No cash accepted.

At the food court, no more than two people stood in each line at Charleys Philly Steaks or Panda Express. Most of the business came from delivery drivers, their motorcycle helmets still on as they grabbed bags of food and disappeared into the streets.

Elsewhere, the mall grew emptier. On the fourth floor, a man rode his bicycle in circles while three teenage boys watched videos on a phone. Cereal boxes, plastic bags and ice cream containers were scattered around like tumbleweed in a desert.

7 p.m.

London Breed, the former mayor of San Francisco, had said she wanted to replace the dead mall with a soccer stadium, but that idea went nowhere before she lost her November bid for re-election to Daniel Lurie.

Mr. Lurie slammed Ms. Breed during the campaign for letting downtown retail die and defeated her on promises to reduce homelessness and improve public safety, especially in the city core.

But since he took office in January, Bloomingdale’s, Swarovski, Rolex and other stores have closed. Asked what he plans to do with the mall, he gave a winding answer about the importance of clean sidewalks and safe streets.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” he acknowledged.

Stonestown Galleria

Friday night at Stonestown was just getting started. At Round 1, a young couple jumped around a karaoke room, holding microphones and singing a Kendrick Lamar song about not killing the vibe. There seemed to be no danger of that.

Numerous birthday parties were taking place at the bowling alley. Parents’ bank accounts slowly drained at the claw machines. The giant arcade would remain open until 2 a.m.

In a few years, Stonestown could be even livelier.

Its owner, Brookfield Properties, co-owned San Francisco Centre with Westfield and gave up on that downtown property. But the company has big plans for Stonestown in San Francisco, including a new neighborhood around it with 3,500 housing units and six acres of parks.

San Francisco Centre

There would be no bright lights, no karaoke and no birthday parties at San Francisco Centre, despite it being a Friday night.

The downtown mall closed at 8 p.m. Twelve minutes later, about 10 people still lingered in the food court. The most activity involved security guards, who walked around checking every corner of the mall to make sure that no one had sneaked in for an overnight stay.

By 8:40 p.m., they kicked out the last stragglers and locked the doors.