Kings Plaza is an enclosed mall at Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U in Brooklyn, New York. Macy's and Alexander's built it together and opened it in 1970, each of them with a four-story store at one end of the concourse.
Alexander's stopped retailing in 1992. Sears took most of that four-story box and held it for almost 19 years. Sears closed in 2016, so the box was divided again among four stores.
Macy's never got divided. It's the only anchor still trading in the space it opened in, four floors at the east end. Everything at the other end is a piece of a store that closed.
Target, Primark, Zara, and Burlington are the four stores inside it now, spread across different parts and levels of one shell. Old Navy has had a piece of the same box since 1997. Seven anchors trade there now.
Kings Plaza opened with 42 of its 110 stores
Kings Plaza was dedicated on September 11, 1970, with 42 stores and services open. The plan had called for more than 110 of them.
A two-level enclosed concourse ran between two four-story department stores, Macy's at about 325,000 square feet and Alexander's at about 330,000, and the specialty stores were supposed to fill everything in between.
Sam Goody, Waldenbooks, and Zum Zum Deli were among the charter tenants. Most of the storefronts weren't open yet. The building around them was finished.
It was the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned regional shopping center in New York City, with a water feature in the central court and a five-level garage planned for nearly 3,700 cars.
Ramps came off Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U into the garage, and from the garage a driver could walk onto either shopping level without going outside.
A twin cinema opened inside the concourse that December.
The leases caught up fast. There were 79 stores by the end of 1970, and 118 by December 1971.
Alexander's went dark for five years
Alexander's stopped retailing in May 1992, the same month the company filed for bankruptcy, and the Brooklyn store went with the rest of the chain.
That left a four-story box standing dark at the west end of a concourse laid out between two department stores.
Macy's still held the east end. The west end had nothing behind its doors for five years.
When the space came back in 1997, the split was lopsided.
Modell's got about 16,800 square feet on the first level and Old Navy about 28,100 on the second.
Sears had committed that year and got the giant share: about 289,200 square feet across all four levels of the roughly 330,000-square-foot box.
Old Navy is still in its piece. Sears opened on October 25, 1997. The shell Alexander's had built for one name was now carrying three.
From a twin cinema to a Best Buy
The cinema opened as a twin in December 1970 and spent the next 25 years being cut up where it stood.
Two auditoriums became four screens in December 1983. Four became six in the mid-1990s.
The theater never moved to a new building, so a house built to show two pictures ended up showing six.
By January 2010 it was a six-screen AMC Loews and a ticket cost $9. It closed that month.
By January 18 the mall-facing entrance was already gone behind a new wall, even though the empty marquee still hung outside.
Best Buy took the space.
The theater's slopes were rebuilt into level retail floors, and the conversion added new routes through the box for shoppers and deliveries.
The store that opened in 2011 ran to the mid-50,000-square-foot range, taking the old theater level and additional space below it.
The cinema in the 1970 plan had lasted about 39 years before the space became a shop.
Sears left one box, four stores moved in
Sears closed in September 2016, almost 19 years after it opened. The box didn't stand dark this time.
Macerich had a multi-tenant conversion in planning before the store finished closing, and what followed was the largest change to an original anchor footprint since the mall opened: about 250,000 square feet cut into four separate stores, with a later appraisal putting the redevelopment at about $144.7 million.
The cutting ran sideways and up. Primark opened on July 7, 2018 with a 57,900-square-foot shopping floor, 56 fitting rooms, and 42 registers.
Zara took two levels near the mall entrance. Burlington went upstairs.
JCPenney opened on August 10, 2018 in about 75,000 square feet across several levels, with a Sephora shop and an appliance department inside it.
The outside changed too.
The Sears front on Flatbush Avenue had been a solid wall, and Macerich replaced it with a four-story glass atrium carrying separate brand signs, visible from the road.
The new entrance tied all four levels of the old Sears into the rest of the center with escalators and elevators.
Two years after the closing, four stores were trading in the space.
2 years for JCPenney, 19 for Sears
JCPenney closed on September 27, 2020, a little more than two years after it opened.
Sears had held the larger box it was carved from for almost 19 years.
The mall itself had shut in March that year under state restrictions and reopened on September 9, so the anchor went out less than three weeks after the doors came back.
Macerich signed Target for the space in 2021, and Target opened on August 13, 2023 with just over 92,000 square feet on three levels and about 200 jobs.
Murals of The Notorious B.I.G. and Aaliyah mark the interior.
There is also a CVS pharmacy and Starbucks, with full-height glazing and patterned concrete floors through the store.
Target replaced JCPenney in the piece carved from the Sears box, but its footprint is larger than JCPenney's was.
The Sears box was most of the Alexander's box before that. Ashley Furniture opened the same month, a 15,342-square-foot showroom on Level 1.
What Kings Plaza has now
Kings Plaza Shopping Center sits at 5100 Kings Plaza, on the southeast corner of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U in Brooklyn, New York.
It opened on September 11, 1970 as a joint venture between Macy's and Alexander's, and it's still an operating regional mall, owned by Macerich.
In September 2026 it has seven anchor tenants where it started with two.
One of them is where it started. Macy's holds the original east-side store, four floors, never divided.
Target, Primark, Zara, and Burlington share the old Alexander's and Sears side in separate vertical and horizontal sections, with Old Navy still on its second-level piece.
Lowe's is in its own building on the east side. Best Buy, in the old cinema space, is closed.
The attached garage now runs to ten numbered levels and charges $4 for the first two hours.
The mall opens at 10 a.m. and closes at 9 p.m. six days a week, and Target keeps its own hours, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
About 40,000 bus passengers travel to and from Kings Plaza on a weekday.
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