Gulf View Square is an enclosed shopping mall on U.S. Highway 19 in Port Richey, Florida. One department store is still open in it. Four of the five buildings that held department stores have been demolished.
The mall opened in March 1980 with Belk-Lindsey and Montgomery Ward. Maas Brothers and Sears followed by July 1982, and a fifth anchor opened in 1990. Every one of those names came off the property.
JCPenney closed in 2014 and Macy's in 2015, and both buildings came down in November 2018 so apartments could go up on the land. Sears closed in March 2019. Its building is gone too.
The apartment complex on the old JCPenney and Macy's ground has 384 units. Dillard's holds the last store and runs it as a clearance center. The cleared Sears land is approved for 280 more apartments.
Four anchors approved, two opened
Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation filed its application for Gulf View Square on July 11, 1974, and named four department stores in it: Sears, Maas Brothers, Belk-Lindsey, and Robinson's of Florida.
Pasco County approved the 956,000-square-foot project with conditions. Then six years went by before anything opened on the site.
When the mall opened on U.S. 19 in March 1980, one store from that list was trading in it. Belk-Lindsey was one anchor.
Montgomery Ward was the other, and Montgomery Ward hadn't been named in the application at all.
Robinson's of Florida never opened at Gulf View Square.
So the first version of Gulf View Square anyone could walk through was an enclosed mall with two department stores open, and Maas Brothers and Sears still to come.
Maas Brothers opened in August 1981, 17 months after the doors did. Sears took another 11 months and opened in July 1982.
By that summer the mall had the four department stores it was built around, three of them named in 1974 and the fourth a chain nobody had promised.
The fifth anchor sat empty for 10 years
After Sears opened in 1982, Gulf View still had one undeveloped anchor site.
Burdines had been slated for that fifth position but never built there. JCPenney finally filled it in 1990, a decade after the mall opened.
Burdines turned up in 1991 through Federated's consolidation of Maas Brothers/Jordan Marsh into Burdines across Florida.
Gulf View's Maas Brothers store changed with the rest. Dillard's bought the Belk-Lindsey store in 1992.
Belk-Lindsey had lasted 12 years on the site and Maas Brothers 10, and both changes reused the existing department-store buildings.
By 1992 the mall had five department stores: Sears, Montgomery Ward, JCPenney, Burdines, and Dillard's.
Three of those five had arrived in the previous three years.
Sears and Montgomery Ward were still trading under the names they opened with, in the buildings they opened in.
Dillard's moved, and a store came down
In 1998, Gulf View Square started remaking its common areas.
The work added a food court, grouping the food tenants in one part of the building, and redid the interior and entrances.
Five department stores were still open while it was underway.
Montgomery Ward liquidated in 2001, and its anchor box at Gulf View Square came free. Dillard's had spent nine years in the old Belk-Lindsey building.
It moved, opening in the Ward building in February 2002, 143,600 square feet across two levels.
That left the store Dillard's had walked out of.
The old Belk-Lindsey building came down in 2002, the first of the mall's department stores to come off the site, and two large-format boxes went up on the land: Best Buy at 31,500 square feet, and Linens 'n Things beside it.
From then on, an empty anchor at Gulf View Square was something the property removed rather than relet.
Linens 'n Things closed in 2008, and T.J. Maxx took the space in 2010 and closed in 2021.
Best Buy is still trading on the ground where Belk-Lindsey opened the mall.
Gulf View Square lost two department stores
The Maas Brothers building kept collecting names.
By 2005, the old Maas Brothers store had carried four names in 24 years: Maas Brothers, Burdines, Burdines-Macy's, and Macy's.
The Burdines-Macy's name had appeared in 2004.
The mall around it was close to full. Occupancy at the end of 2006 was 98.4 percent.
Three years later it was 82.4 percent, in a building that hadn't changed size.
Then the department stores started announcing.
JCPenney's 24-year run ended on August 2, 2014, after the company put Gulf View Square on its closure list that January.
Macy's followed in 2015. Its January 8 announcement listed an 84,000-square-foot store with 78 employees.
Both buildings stayed standing and shut.
The mall was down to two department stores, Dillard's and Sears, while the former JCPenney and Macy's buildings sat empty.
Apartments on the JCPenney and Macy's land
In 2018 Pasco County lowered its residential impact fees in the west county market.
That year an apartment developer bought the two closed anchor parcels for $3.6 million.
JCPenney's building had been sitting shut for four years by then.
Demolition of the JCPenney and Macy's buildings started on November 12, 2018. The redevelopment covered 34 acres.
The plan for that ground was 312 apartments under the name Gables at Gulf View, and the first of them opened in 2020.
A later phase added 72 more, taking the complex to 384 units. It's marketed now as Glades at Gulf View, with its own address at 9702 Gableview Drive.
Retail had carried the entire property from 1980 to 2018.
From 2020, two of the mall's five department-store sites were housing, and several hundred households lived on land where department stores used to trade.
Gulf View Square in 2026
Sears announced the Port Richey closing on December 28, 2018, and the store closed in March 2019 after 36 years.
It was the last department store still trading under the name it had opened with, in the building it had opened in.
The land didn't sit idle for long: Pasco County ran drive-through vaccination sessions on the former Sears area from January 2021 into May, and a testing operation ran at the old Sears Auto Center until May 24 that year.
The building came down by 2023, and county commissioners approved multifamily use on the parcel the same year.
In March 2026, Colliers put the 14.9-acre former Sears site on the market as Central Park at Gulf View.
Its approved plan calls for 280 apartments split among three four-story buildings, and the broker says the site is ready for permits.
Gulf View Square is still an enclosed shopping mall at 9409 U.S. Highway 19 in Port Richey, Florida.
It opened in March 1980 with Belk-Lindsey and Montgomery Ward, and in 2026 it's marketed at 756,400 square feet with three anchors: Best Buy, Dillard's, and Furniture Near Me, which signed for 26,400 square feet in 2024.
Dillard's runs its store as a clearance center, with hours varying by day and all sales final, in the building Montgomery Ward opened.
Four of the five department store buildings are gone.
The January 2026 leasing plan offered 273,100 square feet across 63 spaces, about 36 percent of the mall as marketed.
Across the parking lot, a 384-unit apartment complex occupies the land where JCPenney and Macy's stood, and the one department store left on the property sells clearance.
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