A long-empty Sears anchor at The Gardens Mall could soon become a massive Dick’s House of Sport, complete with climbing walls, batting cages, golf bays and an outdoor sports field. The proposal would turn one of Palm Beach Gardens’ most conspicuous vacant retail boxes into something closer to a sports destination than a traditional store.
WPTV reported Tuesday that the project is headed for city review. Palm Beach Gardens’ official project tracker lists the first City Council reading for Thursday, August 6, with a second reading scheduled for September 10.
A 140,000-Square-Foot Sports Playground
According to the city’s project narrative, Gardens Venture LLC is seeking approval to redevelop the former Sears space with a 140,000-square-foot, two-story House of Sport. The wider proposal would also add about 47,093 square feet of mall shop space and increase the mall’s total approved intensity to roughly 1.45 million square feet.
The store is designed around the kind of hands-on activities that make it difficult to call a shopping trip just a shopping trip. DICK’S Sporting Goods describes the format as a 100,000-plus-square-foot concept with climbing walls, TrackMan golf bays and multi-sport cages, while the Palm Beach Gardens filing adds virtual-reality sports experiences and an 18,500-square-foot outdoor field for clinics, games, birthday parties and summer camps.
The Catch Is Parking
The proposal is not simply a matter of filling an empty building. The city filing asks to reduce the mall’s required parking ratio from 4.5 spaces per 1,000 square feet to 4.0 spaces per 1,000 square feet, arguing that the lower figure better reflects actual use.
The application’s parking study estimates demand at 3.08 spaces per 1,000 square feet and proposes 6,067 spaces against a 5,805-space requirement. That means the project would add retail and recreation space without adding a new parking requirement, a detail likely to draw as much attention from regular shoppers as the batting cages.
A Sears Fight That Took More Than A Decade
The proposed store also revives a retail plan that has been circling the property since 2011. As WLRN reported, Dick’s previously sought to sublease part of Sears’ space, but a dispute involving Sears, the mall owner and the city led to years of litigation before Sears closed in February 2024 and the parties settled.
This time, the plan is structured as a full redevelopment of the former anchor rather than a sublease. The proposal still needs city approval, and there is no announced opening date if the project clears the review process.
The city’s review schedule shows the application includes a land-development text amendment, a planned-unit-development amendment and a major conditional-use request tied to the outdoor field. For Palm Beach Gardens shoppers, the immediate question is whether the vacant Sears box finally gets a second life—and whether the city thinks the mall has enough asphalt to handle it.
