When Merritt Square Mall opened in 1970, it was Brevard County's first enclosed mall, an air-conditioned box on filled marsh at 777 East Merritt Island Causeway that would grow to 70 stores, shops, and businesses.
It had its own power plant, a 20-foot waterfall in the middle, three department stores, and a cafeteria with a 375-seat dining room.
Anchors came and went. Jordan Marsh became Burdines, which became Macy's. Ivey's became Dillard's. Sears arrived in 1989 and closed in 2021. The cinema went from six screens to 16.
The mall sold for $64.4 million in 2005 and half that in 2016. Now planners pitch apartments and an outdoor district, a hospital rises across the road, and the 1970 mall is still deciding what it is.
Merritt Square Mall opened on a filled marsh in 1970
Before the doors opened in 1970, the developer had commissioned a 20-foot waterfall for the middle of the mall.
It weighed 2,000 pounds, sat in an elevated pool lined with Virginia black slate, and pushed 500 gallons of water through its pipes on a loop. Florida artist J.G. Taylor made it.
Maurice Alpert, the Jacksonville developer behind the project, wanted a work of art waiting for shoppers.
The waterfall sat inside Merritt Square Mall, at 777 East Merritt Island Causeway in Merritt Island, Brevard County, Florida.
It opened July 9, 1970, as Brevard County's first major enclosed shopping mall, on the State Road 520 corridor that runs across the island between the mainland and the beaches.
The ground it stood on had been marsh.
Crews filled the low coastal site with dredged sand before construction, the usual method on Merritt Island then.
On top of that fill went more than 810,000 square feet of air-conditioned mall: parking for 2,600 cars, a cafeteria, a six-screen cinema, and eventually 70 stores, shops, and businesses.
This was the Space Coast in 1970, growing fast on Kennedy Space Center work.
The mall was built big on purpose, a single indoor place to pull shoppers from across central Brevard.
And it was built so it wouldn't have to trust the power grid.
Why Merritt Square Mall ran its own power plant
The mall made its own electricity.
Gas-fueled generator sets fed the building, and a control room kept staff on them around the clock.
By 2001, the plant had grown to seven Waukesha generator sets and 5.8 megawatts of capacity, enough to carry the mall's full load with at least one engine held in reserve.
The smart part was the heat.
Waste heat off the generators ran absorption chillers that made chilled water for the air-conditioning, one of the big costs of running an enclosed building in Florida.
A 550-ton Trane absorption chiller went in in 1986, and a Trane Horizon absorption chiller followed in 2000. The reason was practical.
When the mall was planned, getting enough bulk electricity to a developing island corridor was complicated, so the owners solved it themselves and kept the equipment current for decades.
A lot of the machinery came down to one Florida problem: keeping a big building cold.
What that building held was worth the trouble.
Jordan Marsh, Ivey's, and JCPenney anchored the early years
Three department stores anchored the mall's first year: Jordan Marsh, the Florida arm of a Boston chain; Ivey's; and JCPenney. McCrory's took space too.
Piccadilly Cafeteria ran a 375-seat dining room that became one of the mall's steady meal spots.
For Merritt Island, Cocoa, Cocoa Beach, Cape Canaveral, and Rockledge, this was the indoor option.
Climate control mattered in Florida heat and afternoon rain, and the mall put shopping, a cafeteria meal, and a movie together on the main road between the mainland and the ocean.
Jordan Marsh and McCrory's opened that October.
The six-screen cinema, later run as AMC Merritt Square 6, joined the mall that fall.
Two of the three anchors would lose their names. JCPenney stayed JCPenney.
How the original anchors became Macy's and Dillard's
Jordan Marsh became Burdines in 1991, then Macy's in 2005, as the parent company folded its regional names into one. Ivey's turned into Dillard's.
JCPenney never changed, and at 141,500 square feet over two floors, it still holds the largest anchor space in the mall. The fourth anchor came later.
A mid-1980s renovation added 60,000 square feet of retail space, and Sears opened in 1989 after moving over from an older store in Rockledge.
Four department stores now pulled against each other, and Merritt Square sat at its strongest as central Brevard's main place to shop.
The lineage still shows in the floor plan.
Macy's runs 120,000 square feet on two levels, with a Backstage off-price section upstairs.
Dillard's holds 95,700 square feet on one level.
Owning that strength got expensive. The money tells the next part.
A $64.4 million mall that sold for half that price
The money told the story more plainly than the storefronts did.
John Hancock, the insurance company that owned the mall, sold it to Bayview Malls in December 2002 for $32.7 million.
Within three years, the price had nearly doubled: in 2005, Bayview sold it to Thor entities for $64.4 million.
Then it fell. Glimcher Realty Trust took over in 2007, treating it as 804,000 square feet of leasable space.
After a 2015 merger, it became part of WP Glimcher, and in 2016 the debt caught up.
A foreclosure judgment of $47.3 million was entered, and the property went to auction that May.
Nobody bid. The lender took it back in June 2016.
Later that year it sold for $33 million to Namdar Realty Group and Mason Asset Management, half what it had fetched 11 years earlier.
At that price, the mall was still 95.7 percent leased. Half the price, and nearly full.
Through all the ownership turnover, one part of the building kept reinventing itself to stay open.
The cinema that kept reinventing itself
The movie theater outlasted almost everything.
The original six-screen theater opened in 1970 and lasted until the old site was cleared for Cobb's rebuild.
Then a 16-screen multiplex opened in 2004 on the old theater site, run by Cobb Theatres, with the stadium seating audiences wanted by then.
IMAX and D-Box motion seats went in by 2011.
The operators kept changing. CMX took over the Cobb screens in 2017, then closed the theater in January 2025.
Weeks later, GQT stepped in, and by March the lights had come back up under a new name: GQT Merritt Square 16 IMAX, 16 screens, 65,500 square feet.
Each handoff could have left a dark box at the end of the mall. None did.
That made the cinema the exception. Elsewhere, the empty spaces were adding up.
The empty Sears box nobody has refilled
Sears was the anchor nobody had replaced.
It opened in 1989 and closed in spring 2021, leaving 120,000 square feet of empty department store at one corner of the property.
On the current site plan, the box is marked as a separate parcel, "not owned," and redevelopment materials float it as a spot for apartments.
A traditional department store that size has few takers now.
It wasn't the only large space to turn over.
Department stores were closing nationwide, shoppers were buying online and at newer open-air centers like The Avenue Viera, and the format was aging.
Sports Authority moved in in 2013 and was gone by 2016 when the chain liquidated.
Ollie's Bargain Outlet, an off-price store, took that space in 2018 and still runs it at 29,200 square feet.
By 2026, the mall was marketing 104,300 square feet of available retail, from a 100-square-foot kiosk spot up to the 17,100-square-foot store Books-A-Million was leaving.
The list is a roll of former tenants: a Bath & Body Works, an Auntie Anne's, an AT&T, an old ice cream shop.
The mall stayed open, with plenty of room left to fill.
The most interesting construction nearby was happening across the street.
A hospital, an amphitheater, and the mall's next life
Across State Road 520, Health First broke ground in March 2024 on a new Cape Canaveral Hospital campus: a 268,000-square-foot hospital with 120 inpatient beds, six operating rooms, and a 92,000-square-foot medical office building, due to open in early 2027.
Nearby, the public amphitheater at Veterans Memorial Park opened in April 2026, with tiered lawn seating for 2,350 and room for more than 5,000, including adjacent park areas.
That activity changed the conversation around the mall site.
It sits on an 82-acre tract on State Road 520, the primary east-west road across the island, with 33,500 vehicles passing daily, in a corridor the local redevelopment agency has worked on since 1988.
In 2025, a consultant presented a concept for turning the property into an outdoor, mixed-use district with housing, shops, and new streets.
It's a concept, not an approved plan, and the agency doesn't own the mall.
For now, the mall is still a mall. Macy's, JCPenney, Dillard's, and Ollie's are open. GQT is showing movies.
People still pull off the causeway into the parking fields and walk in to shop the stores that are left.
