Rego Center, on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park, Queens, New York, has 338,000 square feet standing empty. That is its older building, three floors of it. The newer one behind it is 99 percent leased.
The empty half opened in 1959 as an Alexander's department store and was redeveloped for big-box tenants in 1996. By mid-1997, five retailers had leases there. The old building stayed in place. Each tenant got a piece of it.
Its biggest tenant left in 2017, so the largest space in the building went years without a permanent replacement. The last two retailers were moved out in 2025.
Northwell Health bought the building in May 2026. The three floors and the garage are still on the corner. The stores are all in the newer center now. It has four retail levels and a parking deck.
One Rego Park store cut into five
Alexander's opened its Rego Park store in February 1959: three floors on Queens Boulevard, with parking to match.
It was the chain's only store in Queens, and period accounts put more than 250,000 square feet of selling space inside it.
Alexander's owned the ground under the store as well as the store itself.
Through the late 1980s the department-store side of the business weakened, and in 1992 the chain shut all of its stores in bankruptcy proceedings.
Rego Park closed with them, which left a very large box on a valuable corner. Alexander's kept it.
Nobody knocked it down. The building sat closed for four years while the plans for it kept changing. Sears signed a lease in 1994.
Caldor had the third floor under lease as well, but after filing for bankruptcy in 1995 it rejected that lease in March 1996, and Alexander's divided the building.
It reopened in 1996 as Rego Park I, first with Sears and Marshalls.
By mid-1997, one department store had become space for five: Sears in the largest share, with Circuit City, Bed Bath & Beyond, Marshalls, and Old Navy in the rest, 351,000 square feet across the full block between Queens Boulevard and Junction Boulevard.
Shoppers still went up through three floors, but the parking had changed: Alexander's built a new multi-level garage during the redevelopment.
The structure was the one Alexander's built in 1959, carrying five tenants where it had carried one.
A bigger center behind the old one
Alexander's had another 6.6 acres beside Rego Park I, along the Long Island Expressway.
The company won city approval in 2005 for a much larger shopping center there, and early site work was underway by October 2006.
Rego Park II put about 600,000 square feet of retail on four levels with a roughly 1,400-space parking garage.
Costco eventually occupied the lower level, and escalators and elevators moved shoppers through the center.
The project also brought required changes to nearby intersections, while DOT planned another traffic count after the stores opened.
The anchor changed during 2009.
Alexander's was still listing Home Depot's 138,000-square-foot lease that March, but the lease was assigned to Costco in October.
By then the center had missed its planned holiday opening.
Rego Park II opened on March 3, 2010, and the 1959 building became the older and smaller half of the corner.
Sears left, IKEA moved in
Sears had the biggest share of the old building, about 195,000 square feet, and it traded there for 21 years.
In January 2017 the company put Rego Park on a national list of closures. The store closed on April 4, 2017.
The lease was supposed to run to March 2021.
Alexander's still counted more than $10 million a year from Sears after the doors shut, until Sears filed for bankruptcy and rejected the lease in October 2018.
The space came back into use as an experiment.
IKEA announced a Queens store in September 2019 and opened it on January 11, 2021, taking 115,000 square feet of what Sears had left behind.
It was the first IKEA in the United States built on the smaller format: goods you could carry out the same day, larger furniture on display and delivered later, room sets sized for small apartments, planning help, and self-checkout.
Its hours were 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week. The opening had been set for 2020, and the pandemic pushed it into the next year.
It lasted 23 months.
IKEA closed the Queens store on December 3, 2022, on a lease written to run to December 2030, and the lease was bought out afterward.
The rest of the building by then was Burlington in about 50,000 square feet, Bed Bath & Beyond in 46,000, Marshalls in 36,000, and Old Navy in 16,000.
Another 78,000 square feet was vacant.
The largest tenant space in the 1959 structure had been cut down for a different kind of tenant, opened, and given up on inside two years, and it was empty again.
The last two retailers walked across
Bed Bath & Beyond stayed until the chain itself went, in the 2023 liquidation. Old Navy closed in January 2024.
That left two retailers in a 338,000-square-foot building, and Alexander's had somewhere else to put them.
Marshalls moved across to Rego Park II on May 15, 2025, into 40,000 square feet. Burlington followed on October 3, into 59,950 square feet.
Neither retailer left Rego Park. Both moved into Alexander's adjacent, newer building.
Alexander's had already decided what would happen to Rego Park I: the Burlington and Marshalls leases said their moves would leave it vacant.
Rego Park II was filling from another direction too.
By late April, Best Buy had come over from Queens Place into the former Toys "R" Us box; DSW came over from Queens Place that September.
By March 2026 there was nobody left in the 1959 building.
Its three floors held 338,000 square feet of vacant retail, and the property also had a garage with 1,236 spaces.
Northwell bought Rego Park I
Rego Center is a retail and mixed-use complex on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park, Queens, New York.
Its older half, at 96-05 Queens Boulevard, opened in February 1959 as an Alexander's department store and reopened in 1996 as Rego Park I. It is vacant now and owned by Northwell Health.
The newer half, Rego Park II, opened in 2010 and still trades.
Alexander's contracted to sell the old building on March 6, 2026, and the sale closed on May 28 for $235.5 million.
Northwell got the 1959 structure, the garage, and about 5.9 acres of Queens Boulevard frontage.
Its Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital is about a mile away. What the building becomes hasn't been announced.
A month later Alexander's signed Target to 135,000 square feet in Rego Park II on a 15-year lease, which put that center at 99 percent leased.
So the shopping on this block is all in one center now. The 1959 half has been closed since 2025 and belongs to a hospital system.
Everything else is behind it and above it: Costco, Burlington, Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, Best Buy, DSW, Aldi, and Petco, four levels of stores and the deck where people park.
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