The lights officially go off after this weekend at the SF Centre (formerly Westfield) mall in downtown San Francisco, marking a final death knell following a very long, slow, and painful demise.

We've gotten piecemeal reports over the last two months about inividual shops closing, and the final closure at the basement-level food court, Panda Express, just came last week. That Mission Street-facing bar Executive Order still hasn't made a closure announcement, and was still promoting its pool tables on Instagram on Monday afternoon.

But now the Chronicle got word from an employee at one of the remaining stores, Ecco, that the official mall closing date is now set for this weekend, January 26.

BART has also confirmed that it has sealed off its entrance to the mall on the concourse level of Powell Street Station, which provided direct access to that food court. BART spokesperson Alicia Trost tells the Chronicle, "Depending on the property’s future use, any new ownership may wish to reopen the entrance. At that point BART would entertain a new license agreement for reopening the entrance."

The entire building is thus set to go dark next week, with the current owners — an ownership trust known as DBJPM 2016-SFC Emporium — looking to shut off the lights and the heat and save on utility bills until they can offload the property to someone with some new plans for it.

Converting what was designed as a shopping mall into a radically different use will require a whole lot of money, and it's anyone's guess at this point what is to come. The building already has a 250,000-square foot office component that was occupied by San Francisco State University for its downtown campus after the mall initially opened, but otherwise it's built out with two huge anchor spaces — the former Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom — and a nine-screen movie theater, along with several full-service restaurant spaces on the fourth floor.

The mall is barely 20 years old, having opened in its current iteration in 2006, after a lengthy and expensive rebuild — that included the preservation of the former Emporium's grand dome.

Below you can see a video, recently posted to TikTok, by user melancholymustard, featuring shots of the immaculately empty mall, with its escalators still running.

Previously: New Owners of Downtown SF Mall Move to Evict Last Three Businesses Who Have Not Left

Photo by Aamy Dugiere