Samanea Mall in Westbury is a big retail, dining, and entertainment complex at 1500 Old Country Road, in the thick of Nassau County's shopping district.
If you grew up here, you knew it as The Mall at The Source.
It opened in 1997, built around the Fortunoff department store. Then Fortunoff closed.
So did a string of other big stores, and the mall sat mostly empty for years.
After a 2017 sale, the new owner spent years trying to refill it, and the tenant list is the strange part: a Korean barbecue joint, a climbing gym, an Asian grocery, pickleball courts, a trapeze school.
It's still a mall, technically. It just barely feels like a regular shopping mall anymore.
How Fortunoff outgrew Brooklyn and anchored Westbury
Fortunoff started in Brooklyn.
By the early 1960s, the Brooklyn complex was cramped and troubled, so in 1964 the family opened a 150,000-square-foot store on Old Country Road in Westbury.
It sold jewelry, silver, china, crystal, furniture, rugs, lamps, linens, housewares.
Home goods and gifts, mostly, with jewelry right there too: the stuff people registered for, bought for occasions, and furnished a house with.
The store kept growing. A 50,000-square-foot level went up in 1969.
In 1972, the family announced a plan to more than double it, to about 440,000 square feet.
By then the Westbury store basically was the company.
It brought in most of Fortunoff's sales and pulled shoppers from across Long Island.
The site had a past, too: this was the old Roosevelt Field area, an airfield and a raceway before the parking lots arrived.
The store got big enough that, eventually, someone looked at it and saw a whole mall.
The Mall at The Source: a shopping center built around one store
That someone was Alan Fortunoff. By 1988, he was working on a mall wrapped around the Westbury flagship.
Early versions were grander, a thing called the Fortunoff Galleria, before the idea shrank into something that could actually be built.
He brought in Simon Property Group, one of the biggest mall developers in the country.
Fortunoff had the anchor and the name. Simon developed the mall around it.
The Mall at The Source opened in 1997, bringing more than 70 tenants to a new mall bolted right onto Fortunoff.
Together, the mall and the old flagship topped 700,000 square feet.
The name leaned on Fortunoff's old "The Source" line, a neat fit for a store known for home goods and jewelry.
It never quite worked like a normal mall.
No clean corridor running anchor to anchor.
Some shops opened to the outside, some to the inside, and getting upstairs depended on which store you were after.
If you knew where you were going, you were fine.
If you came to browse, you wandered.
Why the restaurants outlasted the stores at The Source
The early roster was peak late-90s: Circuit City, Virgin Megastore, Saks Off 5th, Nordstrom Rack, Old Navy.
There was a Rainforest Cafe too.
Then came more names built for destination trips, including Steve & Barry's, David's Bridal, Golf Galaxy, and Jillian's, later Dave & Buster's.
The restaurants had one advantage the inline shops usually didn't get.
The Cheesecake Factory, Jillian's (later Dave & Buster's), and P.F. Chang's faced the parking lot, with their own doors and their own crowds; P.F. Chang's would last until 2020.
They didn't need the mall to be busy to be busy. And the mall wasn't busy for long.
By 2000, three years in, the center had about 100,000 square feet to backfill from tenants that had already cleared out.
Leasing went after bridal shops, big-box stores, more theme restaurants, anything that could pull a crowd on its own.
It didn't help that Roosevelt Field, a far stronger mall, sat a few minutes down the road.
The 2009 collapse: Fortunoff's bankruptcy empties the mall
Fortunoff filed for Chapter 11 in February 2009 and, after liquidation, closed the Westbury store.
The whole mall had been built around that name.
Take it out and the strange layout had no reason to exist.
Circuit City folded around the same time. So did Steve & Barry's.
The anchors went, then the small stores went, because nobody walks an empty mall.
The Gallery at Westbury Plaza opened nearby and took Nordstrom Rack, Saks Off Fifth, and Old Navy by 2013, some of the national names that had kept The Source looking legitimate.
You can watch it in the appraisals. $178 million in 1998. About $90 million by mid-2011.
Around $51 million by May 2012. The owners had already defaulted on the $124 million mortgage back in 2009.
Foreclosure started in early 2012; the place was headed past three-quarters empty by that August, and a foreclosure auction over a roughly $142 million lien drew no bidders.
The dark Fortunoff building next door had its own debt, tens of millions.
Add it all up, and the hole came to almost $200 million, with the eventual sale booking a loss of about $85.2 million.
Through all of it, the restaurants kept the lights on.
Dave & Buster's and The Cheesecake Factory still drew people to a mall that had otherwise gone quiet.
The video gaming hall Westbury fought off
The emptiest part was the old Fortunoff building, dark since 2009, still connected to the mall and its parking garage.
In December 2014, Nassau OTB, the county's off-track wagering agency, named it as the spot for a video lottery hall, about 1,000 machines.
Only part of the building would hold the machines.
Restaurants and shops were supposed to fill the rest. Didn't matter.
The neighbors came out against it fast, worried about traffic, crime, sinking property values, and a floor full of slot machines sitting right across Old Country Road from the Village of Westbury.
(The building itself was in the Town of Hempstead, but that's a line on a map.)
The mayor pushed back and wanted impact studies before anyone signed off.
In January 2015, hundreds of people packed a high school auditorium to say no.
The State Gaming Commission controlled the license, but it couldn't manufacture local goodwill, and the plan got pulled.
The building stayed dark, and the question of what to fill it with stayed open.
China Lesso buys the mall and renames it Samanea
A buyer finally showed up in May 2017, and it didn't look like the usual mall rescue.
China Lesso, a building-materials company, paid $92 million for the mall plus the empty Fortunoff building attached to it.
The place was less than a third occupied at the time.
The first plan was called Lesso Home @Westbury, about $25 million for a home-furnishing makeover.
Then the name changed again, to Samanea New York, after the rain tree, with its wide umbrella crown and built-in shelter-and-gathering symbolism.
The renovation grew to around $30 million.
Two new outside entrances went in, one toward Old Country Road, one toward Merchants Concourse.
The old shell stayed.
The idea was to take the same enormous shell and fill it with a completely different kind of tenant.
How Samanea filled the mall with groceries, trapeze, and pickleball
The weekly draw came from groceries.
99 Ranch Market took about 45,600 square feet for its first Long Island store and opened in 2022, giving the mall a reason for people to come every week instead of every year.
Restaurant Row filled in around it: KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot, MoCA Asian Bistro, and Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, with Ichiddo Ramen and Tous Les Jours still in the coming-soon lane.
Then they went upstairs, which was the hard part.
The second floor had been close to impossible to lease.
In 2021, Empire Adventure Park signed for about 35,600 square feet up there, and when it opened in July 2024, with ninja courses, trampolines, climbing walls, laser tag, and a zipline, it was the first new second-floor entertainment anchor the place had landed in more than 25 years.
After that, the rest of it got weird, in a good way.
The Gravity Vault, a climbing gym of more than 18,500 square feet with walls 45 feet tall and over 250 routes, opened in late 2024.
X-Golf. Pickleball courts. A rage room. An axe-throwing place. A mixed-reality arena.
A board-game cafe with more than 400 games on the shelf.
A flying trapeze school in the atrium.
The occupancy number tells it plainly enough.
Under 30 percent when Lesso bought the place.
About 60 percent by 2021. About 78 percent by July 2024.
Samanea New York today at 1500 Old Country Road
It's 2026, and the leasing work still isn't done.
The building has 250,000 square feet up for lease, 3,838 parking spaces, a tax-roll market value around $43.5 million, and a carnival that sets up out by Dave & Buster's in May.
Fortunoff hasn't fully left, either.
A Fortunoff Backyard Store sells patio furniture inside, and a little Fortunoff Fine Jewelry boutique hung on nearby until January 2021, when it closed and went online.
At Samanea, the name that started all this is down to one storefront now.
The shell is the same. The enormous parking lot is still there.
Even the awkward second floor that the old mall struggled to fill is still there, except now there's a climbing wall on it.
What changed is the reason anyone shows up.
They come for dumplings and groceries, to climb 45 feet of wall, throw an axe, take a trapeze lesson.
The building is busier than it's been in years, and almost nobody there is shopping.
