Santa Rosa Mall has no department store left in it. The property covers 75 acres on Mary Esther Boulevard in Mary Esther, Florida, near Hurlburt Field.
It opened in February 1976 as an enclosed regional mall with three anchors. A fourth, McRae's, came in the mid-1980s and later traded as Belk.
The four stores closed one at a time between 2014 and 2023. The enclosed part of the mall closed in the fall of 2025.
Apartments stand where Belk was. A storage business runs inside the old Sears. The rest of the site is waiting on a plan the owner hasn't finished.
Santa Rosa Mall opens with three anchors
Sears committed to the building before the building existed.
Santa Rosa Mall Venture and Sears, Roebuck and Co. signed their agreement on November 25, 1974, 15 months before anyone could walk through a door.
The doors opened on February 25, 1976.
Santa Rosa Mall was a one-level enclosed regional shopping center at 300 Mary Esther Boulevard in Mary Esther, Florida, west of Fort Walton Beach and a short drive from Hurlburt Field and Eglin Air Force Base.
Jim Wilson & Associates developed it.
Sears, JCPenney, and Gayfers took the ends of the retail corridors, which meant every walk through the building finished at a department store.
The enclosed part of it is closed now, and the ground around it holds apartments, self-storage, a gym, and a cinema.
The Santa Rosa 3 theater opened inside the mall on the same day, under Ogden-Perry Theatres.
The road outside changed too. A run of commercial construction followed along Mary Esther Cutoff, which the city later renamed Mary Esther Boulevard.
A fourth anchor, then the theater leaves
The mall added a wing in the mid-1980s, and McRae's opened in it around 1984.
Four department stores now held the ends of the corridors, and the shape of the building was set for the next 30 years.
Then the theater walked out of the enclosed mall and reopened outside it.
United Artists opened the Santa Rosa 10 on the property in 1994, clear of the enclosed retail area, and the Santa Rosa 3 closed when the new complex opened.
The old theater came down later.
Three screens became 10, and the mall lost one reason people had walked its corridors on a weeknight.
Anyone going to a film after 1994 could park, go in through the cinema's own door, and never enter the mall at all.
That use now worked in a box of its own. It would not be the last.
Two renovations and a space Ross never took
Gayfers changed its sign in 1998.
Dillard's had bought the chain, and the store at the end of the corridor kept trading under the new name in the same building.
The property itself changed hands twice in four years.
Jim Wilson & Associates bought the mall back in 1999 and started a renovation that ran to 2001, ending with Old Navy opening as a junior anchor.
In August 2003, Radiant Partners bought Santa Rosa Mall from Jim Wilson & Associates for $52 million.
A second program followed in 2007. New flooring went down, restaurants opened, and a large space was prepared for Ross Dress for Less.
Ross never opened. In 2013, Planet Fitness took the area.
By 2008 the four department stores held 413,000 square feet of the property, and every other store in the mall put together held 246,900.
Both renovations had worked on the smaller number. The larger one depended on four companies staying in business.
Belk's box becomes 229 apartments
McRae's became Belk in 2006, after Belk acquired the chain. The fourth anchor kept trading under its second name for eight years.
Belk announced the closure in December 2013 and shut the store in 2014.
That left 82,500 square feet empty at one end of the building, and no retailer took it.
The box stood closed for five years.
In August 2019, crews began demolishing it, and a month later Rea Ventures Group and Radiant Partners held a construction-start ceremony for an apartment complex on the same ground.
Walker & Dunlop arranged $35.4 million to build it.
Renaissance Santa Rosa opened in the early 2020s with 229 apartments, one, two, and three bedrooms.
It has a different address from the mall: 200 Page Bacon Road, not 300 Mary Esther Boulevard.
A quarter of the four-anchor plan now has people sleeping in it and a mailbox of its own.
Sears becomes storage, JCPenney closes
Sears was the largest store on the property at 124,900 square feet, and it went second.
The company announced the closure on October 15, 2018, and the store closed that December.
The building stayed up.
In 2019 the owner planned it for self-storage and retail instead of another department store, and USA Storage Center now operates out of Suite 108 at the mall's own address.
The mall kept the square footage and lost the shoppers who came for it.
JCPenney lasted 18 more months.
On June 4, 2020, the company named the Mary Esther store among 154 closures in its bankruptcy restructuring, and 87,700 square feet came out of the anchor plan.
Dillard's was the last department store in a mall that once had four of them.
Santa Rosa Mall closes its concourse
Dillard's announced in February 2023 that the Mary Esther store was one of three it would close that quarter. It closed within weeks.
Dillard's owned its 115,000 square feet, so the land came with the building, and Radiant bought both in early 2023.
Demolition then moved off the edges of the site and into the middle of it.
On March 11, 2025, Radiant said work would begin within 30 days on the former Dillard's and the old food court.
By that July, part of it was down. The food court sat inside the enclosed mall, so taking it out meant taking out the concourse around it.
On July 28, 2025, the owner announced that the enclosed interior would close at the end of September, with a grocery store, restaurants, retailers, and housing among the uses under study.
The interior closed that fall.
The businesses with their own outside doors kept trading. Planet Fitness is open and tells customers the property is under renovation.
Regal Santa Rosa still posts daily showtimes at 300 Mary Esther Boulevard, and Surge Adventure Park runs at Suite 117.
The approved second phase of apartments, 206 more units, had not started by August 2026.
Mary Esther's Veterans Day parade route for November 11, 2026 begins on Page Bacon Road, turns onto Mary Esther Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, and ends at the southwest entrance to the property.
Independent Publisher Notice
BestAttractions is an independent editorial publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any location, business, property owner, manager, government agency, or organization described in this article.
Comments posted on this page are not forwarded to, reviewed by, or acted upon by any entity mentioned in the article.
For official inquiries, complaints, applications, bookings, or other requests, please contact the relevant entity directly through its official website or other verified channels.