Walk from the LEGO Discovery Center entrance toward the Dick's Sporting Goods wing on a Saturday afternoon and you will pass a chain-link fence that wasn't there two years ago. Behind it, framing rises where a surface parking lot used to sit. Most people walking by are headed to Dave & Buster's or the food court and don't look twice. They should. What's going up behind that fence is the first new housing built on this property since 2001, and it's arriving at the same moment the mall is losing the anchor store that helped open it in the first place.
That combination, one long-standing tenant leaving and actual residential construction rising a few hundred feet away, is the real story at Springfield Town Center right now. It's easy to notice the empty JCPenney storefront and assume the mall is shrinking. The opposite is happening. The property is being rebuilt to hold more people, not fewer, just not all of them as shoppers.
The Anchor That Opened the Mall Is the First to Leave
JCPenney closed its Springfield Town Center location on May 24, 2026, ending a run of 53 years that started when the property was still called Springfield Mall. JCPenney and Montgomery Ward were the two original anchors when the mall opened in 1973, back when the storefront sat next to Orange Bowl Pizza on one side and Time Out on the other, and the plaza out front once hosted the Miss Springfield pageant. Catalyst Brands, which now owns the JCPenney chain, said it couldn't continue under current lease terms and couldn't find another suitable spot nearby. Springfield's location was one of 138 JCPenney stores closing nationally, but locally it was the closing of a fixture that had been part of the property since before the current mall existed.
That kind of departure usually reads as decline. Here it reads as a hinge point, because of what's already confirmed to replace it.
What's Actually Moving Into That Space
Dick's Sporting Goods has filed site plans in Fairfax County to take over the vacated JCPenney box and convert it into a Dick's House of Sport, a larger, more interactive format than the traditional Dick's store already operating in a different wing of the same mall. The filed plans call for demolishing more than 10,000 square feet of interior retail space and adding a synthetic turf field and running track, features the House of Sport concept has built at other locations alongside rock-climbing walls and golf simulators. No opening date has been announced yet. Fairfax County shoppers will soon have two versions of the same brand under one roof, the familiar retail format and the newer experiential one, which tells you something about how the mall's owner is thinking about the space: not as square footage to lease, but as a reason to stay longer once you're there.
The Housing You Can See From the Parking Lot
The apartment building rising behind that construction fence will hold 439 units once finished, the first new residential construction at Springfield Town Center since 2001. The building is being engineered with three levels of post-tensioned concrete topped by five levels of wood framing, connected to a retrofitted parking garage, with a pool and an arbor courtyard linked by a pass-through loggia for future residents. The apartments and a companion hotel are part of a broader recapitalization: PREIT, the mall's owner, closed on a $150 million loan in 2025 to fund the project. The hotel, a five-story property owned by Intermountain Management, is targeting a 2028 opening, several years behind the apartments.
Here's the part that changes how residents nearby should think about the property: once those 439 units are occupied, people will be living inside the mall's footprint, not just visiting it. Evening and weekend patterns that used to be driven entirely by shopping hours will start reflecting a residential population too. That's a different kind of foot traffic than the mall has had in fifty years.
The Tenant Mix Already Points the Same Direction
The residential and House of Sport announcements aren't isolated. They're the latest moves in a pattern that started with the LEGO Discovery Center's 2023 opening, a 32,000-square-foot attraction with more than two million bricks and a staff of Master Model Builders, and has continued since.
A few threads worth tracking if you live nearby:
- Good Stuff Eatery was slated to open its first Fairfax County location at Springfield Plaza this summer, a short drive from the mall, bringing Spike Mendelsohn's farm-raised burgers and hand-spun custard milkshakes to the corridor.
- Foodees Fest, a touring food truck and artisan market festival, returned to Springfield Town Center in April 2026 for a second year, drawing more than 40 food trucks and vendors over a three-day weekend. Organizers said the return was driven partly by requests from the local community after the previous year's event pulled between 26,600 and 35,500 visitors. Springfield remains the festival's only Virginia stop.
- Dick's House of Sport plans are filed but not yet dated for opening, meaning the turf field and running track are still a ways off.
None of these are competing strategies. They're the same strategy applied to different tenants: give people a reason to stay past the errand.
In 2024, not long after ground broke on the apartment building, the mall's marketing director Justin Roth told FFXnow:
"I think people are really prioritizing those experiential things... I think it's really working out well for us."
Two years later, the pattern he described has a lot more built around it: framing, a garage retrofit, and a second Dick's format on the way.
What the Numbers Actually Show
It's worth being precise about what's improving and what isn't. As of mid-2024, mall representatives reported a vacancy rate near 4 percent, below the national average, and roughly 10 million annual visitors, matching pre-pandemic levels. Average visit length had actually dropped slightly since 2019, from about 87 minutes to 83. But sales per square foot had risen over the same stretch, from $555 to $603.
Put those two numbers next to each other and you get a specific, non-obvious read: people aren't staying meaningfully longer at Springfield Town Center than they did before the pandemic. They're spending more per trip. That's the bet behind adding apartments and a hotel isn't really about stretching out a single visit. It's about building a resident base that generates trips the old retail-only model never could, morning coffee runs, evening dog walks past the courtyard, weekend errands that don't require driving in at all.
What to Expect Through the Rest of 2026
If you live near the mall, here's the practical version. The JCPenney storefront will likely sit vacant for a while. Site plans move slower than headlines, and Dick's hasn't announced a construction or opening timeline for the House of Sport conversion. The apartment building was originally expected to reach completion in early 2026, but the most recent public construction updates still show work underway on the building and the connected garage retrofit, so don't be surprised if fencing and equipment stay part of the daily scenery near the southern lot a while longer. The hotel won't be a factor for out-of-town guests for a couple more years yet, with 2028 still the target.
In the meantime, the food and entertainment options nearby keep growing. Good Stuff Eatery gives the corridor a burger option with actual regional credibility rather than another drive-through chain. Foodees Fest has become enough of a fixture that its return this spring wasn't really in question. The mall that many longtime residents remember as the place with the JCPenney and the arcade is turning into something else, one lease and one groundbreaking at a time.
We'll keep watching this one. A property that's adding its first new housing in a quarter century, right as a half-century anchor tenant leaves, is worth paying attention to if you live anywhere near the Franconia-Springfield corridor, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar.
If you're curious how any of this ripples into home values or rental demand on your specific street, that's a conversation worth having before the next phase breaks ground. Mannheim Group is local, and Jürgen and Kristen are always glad to talk it through. Talk to Jürgen & Kristen, personal, no-pressure advice, whenever you're ready.
