Palm Beach Gardens This Fall: Two Downtowns Taking Shape
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Ask someone in Palm Beach Gardens where they're headed Saturday morning and you used to get one answer. Now you might get two, and they're not talking about the same place. One person means the shopping center literally named Downtown, the one next to the Gardens Mall that's spent years behind orange fencing. The other means the new grocery-anchored strip going up out past Coconut Boulevard, the one that didn't exist a year ago. Both are correct. Both are called some version of "downtown." And this fall, for the first time, both are actually open for business at the same time.
That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a story about one center replacing another. It's about a city that spent two decades with a single commercial core near PGA and Military Trail now running two of them at once, on opposite ends of town, serving two different sets of neighbors who were never really shopping in the same place to begin with.
Downtown at the Gardens had fenced-off walkways, boarded storefronts, and construction materials stacked where a fountain used to draw families on weekend evenings. It opened in 2005 and had cycled through four owners before EDENS, a national retail developer based in Fort Lauderdale, bought the property in July 2024.
The difference now is visible. EDENS has signed 13 new or expanding tenants since taking over and pushed occupancy to 85 percent, according to the company and confirmed by CBS12's reporting on the property. Some of those names are already open: Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, the New York import known for its Florida-exclusive Key Lime Pie flavor, Muse Paintbar for date nights and birthday parties, Skin Laundry, MeTime Salon, Vagabond Kids Apparel, and Pura Vida Miami, the all-day café brand with more than 30 locations across South Florida. J.Crew Factory is still on the way.
The physical property is changing too. EDENS has completed an east-west cut-through connecting sections of the center that used to require walking around, and it's working through what it calls "Northern Strand" upgrades near REI and CMX Cinemas: new facades, signage, digital directories, landscaping. None of that shows up on a portal listing, but it changes the experience of walking through the center.
Nicole Shiman, EDENS' managing director, put the shift in blunt terms when she spoke with CBS12 about what the neighborhood looked like before the acquisition.
"This used to be more of a retiree destination."
That's not a knock on the Gardens. It's a read on how fast the buyer pool west of I-95 has changed, and it explains why a shopping center that sat half empty for years suddenly has a waiting list of national tenants.
Six miles west, past Coconut Boulevard on Northlake, a second commercial core is opening from scratch inside Avenir, the 4,752-acre master-planned community that's been under construction since the mid-2020s. The Avenir Town Center is approved for more than 200,000 square feet of retail, and it's opening in phases rather than all at once. The first piece landed on May 21, 2026, when a new Publix opened at 12535 Northlake Boulevard with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that morning.
For residents in Avenir's western pods, that single store cut a real drive in half. The two nearest full-line groceries before this were the Publix at Northlake and Coconut and the store on PGA Boulevard, both a genuine haul from the community's western edge. The new location also brought a full pharmacy, a Publix Liquors, and café seating, sitting on the same stretch of road residents were already driving for Fire Station 6 and the Jupiter Medical Center micro-hospital.
The rest of the Town Center is filling in behind it. Confirmed tenants set to open through the remainder of 2026 include:
Nearly 20 businesses total have committed to the center, and it's built to be reached without a car. Avenir's internal road network is golf cart friendly end to end, so a run to Publix, a dinner reservation at Seppe, and a stop at the credit union can happen on the same short loop that never touches Northlake Boulevard directly.
Here's the piece that's easy to miss if you're only half paying attention to either project. Downtown at the Gardens and Avenir Town Center aren't fighting over the same shopper. They're geographically separated by roughly six miles and a very different resident base. Downtown sits inside the older, established core of Palm Beach Gardens, the corridor built out over the last twenty years around PGA Boulevard, the Gardens Mall, and neighborhoods that have had decades to mature. Avenir's Town Center sits inside a community that's still being built, filling a stretch of Northlake that had no retail of consequence west of Coconut Boulevard until this year.
That's why both projects can be under construction, both can be adding tenants at the same time, and neither one has to cannibalize the other's foot traffic. The city isn't choosing a winner between an old retail center and a new one. It's running two separate commercial districts because the western half of Palm Beach Gardens grew fast enough to need its own, while the older half is seeing improvements under its new owner.
While both of those projects work through construction schedules and phased tenant openings, one fall marker in Palm Beach Gardens hasn't moved at all. The Gardens GreenMarket kicks off its next season on Sunday, October 4, 2026, running 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Palm Beach Gardens City Hall Municipal Campus at 10500 North Military Trail. The city is treating opening day as a proper Season Kickoff Celebration, not just a normal Sunday market.
It's worth noticing how that date functions against everything else happening this fall. Retail openings at both Downtown and Avenir are staggered and tenant-dependent, with specific dates still shifting as buildouts finish. The GreenMarket doesn't work that way. It's the same corner of Military Trail and Burns Road every Sunday, rain or shine, and it's the one fixed point locals can plan around while two entire shopping districts remain in motion around it.
If you live east toward PGA and the mall, your fall probably looks like watching Downtown at the Gardens fill back in one storefront at a time, an ice cream run to Van Leeuwen this month, a Muse Paintbar class next month, J.Crew Factory sometime after that. If you live west toward Avenir, your fall looks like watching a Publix parking lot get busier every week while Seppe and Taki Kappo work through their own opening timelines. Either way, the GreenMarket on Sunday mornings is the constant that ties both halves of the city back together, at least until one of these new stretches earns its own Sunday routine.
Palm Beach Gardens hasn't had two working commercial centers before. It has both now, while Avenir Town Center continues to fill in. That's not a small shift for a city its size, and it's worth watching regardless of which side of Northlake you call home.
If you're weighing what a move within Palm Beach Gardens, or into it, might look like given how fast both ends of the city are changing, The Homeseeker Group knows this market corridor by corridor. Schedule a consultation with Stacy Plean and her team to talk through what these changes mean for your own next move.
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