The Mall at Wellington Green is a two-level enclosed shopping mall at Forest Hill Boulevard and State Road 7 in Wellington, Florida.
It opened on October 5, 2001, less than a month after the September 11 attacks.
Taubman built it with Burdines, Dillard's, JCPenney, and Lord & Taylor, then added Nordstrom in 2003.
Locals know the core as the egg, after the oval the ring road draws around the building.
Lord & Taylor left after three years. Nordstrom left in 2019.
Starwood bought the mall for $341 million in 2014, then its mall-owning affiliate defaulted on a four-mall loan, and a court receiver has run the place since 2021.
The assessed value fell from $245 million in 2017 to $74 million in 2024.
And the mall stayed open through every bit of it.
Now a developer wants to replace the empty Nordstrom with 620 apartments.
Here's how a mall survives its own foreclosure while its anchor parcels, parking lots, and mall core remain divided among different interests.
Wellington Green had to beat Royal Palm Beach
Before a single wall went up, the mall had to win a race.
In the mid-1990s, two regional malls were proposed for the same stretch of western Palm Beach County: one in Wellington, one in Royal Palm Beach.
Market and traffic studies concluded the area could support one regional mall, and the road network couldn't absorb two.
So the county wrote a first-to-build test into the approvals.
To claim the corridor, a project needed a development order, commitments from at least three department stores of 125,000 square feet or more, permits for at least 350,000 square feet of mall core, with the core and those stores totaling at least 800,000 square feet, and continuous vertical construction, foundations and footings actually poured.
If Royal Palm Beach hit those marks first, Wellington would lose its approval.
Wellington Green got there first.
Six lanes, 7,600 spaces, and a fern preserve
The approvals came loaded with conditions.
Forest Hill Boulevard had to be under construction as a six-lane road between South Shore Boulevard and State Road 7 before the mall could receive any certificates of occupancy.
The developer owed turn lanes, signals, and five bus pullouts with sheltered waiting space for at least 40 people.
The strangest condition sat near the largest lake: a 1.1-acre preserve for a population of hand fern, complete with buffers, a management plan, and permanent protection.
The mall itself was one pod, inside a 466-acre master plan that also allowed offices, a hotel, a 24-screen theater, 400 apartments, and a 10-acre public park.
Nothing else in the plan could move until mall construction began.
When it did, the building went up inside an internal ring road that gave the core its local nickname: the egg.
A later planning study estimated 7,600 surface parking spaces around the mall and nearby development.
The Mall at Wellington Green opens weeks after 9/11
October 5, 2001.
Less than a month after the September 11 attacks, tens of thousands of people showed up on opening day anyway.
The Mall at Wellington Green opened at 10300 Forest Hill Boulevard with four department stores: Burdines, Dillard's, JCPenney, and Lord & Taylor, which moved its Palm Beach County store over from the aging Palm Beach Mall.
Two levels, a long central concourse, stucco walls and tiled roofs, and tower forms on the outside.
Taubman Centers built it during the last major period of enclosed-mall construction in South Florida, and Wellington got one of the final entries.
The tenant mix ran wide.
The anchors stretched from JCPenney at one end of the price range to Lord & Taylor at the other, with national chains for several incomes in between.
Nordstrom arrives with a safety net
Nordstrom opened its two-level, 124,000-square-foot store on November 14, 2003, the mall's fifth anchor.
The lease carried an unusual cushion.
If the store missed stated sales levels during its first four years, the landlord could owe Nordstrom up to $1.9 million a year, an arrangement scheduled to end in 2007.
And the ownership was split: Nordstrom owned the building, while the mall owned the ground underneath it.
That split mattered to the 2005 mortgage: the land entered the collateral, but the Nordstrom building did not.
Lord & Taylor leaves, furniture moves in
Lord & Taylor lasted three years.
The store closed in 2004, and by 2005 the building had been carved up: City Furniture took 70,000 square feet downstairs, Ashley took 44,000 square feet upstairs, and a La-Z-Boy showroom later joined the upper level.
One department store became a 139,500-square-foot stack of furniture retailers.
The name over another anchor changed in the same stretch.
Burdines began operating as Burdines-Macy's in 2004 and became plain Macy's in 2005.
Same building, same doors, new sign.
The 2005 snapshot: 154 stores and a $200 million loan
In 2005, the property held 1,272,000 square feet, five anchors, and 154 smaller stores, including Apple, Coach, Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, California Pizza Kitchen, and The Sharper Image.
Comparable small tenants under 10,000 square feet averaged $414 per square foot in 2004 sales.
Dillard's ran 200,700 square feet, the former Burdines building 199,900, JCPenney 144,800.
That May, a $200 million mortgage landed on the property: interest-only, 5.44 percent, due in 2015.
The collateral map mattered more than the rate.
Dillard's, Macy's, and JCPenney owned their own land and buildings, so they sat outside the loan entirely.
The ground under Nordstrom was in; the Nordstrom building was out.
A lender could end up controlling the enclosed mall without owning four of its five anchor buildings.
Taubman sells, Starwood pays $341 million
In June 2014, Taubman announced it would sell seven malls to a Starwood Capital Group affiliate for $1.4 billion, from Texas to Virginia to Michigan.
Wellington's piece closed on October 17 at $341 million.
The deed covered 57.5 acres of a 97-acre core, because the three department stores had never belonged to the mall owner in the first place.
Thirteen years of developer ownership ended, and the stores kept trading without interruption.
A 10-screen cinema inside a department store
The former Lord & Taylor box kept changing.
La-Z-Boy closed in 2014.
Paragon Theaters built a 10-screen cinema in part of the upper level, with 1,100 reclining seats fitted with footrests and tray tables, and opened in December 2016.
Cask + Shaker Craft Bar and Kitchen opened beside it.
CMX bought the theater in August 2017 and renamed it CMX Cinemas Wellington 10.
Starting in 2015, City Furniture spent $1.1 million to move its Ashley store from 15,000 square feet to an adjacent 25,000-square-foot space within the mall.
The 1990s master plan had allowed a 120,000-square-foot indoor theater outside the mall pod.
The mall never built it. The cinema fit inside a store that had already emptied once.
Nordstrom walks away
Nordstrom announced the closure on January 23, 2019, and rang its last sale on April 5.
About 65 nonseasonal employees were affected.
The chain kept its full-line stores in Palm Beach Gardens and Boca Raton, plus Rack locations around the county.
The largest vacant box on the property has lacked a permanent tenant ever since.
Spirit Halloween moved through. Arcade Time used part of it. The rest held storage.
During the 2020 shutdowns, the Nordstrom parking lot became a food-distribution site.
The lagoon plan that went nowhere
Starwood answered the vacancy fast.
A September 2019 application proposed demolishing Nordstrom for about 700 apartments, a 150-room hotel, roughly 22,000 square feet of restaurants, and a swimming and kayaking lagoon of roughly four acres with an artificial beach.
A second phase sketched more apartments, another hotel, and office space.
The traffic study projected 4,700+ net new daily trips.
The application stalled during the pandemic.
Wellington withdrew it for inactivity in December 2020, and the lagoon never got past paper.
A four-mall foreclosure and a court receiver
The money trouble ran wider than one empty anchor.
Wellington had been bundled with three other malls, in Norfolk, Charlotte, and suburban Detroit, under a $680 million loan.
The loan came due, after an extension, in November 2019 and went unpaid.
In 2021, Wilmington Trust filed for foreclosure, claiming $718.1 million in principal plus interest across the four-mall structure.
A court handed daily operations to Spinoso Real Estate Group as receiver: collecting rent and signing leases while the case ground on.
The tax rolls recorded the slide.
The mall's assessed value fell from $245 million in 2017 to $72 million by 2022, then settled at $74 million in 2024.
Through all of it, the doors stayed open.
Four concepts, one problem: no one controls the whole site
In December 2019, Wellington commissioned a study of the mall and the State Road 7 corridor.
Its hardest finding was about deeds. Macy's and Dillard's own their stores and parking.
The JCPenney parcel passed into a trust during the retailer's Chapter 11.
The former Nordstrom building and the land beneath it had been separately owned; by 2026, TM Wellington Green Mall LP owned the site under a court-appointed receivership run by Spinoso Real Estate Group.
The receiver runs the mall core and common areas under the court's order.
Any comprehensive plan for the full 97 acres needs all of them at the table.
The study drew four test concepts anyway, finished in March 2023.
One placed a sports complex and light industry near State Road 7.
Another kept parts of the mall and threaded a diagonal route through the site.
The densest ideas reached 1,500 housing units and a full town-center street grid.
Each reserved room for a possible future rail stop on the corridor.
In 2024, the Village Council converted the work into the Wellington Green Master Plan Design Standards.
The standards shape what can be built. They don't order anything demolished.
620 apartments where Nordstrom stands
Bainbridge filed an application under those standards in 2026.
The plan: demolish the 121,700-square-foot Nordstrom building and raise three seven-story residential buildings in its place, 620 apartments in all, with a clubhouse, surface parking, and a garage, spread over an 18.4-acre development area around the 8.9-acre store parcel.
Access would come off the mall's ring road, with no new driveway on Forest Hill Boulevard or State Road 7.
Bainbridge has the site under contract from the receiver for about $36 million, plus $50,000 for each approved unit above 613, which would lift the price to $36.4 million at the full 620.
The sale needs court approval because the property remains in foreclosure.
The traffic study estimates 1,164 fewer daily trips than the retail use it replaces, though the morning peak would gain 146.
The application projects a 2031 buildout.
As of July 2026, it was still under village review, with no approval and no demolition date.
Still open, and busier than the headlines suggest
Walk in today, and the mall works.
Dillard's, Macy's, JCPenney, City Furniture, Ashley, and CMX Cinemas Wellington 10 anchor the building.
The directory runs from Apple and Tommy Bahama to Chico's, Brighton, and locally owned shops, with around 150 stores in current counts.
The newest tenants lean toward play and food.
Arcade Time cut the ribbon on its expanded 13,000-square-foot location near the food-court entrance on June 27, 2026, with virtual-reality attractions, motion simulators, and a bar.
Kids Empire opened a play center of more than 15,000 square feet on July 4, with slides, climbing structures, and obstacle courses.
Palm Beach Improv now appears in the mall directory, while Copper Blues Rock Pub & Kitchen remains part of the announced combined 13,700-square-foot venue beside the cinema.
No confirmed opening date was posted for the pair as of July 2026.
Breakers Korean Grill was announced for the long-empty Ruby Tuesday space, but its current status is unclear.
One anchor still sits vacant while the proposed sale awaits court approval and the apartment plan remains under village review.
The rest of the building sells furniture, movies, jewelry, and hosts birthday parties, and its newest tenant opened on the Fourth of July with an obstacle course inside.
