The north end of The Avenues Mall has been in transition since Sears closed in 2019. The entrance is still there. The corridors still connect to the rest of the building.
What used to pull shoppers through that wing is gone, and the former Sears space has since been reactivated in a different way rather than returning as the same kind of department-store anchor.
The Avenues opened in Jacksonville, FL, in 1990, with department-store anchors that made it the natural destination for the entire Southside. For roughly a decade, it held that position without serious competition. A newer mall format arrived on the same road.
The anchors began leaving. A $110 million commercial mortgage, written when the mall was 91 percent occupied, was modified once before its lenders ran the numbers on what the property was actually worth.
What the mall is becoming now involves apartments and go-karts. How it got there is the longer story.
How The Avenues Gave the Southside Somewhere to Go
Before The Avenues opened, Jacksonville's Southside had grown fast without a center.
Families had moved south through the 1970s and 1980s along Baymeadows and Philips Highway, filling subdivisions that spread outward from the city's older commercial core.
The nearest enclosed regional mall was Regency Square, which had opened in 1967 on the east side of Jacksonville. Getting to a full department-store mall from the Southside meant driving away from where you lived.
CBL & Associates built the mall at 10300 Southside Boulevard, near the junction of Interstate 95 and Philips Highway, where north-south and east-west traffic routes already crossed.
The location put a major retail center close to the expanding residential corridors of southern Duval County and within reach of northern St. Johns County just past the county line.
Three anchors opened on September 26, 1990: Sears at the north end of the building on two levels, JCPenney, and Maison Blanche. Dillard's followed in 1991.
Five Department Stores and the Years When The Avenues Was Enough
Parisian opened in 1994, and the count reached five: Sears, JCPenney, Dillard's, Gayfers, Parisian. On a Saturday, the two-level interior moved.
The corridors between the anchors held apparel, footwear, accessories, and the full rotation of national chains.
There was always one more store before the exit.
The names on the department-store facades changed more than once. Maison Blanche became Gayfers in the early 1990s. Gayfers became Belk by the end of the decade. The interiors stayed largely the same.
By 2013, when a $110 million mortgage was placed against part of the property, occupancy stood at 91.3 percent.
That number meant the five-anchor model had been working for about twenty years. It also meant the people writing the loan believed it would keep working.
Belk Acquires Parisian, and the Anchor Lineup Starts to Shift
Parisian had lasted longer under its own name than Maison Blanche had. The Birmingham-based chain held its identity from 1994 until Belk acquired Saks Incorporated's Parisian division in 2006.
By that point, the original Maison Blanche space had already been operating as a Belk store for several years, following the Maison Blanche → Gayfers → Belk conversion in the late 1990s.
With Belk now also operating the former Parisian space, the second location was rebranded Belk Men, Children and Home.
Two Belk banners in one building was not a long-term format. Belk eventually consolidated into the original location, and the Men, Children and Home space came open.
Forever 21 took the space in 2010, occupying about 116,000 square feet across two levels of that former anchor space. The gap left by a traditional department store was filled by a large-format fast-fashion retailer.
The anchor category had started to mean something different from what it had in 1990, and the mall was already adjusting to a retail landscape the original lease plan had not anticipated.
The 2005 Renovation and the Mall That Opened Down the Road
In April 2005, The Avenues finished a renovation worth roughly $10 million.
The project touched nearly every part of the shared interior: a redesigned entryway, Italian limestone flooring on the lower level, a new neutral color scheme, updated ceilings and lighting, new lounge chairs and benches, upgraded restrooms, improvements to the glass elevator, revised kiosks and signage, and a children's soft-play area.
Shoppers who had known the older interior walked into something that felt considered again.
St. Johns Town Center opened the same year, also on Jacksonville's Southside, also connected to Simon management.
It offered an open-air format with a large concentration of national retailers and restaurants that had not previously come to Jacksonville.
Town Center was not across town. It was nearby, aimed at the same trade area.
The renovation helped The Avenues hold ground in the short term.
H&M opened a two-story store there in September 2012, filling a North Florida gap the chain had left open, with Orlando as the nearest existing location.
But refreshed limestone floors and new signage could not change the structural problem: The Avenues was an enclosed mall competing against an open-air center a few miles away.
Sears Closes, and the North End of the Mall Goes Dark
Sears had been at the north end of The Avenues since opening day. Its two-level space anchored the building's northernmost wing, pulling shoppers in from the parking lot at that end and sending them toward the interior.
When the closure was announced in September 2019 as part of a broader round of Sears and Kmart liquidations, it was both an anchor loss and a financial event: because the space was leased rather than separately owned, it was part of the loan collateral.
By December 2019, the north-end anchor was empty. The entrance remained. The corridors connecting that wing to the rest of the mall still ran their full length.
But the reason to enter from that direction had closed, and two levels of space behind it went dark.
Vacant Sears boxes across the country proved nearly impossible to replace, sized and built for a department-store format that had no obvious successor.
Occupancy on the financed portion of the mall fell from 91.3 percent at issuance to about 58 percent by the close of 2020.
JCPenney's Bankruptcy and the Anchors That Stayed
The parking lot at The Avenues held almost no cars for weeks in the spring of 2020. Simon had closed its retail properties under COVID-19 restrictions.
The food court had already reduced seating, vendors had gone dark, and the building that the Southside had spent thirty years treating as a Saturday destination sat quiet through the spring.
JCPenney filed for Chapter 11 in May 2020. Its reorganization closed the Regency Square location in October and kept The Avenues open.
The land under the Avenues store was sold to Store 2430 LLC for $5.4 million in December 2020.
JCPenney has run the retail floor there ever since; it just no longer owns the ground beneath it.
That left four anchor stores standing: JCPenney, Belk, Forever 21, and Dillard's. Sears had already been gone since 2019.
A $110 Million Loan and the Long Accounting
In 2013, when the mall still had five active anchors and the financed portion was 91.3 percent occupied, someone was willing to lend $110 million against The Avenues.
That is the simplest way to understand what the property was once worth to the people financing it.
The loan carried a 3.6 percent fixed rate, required only interest payments, and was set to mature in February 2023. The property was appraised at $244 million the previous December.
Cash flow declined every year after 2015. Sears closed in 2019. By the early 2020s, net cash flow was nearly 30 percent below what it had been at issuance.
The loan, transferred to special servicing in late 2022, was modified in April 2023 to extend maturity to February 2026 and required excess cash to be swept into a reserve.
An April 2023 appraisal put the property value at about $166 million.
Forever 21 vacated in January 2026. The loan transferred to special servicing again in December 2025.
By early 2026, the property that had supported $110 million in financing was estimated at a liquidation value of $56.7 million.
The mall that had been worth lending against had become something lenders were trying to figure out how to exit.
The Mall Still Running While Its Finances Fell Apart
The Avenues did not shut down because of its financial trouble. Belk, Dillard's, and JCPenney stayed open. The food court still served customers at Chick-fil-A, Charley's, Sbarro, and Sarku Japan.
H&M, American Eagle, Victoria's Secret, Foot Locker, LUSH, MAC, Build-A-Bear, and roughly 150 other tenants kept doing business in the same corridors where they had been for years.
For the year-to-date period ending September 2025, occupancy on the financed portion was about 45 percent.
The old Sears space at the north end had been turned into a Furniture Source location, with sales upstairs and storage downstairs.
The bigger empty space behind the occupancy number was the former Forever 21. That space went dark after January 2026 and became the main large-format opening tied to the Elev8 Fun conversion plan.
The mall was still running while its financing was falling apart, and that was not really a contradiction.
It showed how enclosed malls age: not all at once, but in uneven pieces, section by section and anchor by anchor, while the places that still bring in shoppers keep doing so.
Apartments Near the Dillard's Garage and Go-Karts Where Forever 21 Was
Jacksonville City Council approved the mall's rezoning on July 22, 2025, by a 17-0 vote, allowing up to 266 apartments on a 3.46-acre parcel near the Dillard's parking garage.
The approved building is four stories and about 289,000 square feet, with a clubhouse, fitness center, two courtyards, a pool, and about 23,500 square feet of recreation and open space.
The project sits on an existing paved parking area. Residents will use dedicated spaces in the Dillard's garage.
The former Forever 21 space is planned for Elev8 Fun, an indoor adventure park from PrimeTime Amusements, with more than 150 arcade games, bowling, go-karts, laser tag, and mini golf.
The Avenues opened in 1990 as the destination the Southside had been missing.
Thirty-five years later, the north end is getting apartments on the site, and the space where Forever 21 sold fast fashion for fifteen years is about to have go-karts.
Three department stores and roughly 130 specialty retailers still work here.
