New Lease on Life

Federated Department Store's (Cincinnati) century-old Emporium store, the first department store near San Francisco's Union Square, will get a new chance at life through a $360 million project to renovate the store into a Bloomingdale's store, while also connecting five floors of the building to its younger neighbor, the San Francisco Shopping Center.

According to The New York Times, publicly traded real estate companies Forest City Enterprises (Cleveland) and Westfield America Inc. (Los Angeles) plan to break ground this fall on the project, which would create one of the largest indoor malls in the country.

Plans for the Emporium, which was designed by architect Albert Pissis in the 1800s, include gutting the interior, which does not meet current seismic and merchandising codes, to house a five-level Bloomingdale's to face Mission Street. In addition, the building's elegant façade will be restored and its oval rotunda-topped 102-foot-wide green glass and steel dome will be raised 54 feet to become part of the San Francisco skyline.

The vertical-style San Francisco Shopping Center currently houses 68 shops and is anchored by a five-level Nordstrom department store. Richard Green, Westfield's vice chairman of operations, says the center will be expanded to 1.5 million square feet and will house nearly 200 shops, a movie theater and three floors of offices.

The entire project is expected to serve as a link between Union Square, located a few blocks away, and Yerba Buena, a developing cultural and residential neighborhood to the south, and is expected to be completed in 2006.