The North Face's outlet at 1238 Fifth St. in Berkeley's Gilman District closed earlier this month, ending the brand's storefront presence in the city where it was once headquartered — two weeks after online chatter that it might close was reported as unfounded.

The outlet at 1238 Fifth St., in the low-slung retail stretch of Berkeley's Gilman District, is dark. The North Face closed its last Berkeley store earlier this month — the discount location where the racks ran to heavily marked-down shells and fleece — ending the company's storefront presence in the city where it was once headquartered. Berkeleyside first reported the closure; SFGATE's Kasia Pawlowska confirmed it this week.

There's a small correction folded into this one. Two weeks ago, The Dissent noted that the Berkeley outlet — contrary to recent online speculation — was still open, even as the brand's Union Square store in San Francisco had shut in 2024. That's no longer true. The speculation, it turns out, was early rather than wrong.

The Gilman store functioned as an outlet, selling seconds and last-season stock at a discount, which is a particular kind of loss on a block: not the flagship, but the place where a jacket that costs three figures downtown becomes something a family can actually buy. On Yelp and Instagram, shoppers said as much. "Oof. This one got me in my feels," one Yelp user wrote, in a review SFGATE quoted. "Throughout the years, I have been able to take my kids here and buy them clothes and even their back to school backpack. Staff were always friendly and helpful. Sucks."

The North Face was founded in San Francisco in 1966 by Douglas and Susie Tompkins, who took the name and the quarter-dome logo from the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, the climbing route on Yosemite's granite. It began as gear for hikers and campers and became, over decades, a global lifestyle label worn far from any trailhead. The Tompkinses went on to start another San Francisco brand, Esprit. The company later moved its base out of the East Bay entirely; VF Corporation, its parent, did not respond to SFGATE's request for comment on the closure.

What someone walking Fifth Street will notice now is an empty box in the Gilman stretch — the outlet-district corridor of furniture showrooms and bike shops — where a brand that took its name from a rock face 200 miles east kept a last, discounted foothold in the city it once called home. The awning stays; the store is gone.