New York City Hadn't Built a Big Enclosed Mall in Four Decades. The Mall at Bay Plaza in the Bronx Broke That Streak in 2014.

The Mall at Bay Plaza is a three-level enclosed shopping mall at 200 Baychester Avenue in the northeast Bronx, next to Co-op City.

It opened on August 14, 2014, the first large enclosed fashion mall built anywhere in New York City in 40 years.

Before that, Bay Plaza meant the outdoor center Prestige Properties opened here in 1988, eventually home to Pathmark, a cinema, a Kmart, and the Barnes & Noble that was the only general-interest bookstore in the Bronx.

The district had nothing like a full fashion mall, so shoppers went out to Westchester and Queens to find it.

Macy's agreed in November 2011 to build a 160,000-square-foot store, Prestige wrapped 780,000 square feet of enclosed mall around it and the existing JCPenney, and the project was being called a $300 million development by the time construction started.

Twelve years on, the Apple store here sells nearly as much as Macy's does.

Here's how the Bronx finally got an indoor mall, and what it has taken to keep it full.

Before Bay Plaza: an amusement park on marsh

On June 19, 1960, 61,500 people came through the gates of an amusement park built on marshy ground in the northeast Bronx.

Freedomland U.S.A. covered 85 acres, laid out in sections patterned after regions and periods of American history.

It ran five seasons and closed in 1964. What replaced it was housing.

Co-op City went up across land associated with the Freedomland tract in the late 1960s and early 1970s: more than 15,000 apartments in high-rise towers and lower buildings, one of the largest housing developments in the country.

Tens of thousands of people now lived minutes from Baychester Avenue, which is what made a big retail center there worth building.

In 1984, Sami Shalem and Irving Pergament founded Prestige Properties & Development, a company that concentrated on retail and mixed-use property around New York.

Four years later Prestige opened the Bay Plaza Shopping Center on the old park's ground: outdoor, with parking in front.

The open-air years, 1988 to 2011

Bay Plaza grew one lease at a time, and for 26 years it grew without a roof.

A General Cinema theater opened on November 24, 1989 with 10 screens and 3,419 seats.

The auditoriums were divided into 13 screens in 1995, and the complex later became an AMC.

Kmart signed on November 18, 1993 for a building that didn't exist yet, anticipated at 131,780 square feet, at $11 per square foot on an initial 25-year term.

Stop & Shop began its tenancy in August 1996.

Then came the two stores that shaped what followed. JCPenney opened in 1997, 17 years before the indoor mall it would end up anchoring.

Barnes & Noble opened in 1999 after a public campaign for a general-interest bookstore in the Bronx collected 10,000 signatures, and it became the only one in the borough.

By 2011 the center was being described at close to 1.3 million square feet, with groceries, a cinema, discount boxes and a department store.

It still lacked the long run of fashion and specialty shops packed into the enclosed malls of Westchester, Queens and northern New Jersey, which is where Bronx shoppers drove to find them.

What Macy's made possible in 2011

On November 9, 2011, Macy's announced it would build a three-level, 160,000-square-foot store at a new mall in the Bronx, projecting 225 jobs.

It was the company's second Bronx location after Parkchester and the first newly built Macy's anywhere in New York City since Queens Center in 1995.

That commitment made the rest possible.

Prestige's plan put a 780,000-square-foot enclosed mall between two department stores, JCPenney at one end and the new Macy's at the other, for $270 million and an 1,800-car garage.

Finished, it would bring the whole Bay Plaza complex to 2 million square feet.

Altoon & Porter Architects of Los Angeles drew it.

Prestige wanted more stone and less glass outside, with the standard three-level circulation of a regional mall inside.

A ceremonial construction start was held on May 14, 2012, by which point the project was commonly described as a $300 million development, with more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,700 permanent ones.

Aurora Contractors took the Macy's package in May 2013 on a $20 million contract and built the store between June 2013 and July 2014.

The price tag kept moving. $270 million when the plan was unveiled, $300 million during construction, then $403.9 million in 2025 financing documents.

One building, counted three ways at three different moments.

The Mall at Bay Plaza opens, August 2014

The grand-opening ceremony started at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 14, 2014. The ribbon was cut and the doors opened at 10.

Inside were three levels, 780,000 square feet and more than 100 stores, with Macy's and JCPenney holding opposite ends of the building.

It was the first large enclosed fashion mall built in New York City in 40 years, and the first major enclosed mall in the Bronx.

Several chains were entering the borough for the first time. H&M opened its first Bronx store here.

Ulta Beauty took 11,400 square feet. Victoria's Secret, Gap and Aeropostale opened along the concourses.

XSport Fitness signed for 37,000 square feet upstairs, with a pool, a spa and basketball, its first location in New York City.

Not everyone wanted the traffic.

Community Board 10 and local officials had spent the planning years warning that a new mall this size would pour cars onto roads already carrying Co-op City, the outdoor center and Interstate 95.

The I-95 exit was being widened with city, state and federal money as the mall opened.

It wasn't enough for the neighbors: in 2015 the East Bronx Traffic Coalition was still asking for new parkway ramps.

There was no subway station then, and there still isn't. Buses have carried a large share of the mall's transit customers since day one.

First in the Bronx: Uniqlo, Apple, Adidas

The first-in-borough openings kept coming, years apart.

Uniqlo took 8,000 square feet on the second level on April 27, 2018, its first store in the borough.

Apple opened the first Apple store in the Bronx on September 24, 2021 in 10,391 square feet, bringing 105 jobs.

Adidas followed in February 2023 with 11,000 square feet, digital merchandise displays, click-and-collect, and artwork by Bronx-born designer Jae Tips.

In 2024 the Apple store sold $42.3 million of merchandise. Macy's, in a building 15 times the size, sold $43.5 million.

JCPenney did $23.6 million from a store that had been open 27 years by then.

Reported sales across the mall went from $251.2 million in 2022 to $261.2 million in 2024.

Reporting shops under 10,500 square feet, Apple excluded, averaged $750 per square foot in 2024, and occupancy averaged 94.8 percent from 2017 onward against 14.7 million visits a year.

A decade after opening, the building was close to full.

The churn happened outside the doors

Most of the closings people associate with Bay Plaza happened in the open-air center, not inside the enclosed mall.

Barnes & Noble is the one that hurt.

The store prepared to leave in 2014, won a temporary extension after community pressure, and closed in December 2016, ending a run of more than 17 years and leaving the Bronx without a general-interest bookstore.

Saks OFF 5TH moved into part of the space at 290 Baychester Avenue in August 2017 with 25,000 square feet, then announced in 2019 it would close at the end of October, two years in.

The old Kmart building at 300 Baychester Avenue changed tenants twice in four years.

At Home subleased 135,000 square feet there in May 2022, its first Bronx store.

It filed for Chapter 11 on June 16, 2025 with nearly $2 billion in debt and put the Bronx location on a list of 26 closings.

Forman Mills opened in the same building on March 26, 2026. The theater kept going.

When Concourse Plaza Multiplex Cinemas closed on May 28, 2024, AMC Bay Plaza became the only operating movie theater in the borough, and stayed that way for 10 months until Regal reopened the Concourse Plaza site in March 2025.

$475 million and a 2030 loan

Inside the mall, empty space got refilled.

Forever 21 gave up 33,800 square feet, almost 5 percent of the building's floor area, and Zara leased the entire box. It was open by spring 2026.

The gym went the other way.

LA Fitness bought XSport's operating business in 2024, and by late 2025 the 37,600-square-foot club was dark while the rent kept arriving.

Underwriters treated it as vacant anyway. Then the money.

In October 2025 Prestige refinanced the enclosed mall with a $280 million loan, split into a $170 million senior piece and $110 million behind it, due in November 2030.

An appraisal that August valued the property as-is at $475 million against $26 million of annual net operating income.

The mall was 91.6 percent leased that October across 87 national and regional tenants.

Two numbers describe the same building: 780,000 square feet in the 2011 development plan, 696,000 in the 2025 loan documents covering 21 acres.

Financing collateral and gross development area are not measured the same way.

One expense is scheduled to grow.

Six tax lots carry city abatements, four with 15-year and 25-year schedules and two with 25-year schedules, and the benefits shrink as they run out.

Without them, the 2025-2026 tax bill would have topped $12 million.

Chaperones, rail plans and who shows up now

On Presidents Day, February 16, 2026, police responded just after 2 p.m. to a gathering of teenagers organized through social media.

Officers took 18 people into custody.

Disorder spread through parts of the mall and into nearby businesses, and a window was broken at a McDonald's outside.

The mall stayed open, and management said there was no major damage inside.

Prestige's answer was a temporary rule: shoppers under 18 had to be with an adult at least 21 years old.

The rule dropped into a national argument running through 2026 over age limits at malls, weighing security for tenants and employees against the fact that teenagers are a large part of who uses a mall on a school holiday.

They still show up, and so does everyone else. Macy's and JCPenney still hold the ends.

Apple, H&M and Uniqlo are open, Zara is in the Forever 21 space, Stop & Shop and AMC are still running in the older center, and Forman Mills has the building Kmart built.

Prestige counts more than 16 million visits a year across the combined property, with 1.4 million people living within five miles.

The next change is coming from outside the property line.

A Metro-North station at Co-op City is under construction as part of Penn Station Access, and the MTA is still trying for limited service there in 2027 even as full completion has slipped to 2030, which would give the northeast Bronx a direct train toward Penn Station and put rail service beside a mall designed around highway ramps.