San Francisco Closure Tracker

San Francisco loses restaurants, bars, galleries and landmarks faster than the guides describing them get updated. This is a running list of places that have closed, moved or changed names — each one dated, sourced, and checked against the city’s own business register rather than against another guide.

It exists because we kept finding the same thing while researching our own guides: a venue recommended in a piece updated three months ago that had been shut for three years. So we started writing them down.

What counts as a closure here

Four things, because all four leave a reader standing outside a door that isn’t what they were promised.

• Closed — the business has stopped trading at that address and has not reopened elsewhere.
• Moved — still trading, at a different address. The place is fine. The directions are wrong.
• Renamed — same owner, same room, different name over the door. Usually a rebrand rather than a sale.
• Demolished — physically gone.

Where a chain has closed one location and kept others, we list the location, not the company, and say so in the entry. Humphry Slocombe did not close; its original Harrison Street shop did.

How each entry is checked

Every entry is verified against the San Francisco Treasurer’s register of business locations, which records when a business’s registration at a given address started and ended, and by press coverage or the business’s own announcement where one exists.

Three rules make the difference between a list that is right and one that merely looks right:

1. We query by address, never by name. Name searches produce false closures constantly, because businesses re-register under slightly different spellings. Searching for “SPQR” suggests it closed in 2021; searching its address shows “S P Q R” trading continuously since 2007. It is open.
2. We check what is registered at the address now. A successor business is the strongest confirmation a closure is real — and it is also the most useful thing we can tell a reader, because it is where they will end up standing.
3. A registration end date is not always the day the doors shut. Registrations lag, sometimes by years. Where press reporting and the register disagree, we record both and say which is which.

What this list is not

It is not complete. San Francisco has tens of thousands of businesses and this tracker holds a few dozen; it grows out of our own research rather than from a systematic sweep. A place being absent from this list is not evidence it is open.

It is also not a running judgement on the city. Places close everywhere, constantly, and most of these closed for ordinary reasons. The point is not that San Francisco is dying — it is that written recommendations decay, and nobody tells you when.

Two entries we removed before publishing are worth naming, because they show the failure mode. SF Camerawork announced it was closing after 52 years in August 2026 and was widely reported as gone — then reversed the decision and reopened on 9 September 2026. The Mill on Divisadero has been dark since a fire in June 2026, but its registrations are live and it intends to reopen; a fire is not a closure. Anything we cannot stand behind does not go on the list.

Corrections

If an entry is wrong — and on a list like this, some will be — tell us. We will re-check it against the register, correct it, and date the correction on the page rather than quietly editing it. If you own or run a business listed here and we have got it wrong, that correction goes to the top of the queue.

Using the data

The whole tracker is downloadable as a CSV and free to reuse, including commercially, under CC BY 4.0 — credit Project SF and link back to this page. Journalists and researchers are welcome to it; if it is useful we would rather it got used than sat here.