More than a dozen years after an aborted attempt to add Dick’s Sporting Goods to The Gardens Mall, the mall’s owners have proposed bringing an even larger version of the national sports chain to the two-level space formerly occupied by Sears.
READ MORE: Lawsuit offers insight into Sears closure at Palm Beach County mall
Dick’s House of Sport would replace the now-vacant Sears store as the mall’s fifth anchor in a proposal that also would bring Dick’s latest attraction, an 18,000-square-foot outdoor playing field, to the mall, a June 27 development application submitted to Palm Beach Gardens shows.
The proposal from a subsidiary of The Forbes Co., the Michigan-based owner of the mall, also would provide an extra 47,000 square feet in the mall for more stores, with specialty furniture seller Arhaus moving from its spot near Bloomingdale’s.
In all, the project would add 61,467 square feet to the mall but no additional parking, instead asking the city to reduce the formula for how parking demand is calculated.
The plans for the 37-year-old mall on PGA Boulevard east of Interstate 95 were first reported in July by the South Florida Business Journal. Forbes owns the mall with a larger mall owner, Taubman Centers, which bought a 48.5% share in 2019.
The House of Sport is Dick’s new model that aims to lure customers by offering actual sports experiences, such as rock-climbing walls, batting cages and golf bays.
The outdoor field, which would go on the east edge of the mall, could be used for equipment testing, sports clinics, community games, birthday parties, fitness classes and athlete appearances, the application said.
Dick’s phased out guns after Parkland
The mall’s history with Dick’s, which has stores in West Palm Beach, Royal Palm Beach, Boynton Beach and Boca Raton, goes back to 2011, when Sears proposed subleasing its second floor to Dick’s.
But Forbes refused to sign off and the City Council passed a resolution that said mall anchor tenants could not subdivide their space without the approval of Forbes and the city.
Among concerns cited at the time was Dick’s sales of guns, but the company began to phase out the guns sales in its stores after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
Sears sued Forbes in 2014 for the right to bring in Dick’s, then added the city to the lawsuit the next year. In June 2017, the 4th District Court of Appeal found the city resolution to be unconstitutional because it impaired Sears’ contractual rights.
Lawsuits reignited in 2019
But even the court ruling didn’t pave the way for Dick’s to move in. Forbes refused to sign off on paperwork needed for city approvals, leading to a second round of litigation in 2019.
Sears’ successor, Transform Operating Stores, was sued by Forbes and filed a countersuit that brought the city back into the litigation.
“Having accomplished its goal of destroying the Dick’s sublease, the Forbes Parties (by their own admission) are waiting in the hopes that Transform goes out of business and … pressure Transform into selling its interest in the Sears Building to Forbes,” a 2023 legal filing said.
“Ultimately, the Forbes Parties’ goal, as it has been for years, is to get rid of the Sears store and
recapture/redevelop the Sears property itself.”
In late February 2024, Sears abruptly closed and the parties settled the Circuit Court case.
In presenting the settlement to the Gardens City Council in March 2024, the city’s outside counsel, Scott Hawkins of Jones Foster, said Transform and Forbes settled at no cost to the city.
The original Sears lease with Michigan-based Forbes, which ran until 2058, had been extinguished, Hawkins said.
“However you want to look at it, that’s a very significant development,” Hawkins said. “So I think the prospects for the mall and the city and the surrounding development are really, really meaningful.”
Dick’s pursued suit against mall owner
But a lawsuit filed by Dick’s against Forbes remained active in federal court in West Palm Beach. In a Sept. 6, 2024, ruling just 10 days before the case would go to trial, U.S. District Judge Bruce Reinhart handed Dick’s victory on two key points, including granting partial summary judgment.
Records show the case settled two weeks later, after three days of trial, including jury selection.
Attending the settlement conference on Sept. 20, 2024, were the mall’s owners, Nathan Forbes, managing partner of The Forbes Co., and William Taubman, president of the Taubman Realty Group. Also there, a sign-in sheet shows, was Edward Stack, executive chairman of Dick’s Sporting Goods.
The court record does not indicate whether the settlement called for Dick’s to take over the Sears site it had been pursuing since 2011, as it now appears to be doing.
But Forbes is a signatory to the application to build the 140,000-square-foot, two-story store, about the same size as the high-end Nordstrom department store on the opposite end of the mall.
The proposal, still under review by city staff, includes an extra 47,000 square feet of mall stores, including space for Arhaus on the south side of the mall, facing PGA Boulevard. Arhaus, a Nasdaq-traded company started in 1986, also has a store in Boca Raton and is growing rapidly. It added 11 new locations in 2024, to bring its total to 103 stores toward a goal of 165, it said in its annual report.
6,057 parking spaces at the mall
In all, the mall would grow by 61,467 square feet over its size before Sears left, raising the total square footage to 1.45 million square feet.
But even with more stores, the developer suggests less parking is needed.
Instead of providing 4.5 spaces for every 1,000 square feet of development, Forbes produced a study by Kimley Horn that recommends resetting the ratio to 4.0 spaces per 1,000 square feet.
That would require 5,806 spaces but the mall already has 6,057, a surplus of 251, so the mall owner is asking the city to require no new spaces.
Once city staff has completed its review of the application, it will be presented to the city’s Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board. From there, it would go before the City Council.
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
