Two Climbing Walls Are Coming to Springfield Town Center. That's Not the Interesting Part.

For 53 years, if you wanted a new coat or a wedding registry in Springfield, you went to JCPenney. The store opened in 1973 as one of the original anchors of what was then Springfield Mall, and it stuck around through recessions, the rise of online shopping, and a full gut renovation that turned the mall into the Town Center it is now. It even hosted British royalty. In November 1985, Prince Charles and Princess Diana toured the store, reportedly bought an $8 scarf, and drew a crowd of roughly 6,000 spectators. That store closed for good on May 24, 2026.

What's replacing it isn't another department store. It's a synthetic turf field.

Dick's Sporting Goods has filed plans with Fairfax County to convert the vacated JCPenney box into a Dick's House of Sport, the company's larger and more interactive retail format. The plan calls for demolishing more than 10,000 square feet of the existing building to make room for a turf field and running track, on top of the format's signature features: rock-climbing walls, multi-sport practice cages, and golf simulators. This is a concept Dick's first rolled out in 2021, and Springfield's version will join a small but growing list of these stores nationally.

That alone would be a decent local story. But it's only half of what's actually happening at the property, and the other half is where this gets genuinely interesting for anyone who already lives nearby.

The Mall Already Has a Climbing Wall Problem

Before Dick's ever filed its plans, Springfield Town Center had already signed a lease with Movement, the indoor climbing gym chain, to fill one of the shell spaces created during the mall's redevelopment. That deal was supposed to result in an opening by late 2024. It didn't happen. As of the most recent reporting, Movement's opening had slipped to "sometime in 2026," with no firm date attached.

So depending on how construction timelines shake out this year, Springfield Town Center could end up with two separate climbing walls under one roof, built by two different companies, neither of which coordinated with the other because they're not in the same business. One comes bundled inside a sporting goods superstore. The other is a dedicated climbing gym that's been "coming soon" for close to two years.

Here's the part that makes this more than a funny coincidence: Dick's Sporting Goods already operates a standard-format store inside Springfield Town Center, the kind without a turf field or a climbing wall. Public filings only address converting the old JCPenney space into the elaborate House of Sport version. Nothing in the record says the existing Dick's is closing. If both formats end up open at once, one property will have two Dick's storefronts and, potentially, two places to climb a wall within a few hundred feet of each other.

Neither has opened as of this writing. Both are, on paper, headed for the same shopping center in the same rough window. That overlap says something the individual headlines don't: this property isn't adding one experiential tenant to replace a shuttered anchor. It's stacking multiple bets on the same kind of tenant, at the same time, without much apparent coordination between them.

Springfield Plaza Is a Different Address

If you've seen "Good Stuff Eatery is coming to Springfield" somewhere and pictured it walking distance from the LEGO Discovery Center, that's worth a correction. Good Stuff Eatery, the farm-to-table burger chain founded by chef Spike Mendelsohn, is opening its first Fairfax County location at Springfield Plaza on Old Keene Mill Road, not inside Springfield Town Center itself. The two properties sit close enough to blur together in conversation, but they're separately owned and managed.

The Good Stuff space sits in a 2,450-square-foot storefront between The Container Store and Music & Arts, with at least $70,000 in permitted renovations underway as of earlier this year. The company's deputy CEO told local reporters the location was targeting a summer 2026 opening. As of the most recent public reporting, no exact grand opening date had been announced. August 31 is the last day of summer on the meteorological calendar, so if Good Stuff hit its own timeline, the burgers should already be flipping. Worth calling ahead before you drive over expecting a full menu.

The Housing Showing Up Underneath All of This

While the retail mix at Springfield Town Center gets more experiential and less transactional, the property is also getting denser in a way that has nothing to do with shopping at all. PREIT, the mall's owner, closed on a $150 million loan to fund a mixed-use redevelopment that includes a 460-unit apartment building and a hotel, with an additional 400 apartments in planning. That construction has been underway for months, though PREIT hasn't published a firm date for when the first units will be ready. Separately, Fairfax County supervisors approved the Springfield Gateway project a few blocks away, which will turn 5.77 acres of underused commercial land into as many as 732 apartments with ground-floor retail of its own.

None of this is happening in isolation. It's the same pattern showing up twice: retail space contracting into fewer, larger, more experience-driven tenants, while residential density gets built directly into and around what used to be pure shopping center.

Springfield Town Center spent 53 years selling clothes. It's spending this year selling reasons to stay for an hour, and building somewhere to live next door while it does.

This didn't start with JCPenney's closure. The LEGO Discovery Center opened at the property back in August 2023, occupying 32,000 square feet near the mall's main entrance, well before any of this year's changes were on the table. What's different in 2026 isn't the direction. It's the pace. Three separate experiential concepts, one retail closure with genuine local history attached, and two housing developments are all moving at once, on overlapping but uncoordinated timelines.

What This Actually Looks Like From the Outside This Fall

If you live near Springfield Town Center right now, expect a mall that's harder to describe in one sentence than it was a year ago. Part of it will feel like a sporting goods flagship under construction. Part of it will keep functioning exactly as it has, since Target, Macy's, Regal Cinema, and the rest of the more than one million square feet of existing retail aren't going anywhere. And around the edges, cranes that have been up since last year will keep adding apartment units that didn't exist when most current residents moved in.

None of this requires you to do anything. But if you've noticed the property feels like it's in the middle of becoming something else, you're reading the situation correctly. The honest version of the story isn't "new store opens, old store closes." It's a shopping center that's placing several different bets on becoming a destination people drive to for an afternoon rather than a stop people make on the way to somewhere else, while quietly building housing into the same footprint at the same time.

That kind of shift tends to change how a neighborhood feels to live in well before it changes what anything costs. Worth keeping an eye on either way.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own home's value down the line, or you're simply curious what Springfield's shifting retail mix is doing to buyer interest in the neighborhoods around it, Cheantae Lewis tracks these changes as part of the job. Her free home valuation tool is a good place to start if you ever want a clearer picture of where your property stands.