Macy's Union Square is a

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store under one roof, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store mad ...

building bounded by O'Farrell, Powell, Geary, and

Stockton Street Stockton Street is a north-south street in San Francisco. It begins at Market Street passing Union Square, a major shopping district in the city. It then runs underground for about two and a half blocks in Stockton Street Tunnel (lending its ...

s in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, United States. The present-day building consists of several buildings that were built separately and later connected, the earliest of which was designed by

Lewis P. Hobart Lewis Parsons Hobart (January 14, 1873 – October 19, 1954) was an American architect, whose designs included San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, Grace Cathedral and Macy's Union Square, several California Academy of Sciences building ...

for the O'Connor, Moffat, Kean Co. store in 1929. It has been the regional flagship store of the

Macy's Macy's is an American department store chain founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. The first store was located in Manhattan on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, south of the present-day flagship store at Herald Square on West 34 ...

department store chain since 1949, however, is scheduled to close in 2025.

History

O'Connor, Moffat & Co.

Macy's

roots date back to 1866 and the founding of O'Connor, Moffat, Kean Co. at Second &

Market Market is a term used to describe concepts such as: *Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand *Market economy *Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market *Marketing, the act of sat ...

Streets, eventually moving into several buildings on south Post Street, between

Grant Avenue Grant Avenue in San Francisco, California, is one of the oldest streets in the city's Chinatown, San Francisco, Chinatown district. It runs in a north–south direction starting at Market Street in the heart of downtown and dead-ending past Fran ...

and

Kearny Street Kearny Street () in San Francisco, California runs north from Market Street to The Embarcadero. Toward its south end, it separates the Financial District from the Union Square and Chinatown districts. Further north, it passes over Telegra ...

, where it rebuilt after the

1906 San Francisco earthquake At 05:12 AM Pacific Time Zone, Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated Moment magnitude scale, moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli inte ...

and reopened in March 1909. In 1928, the company, by then known as O'Connor, Moffat & Co., commissioned

to design a new eight-story store building at 101

at the northwest corner of

O'Farrell Street Jasper O'Farrell (1817–1875) was an Irish-American politician who served as the first surveyor for San Francisco. He designed the "grand promenade" that became today's Market Street. O'Farrell Street in San Francisco is named after him. Early ...

, with a projected cost of $3,400,000 . The new O'Connor, Moffatt & Co. store opened to the public on March 4, 1929, clad in cream-colored terra-cotta that incorporated Neo-Gothic details, especially at the top of its façades.

1945: Macy's San Francisco

R.H. Macy & Company,

New York, New York New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on New York Harbor, one of the world's largest natural harb ...

acquired O'Connor Moffat in 1945 for a reported $2,175,000 in stock. On October 16, 1947, the store was rebranded as Macy's. When announcing the merger, Macy's also announced the purchase of the six-story Brickell Building with of frontage on Geary Street facing Union Square, and took possession on January 1, 1946. At the time it was home to the

Santa Fe Railroad The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway , often referred to as the Santa Fe or AT&SF, was one of the largest Class 1 railroads in the United States between 1859 and 1996. The Santa Fe was a pioneer in intermodal freight transport; at variou ...

ticket office (235 Geary) and the Frank More shoe store (233 Geary). A corridor gave access to Macy's from Union Square. Macy's followed up with a major expansion of the store, incorporating 170 O'Farrell Street to the west, in 1948, commissioning the original architect of the 1928 building, Louis Parson Hobart. The new addition, costing a reported $6,500,000 ( opened in September 1949, matched the façades of the older store, except at the parapet, where the florid Gothic detail was not replicated. A polished-granite first floor united both new and old parts of the store. In the interior, the 1949 remodeling kept the original square fluted columns, but a drop ceiling and "modern" lighting obscured the elaborate gothic tracery of the older store's street-floor ceiling.

Union Square side

In 1955, the Brickell Building was refurbished, after which Macy's customers could enter the store through the Blum's Confectionery, a candy store that incorporated a café serving desserts and light meals. Macy's acquired the Dohrmann's home furnishings store, demolished it in 1967 and constructed a building on the site that was added to the main store. The new front incorporated a clock tower worked into the façade design. Eventually the front of the Brickell Building was also redone so that it matched the 1968 addition on the Dohrmann's site. The floor elevation of the 1968 addition did not align with the main (1929/1948) building, so escalators at the street floor of the Union Square buildings connected down to the main floor and up to the second floor of the older portion of the store. in 1976, Macy's bought the building at 255 Geary, for decades, home to Frank Werner shoes, sold in 1952 to Bally of Switzerland.

Men's Store building

In 1984, Macy's opened a separate separate Men's Store in a building across Stockton Street from its Main Store. The building at 100-120 Stockton Street was built in 1974 and previously a branch of the Hawaii-based

Liberty House (department store) Liberty House, headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii, was a department store and specialty store chain with locations throughout the Hawaiian Islands and on Guam, as well as several locations on the United States mainland. History Tracing its anteced ...

, bringing the total area of the complex to .

I. Magnin building

In 1995,

Federated Department Stores Macy's, Inc. (previously Federated Department Stores, Inc.) is an American holding company of department stores. Upon its establishment in 1929, Federated held ownership of the regional department store chains Abraham & Straus, Lazarus (departm ...

, which owned both Macy's and I. Magnin specialty department stores, closed the I. Magnin chain. Macy's 1929/1948 building and its Union Square-facing buildings formed an "L" shape surrounding the I. Magnin Union Square store at the southwest corner of Stockton and Geary streets, built in 1946. In 1995, Federated decided to incorporate the building as part of Macy's Union Square, which meant that Macy's then occupied the entire block facing Stockton street from O'Farrell Street on the south to Geary Street and Union Square on the north. The entire complex including the Men's Store thus reached its peak size of approximately , one of the largest department store locations in the world at that time. This was at a time when most other downtown flagship stores in large U.S. cities other than New York and Chicago had already closed, such as May Co. in Los Angeles (1986), Bullock's and J.W. Robinson's in Los Angeles (1983), Rich's in Atlanta (1994), May Co. in Cleveland (1993), and Hudson's in Detroit (1983). Even Macy's Union Square's own local rival Emporium would close its flagship the next year, in 1996. In the late 1990s Macy's began a multi-year project to rehabilitate the entire complex, remodeling of the 1929/1948 building and the Men's Store; expanding into the upper floors of the Magnin's building, and razing and replacing the two out-of-date buildings on Geary Street facing Union Square (on the Brickell and Dohrmann's sites), giving the store its current signature glass-fronted entry from the Square. In 2018, Macy's proceeded to sell both of its most recent additions: the former I. Magnin building that had been incorporated into the main complex, and the separate Men's Store (former Liberty House) building. The complex, now reduced back to its pre-1984 size, still boasts about of retail space.

Closure

On February 27, 2024, it was announced that Macy's would be closing this location as part of a plan to close 150 stores nationwide by the end of 2026. Macy's stated that the location would remain open until the property would be sold to a new owner. More than 400 employees will be impacted as part of the closure.

Table of buildings and additions

*announced

Gallery

Macy's, Union Square, San Francisco (2013).JPG, Signage on oldest part of the store, O'Farrell and Stockton Union Square Christmas.jpg, Aerial view of Union Square side at Yuletide San Francisco Macys.jpg, The entrance facing Union Square decorated for Yuletide by day… Macys Union Square in San Francisco December 2024.jpg, …and at night. (Photo by

Steven Saylor Steven Saylor (born March 23, 1956) is an American author of historical novels. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied history and classics. Saylor's best-known work is his '' Roma Sub Rosa'' historical mystery ...

) Macys West San Francisco.jpg, View of roof

References

{{reflist 1900s architecture in the United States Commercial buildings in San Francisco Commercial buildings completed in 1929 Department store buildings in the United States Union Square Retail buildings in California Union Square, San Francisco