Preakness Shopping Center in Wayne, NJ is more than half empty. Will the old Macy's finally come down?

Preakness Shopping Center in Wayne, New Jersey, started with a grocery at Hamburg Turnpike and Alps Road in 1955.

A few years later it was planned as the biggest retail center in Passaic County, and by 1962 it was the township's first shopping center.

Stern's anchored it, and Macy's later took over the store. For years its parking lot held a Christmas parade, with Santa in the line.

In 2017 the owners paid Macy's $620,000 to leave early, counting on a tenant who would pay more. No permanent tenant signed.

The four-screen theater went dark during the pandemic. The deli that had opened in 1982 closed after about 40 years, and some smaller shops moved to a newer center at the same crossroads.

More than half of the center is empty now. The old Macy's, the biggest store on the property, has had no permanent tenant since 2017, but there is a development plan.

A grocery at Hamburg Turnpike and Alps Road

An A&P grocery opened at the corner of Hamburg Turnpike and Alps Road in Wayne in 1955. By 1961, a much bigger center was taking shape at the corner.

The center grew a building at a time.

On November 16, 1961, S.S. Kresge held a ribbon-cutting for its variety store at Preakness Shopping Center, the name the growing cluster had taken.

By 1962 Preakness Shopping Center in Wayne, New Jersey, was the township's first shopping center.

It was an open-air center of low retail buildings, laid out around surface parking and a network of internal drives, and every store had its own front door facing the cars at the curb.

Stern's, a movie house, and Willowbrook

One of the center's internal drives followed the row of shops from the First National Bank to the northeast corner of Stern's, and another ran along the side of the A&P. The department store at the end of that first drive gave Preakness a size that set it apart from a neighborhood strip.

Stern's was trading there by 1968.

More draws arrived in the same decade.

A movie theater, the Skouras-Wayne, opened at 1220 Hamburg Turnpike with one large auditorium and a single screen.

By the late 1960s Rickel Super Mart, a hardware and home center, also had a store at Preakness.

With a department store, a supermarket, a variety store, a bank, and a cinema on one property, Preakness had grown into a full community center.

The Rouse Company picked another site in Wayne for Willowbrook, an enclosed mall built around a lineup of regional department stores under one roof, and it opened in September 1969.

Willowbrook was far larger than Preakness, and it took the place in Passaic County that Preakness had been planned to hold.

Four screens and a parade in the lot

By the 1970s a Christmas parade was staged in the parking lot.

On November 22, 1975, the parade took a colonial theme for the Bicentennial, and American Legion Post 174 and mounted sheriff's deputies marched in its line.

By 1988 it was an annual event at the center, with Santa and local youth and public-service groups taking part, and it kept going into the 2010s.

Some of the center's businesses from these years stayed for decades. IHOP was serving at the center by 1971.

In 1982 Preakness Gourmet Deli opened, at a time when the center held Stern's, Rickel, and the movie theater.

The theater changed shape over the same years. Its single auditorium was subdivided, and in 1986 the house took the United Artists name.

That October two more screens opened, and the cinema that had started with one screen had four, with 1,180 seats between them.

New owners and a burned restaurant

In 2002 a fire gutted the IHOP. The restaurant was boarded up and left vacant, a burned-out building among the open stores.

The large spaces around it had changed names by then. Rickel was gone after its chain failed.

Stern's became Macy's, Stop & Shop ran the supermarket, and by 2003 those two stores and CVS were the center's anchors.

In November 2002 the whole center was sold to Wayne PSC, LLC, for about $33.3 million.

By then Preakness covered about 323,000 square feet in eight buildings.

First Real Estate Investment Trust of New Jersey, known as FREIT, held 40 percent of Wayne PSC.

The other 60 percent belonged to H-TPKE, LLC, a co-owner controlled mostly by the Hekemian family and its associates, and Hekemian & Co. took over managing and leasing the center.

Under the new owners Preakness was close to full.

In the mid-2000s about 40 smaller tenants traded around the three anchors, the clothing store Annie Sez, and the four-screen theater.

Paying Macy's to leave

In January 2017 Macy's announced it would close its Wayne store.

Wayne PSC negotiated an early end to the lease, effective in April 2017, and paid Macy's $620,000 to get the 81,200-square-foot store back.

It was the largest space on the property, about a quarter of the whole center.

Macy's rent had been low, about $234,000 a year, or less than $3 a square foot.

The owners expected to collect more from the space once it was divided into smaller stores or leased again at market rates.

That gap was why Wayne PSC paid.

After April 2017 the department store sat empty. No permanent tenant signed for it, whole or in pieces.

By 2018 the center's big tenants were Stop & Shop, CVS, Annie Sez, and the four-screen theater.

Two plans for the same land

Around 2020 the owners won approval to take down both empty buildings, the old Macy's and the burned IHOP.

A 60,000-square-foot retail building would replace the 81,200-square-foot department store.

A 20,000-square-foot building would go up on the IHOP footprint.

The plan added a drive-through restaurant near the driveway off Hamburg Turnpike and called for rebuilding the south side of the building where CVS traded.

Housing came on a separate track.

In November 2020 the township, its Planning Board, and Wayne PSC settled over Wayne's affordable-housing obligations under New Jersey's Mount Laurel rules, with Preakness as the site.

In April 2021 the township adopted an ordinance for the property.

It allowed a single apartment building of up to 244 units, at least 15 percent of them affordable, set at the back of the land and well away from Hamburg Turnpike.

The shops in front of it could keep running.

By the spring of 2021 no work had started on either plan.

The storefronts go dark

The theater had come close to closing once already.

In 2016 Bow Tie Cinemas, its operator by then, got a last-minute lease extension after the house had been expected to shut.

Its four screens went dark during the 2020 pandemic shutdown, and the theater never reopened.

In January 2022 the empty Macy's opened as Passaic County's vaccination mega-site.

The county ran it with St. Joseph's University Medical Center and the state Department of Health, with help from the State Police and the National Guard.

That same month the gourmet deli closed after about 40 years. It had outlasted Stern's, Rickel, and the theater it once opened beside.

Smaller tenants left too, and some went no farther than the same crossroads.

The Yard, a newer center at Alps Road and Hamburg Turnpike, took in European Wax Center and Mathnasium, which had both done business at Preakness.

By 2024 the main building, the long row facing west, had 44 storefronts, and more than half of them stood empty.

By late 2025 the center had 17 smaller tenants, down from about 40 in the mid-2000s.

Annie Sez was gone from the list of major tenants, and only three names were left on it.

An approval that keeps getting extended

Early in October 2026, a row of empty storefronts was being remade for "Miami Vice '85."

Film crews turned the vacancies into 1980s businesses selling cameras and clothes and repairing VCRs and TVs.

The signs went up on a center whose owners had spent the past year keeping it financed.

Wayne PSC's $25 million mortgage came due in August 2025, and ConnectOne Bank, the lender, extended it while new terms were worked out.

In June 2026 the owners put $5 million of their own into the loan, which brought it down to $20 million. The modified loan runs to July 2031.

The rebuild has been kept alive by extensions of its own.

The Planning Board extended the approval in June 2024 and again in January 2025, and in March 2026 it moved the deadline to January 2028.

No construction has begun on the new stores. The zoning for up to 244 apartments stays in place, and none have been built.

In September 2026 FREIT's shareholders voted to liquidate the trust, a step that lets it sell its assets or move them into a liquidating trust and then dissolve.

The vote covers FREIT's own holdings, including its 40 percent of Wayne PSC, and the center remains split between FREIT and H-TPKE.

Preakness Shopping Center is open.

Stop & Shop, CVS, and T-Bowl, the bowling alley, trade alongside smaller shops and bank branches, while more than half of the space stands empty.

The burned IHOP is marked for demolition.

For decades the building at the end of the drive from the bank held a department store, Stern's and then Macy's.

It is the largest space the owners now have on offer, cleared to come down and still standing.