Drive past the Moorestown Mall on Route 38 this month and you'll see three things happening at once: a fenced-off construction zone where the old Lord & Taylor used to be, a brand-new apartment building rising behind Boscov's, and a parking garage that's been sitting there, oddly empty, for longer than it should be. None of it looks finished. All of it points to the same shift.
Here's the part most people don't know, even people who've shopped there for decades: Moorestown was a dry town until 2011. No liquor licenses, no bars, no restaurant wine lists, for the entire first half-century of the mall's existence. When the township finally lifted the ban, PREIT moved almost immediately to bring in fine dining. Fifteen years later, that same shift is still working itself out, and this year is the one where it finally becomes visible from the parking lot.
Three different bets, landing in the same twelve months
Malls that lose anchor stores usually make one big move to fill the hole. Moorestown Mall is making three, and they're not the same kind of bet. One is entertainment. One is housing. One already happened and most residents drive past it without registering what it is.
Cooper University Health Care converted the mall's long-vacant Sears building into a multi-floor outpatient campus, a project Philadelphia Inquirer reporting from 2022 described as part of a broader transformation involving medical, residential, and entertainment uses on the same property. It doesn't have an emergency room or overnight beds. It's outpatient only, but it's already open and already pulling daily foot traffic that has nothing to do with shopping.
The other two bets are still under construction, and both are aimed at a summer or fall 2026 finish.
What Parky's actually is
The former Lord & Taylor space closed in 2020, sat briefly as a discount liquidation store called Turn 7, and then closed again in 2024. What's replacing it is not another retailer. It's a 200,000-plus-square-foot entertainment, restaurant, and bar complex called Parky's, purchased for $4.6 million by Aaron Parkinson, who also owns Xtreme Action Park in Fort Lauderdale. According to 42Freeway's on-site reporting from construction start, the finished building will be at least twice the size of the original Dave & Buster's on Philadelphia's Delaware Avenue pier.
Inside, the plan includes:
- An indoor multi-level go-kart track
- Duckpin bowling and axe throwing
- Boardwalk-style arcade games and mini-golf
- A speakeasy-style bar on the ground floor
- A second-floor rooftop space with a performance stage, bars, and outdoor dining
That rooftop detail matters more than it sounds. It sat hidden behind an extended front wall facade for months before anyone realized it was there, tucked into a building most residents assumed was just going to be another big-box store. PREIT's head of leasing told Bisnow that consolidating entertainment under one roof is a strategy the company has pursued for over a decade, but that the moment for it is now. Construction trailers arrived on site in late spring 2025, and multiple 2026 sources point to a summer 2026 opening, though town officials had originally floated a 2025 timeline. If your Route 38 drive-by still shows scaffolding this month, that's why: the project has already run past its first target date.
The neighbors moving in next door
While Parky's occupies the old department store, a different kind of change is happening in the parking lot behind Boscov's. Bel Canto Asset Growth Fund broke ground on Pearl Apartment Homes on September 30, 2025, a 375-unit complex that will be the first residential community built directly on mall property. The dedicated parking garage for residents was finished before a single apartment was framed, which tells you how deliberately this phase was sequenced.
Pre-leasing opened May 1, 2026, according to the property's own leasing site, with 15 floor plans ranging from studios to three-bedroom units and rents starting in the low $2,200s. First move-ins are targeted for fall 2026. Seventy-five of the units are set aside as income-restricted affordable housing, and Moorestown Township's civic alert page projects the first of those units becoming available around August 2026, which is essentially now.
Here's how the three projects line up against each other:
| Project | Status as of August 2026 | Target milestone |
|---|---|---|
| Cooper outpatient campus | Open and operating | Already converted from former Sears |
| Pearl Apartment Homes | Pre-leasing since May 2026 | Move-ins targeted fall 2026; affordable units ~August 2026 |
| Parky's entertainment complex | Under construction | Opening targeted summer 2026 |
Bel Canto's chairman, quoted in a release distributed through the Burlington County Regional Chamber of Commerce, framed the project as serving both ends of the demographic spectrum at once, longtime residents looking to downsize without leaving town and younger professionals looking to put down roots near Lockheed Martin and Cooper. Whether that framing holds up in practice, the effect on the ground is straightforward: for the first time in the mall's history, people will sleep there.
The small stuff that shows up before the big stuff opens
Big anchor projects get the headlines, but the tenant mix at Moorestown Mall had already started shifting years before Parky's broke ground. A 2024 report from ROI-NJ on a wave of new leasing described 13 stores opening across more than 51,000 square feet, including a restaurant that marked a homecoming for Moorestown resident John Murphy, a do-it-yourself slime bar for kids' workshops, a dog obedience school offering private and group lessons, and the mall's first new liquor store in more than a century.
That last detail loops back to where this story started. A shopping mall that operated for six decades in a town where alcohol sales weren't legal until 2011 is now adding a liquor store, a speakeasy bar, and a rooftop bar within the same few years. None of these are chain concepts. They're locally rooted, individually chosen tenants, which is a different kind of bet than trying to backfill a lost department store with another national retailer.
What it actually changes if you already live here
If you're already in Moorestown, none of this requires you to do anything. But it does change what a Tuesday night or a Saturday afternoon can look like without getting on Route 73 toward Cherry Hill or on 295 toward Philadelphia. A rooftop bar and a go-kart track within walking distance of Boscov's is not a small addition to the town's after-dark options, and 375 new households moving in over the next year means new faces at the coffee shop, new demand at the restaurants that have already staked their claim, and a mall that finally has residents instead of just customers.
It's also a useful case study in how a struggling mall actually gets fixed. Not with one splashy anchor tenant, but with three unrelated bets landing close together: healthcare that brings people in on weekdays, entertainment that brings them in on weekends, and housing that makes some of them permanent. Moorestown didn't get a renovated mall. It got a second small neighborhood built inside the old one, and 2026 is the year most of it opens at once.
If you're watching Moorestown change and wondering what that means for property values or the timing of a move, Dream Home by Steven tracks this kind of local development as closely as we track listings. Request a free market valuation and we'll walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the mall's press releases say.
