Drive Route 38 past Cherry Hill Mall on a Saturday afternoon this summer and you will circle the parking deck twice before finding a spot. Drive three miles further down the same road to Moorestown Mall and you can park at the door. One visitor who hit both malls in the same rainy afternoon this July described the difference bluntly: Moorestown had almost nothing going on inside, while Cherry Hill was packed enough to make parking a chore.
That gap is not really about which mall has better stores. It is about which mall has stopped treating empty space as a problem to manage and started treating it as square footage to sell. Since mid-2025, Cherry Hill's two largest commercial buildings, the mall itself and the H-Mart on Route 70, have each worked through a section that sat dark or underused for years. One project is already finished. The other is still wrapped in construction fencing. Together they explain why this stretch of Camden County keeps adding square footage while a mall three miles away sits quiet. That is the part worth understanding if you live here, because it changes what a normal weekend errand run looks like by the end of this year.
The Nine-Story Building Behind the Food Court Is Gone
For decades, a nine-story office tower sat in the Cherry Hill Mall parking lot, built in the 1960s and known simply as One Cherry Hill. It was the kind of structure that becomes furniture in a town's mental map: everyone's seen it, nobody thinks about it. PREIT, the mall's owner, began demolishing it in early July 2025 to make room for something that has nothing to do with cubicles.
DICK'S House of Sport is taking over that 120,000-square-foot footprint, and PREIT has called it the largest single-tenant addition to the mall in more than a decade. The store includes a climbing wall, golf bays with TrackMan simulators, an outdoor track and field, and a multi-sport cage for baseball, softball, lacrosse, and soccer, letting shoppers test equipment before they buy it. When a reporter checked on construction progress in January 2026, the structural steel had only just begun rising. By July, the building was largely enclosed, with the roof installed, rooftop HVAC equipment in place, and most of the exterior facade complete. A new entrance will connect directly into the JCPenney wing, giving shoppers access from both mall levels. The opening is still slated for later this year, though PREIT has not pinned it to an exact date.
That single project explains a lot of the mall's recent internal shuffling. Spencer's, which has held a spot at Cherry Hill Mall since the mall's earliest years, longer than almost any other tenant in the building, relocated to a larger space in May 2026 specifically to sit closer to the future Dick's entrances. Famous Footwear moved to a second-floor spot near JCPenney to make way for the new customer walkways connecting to the sports store. Pandora also moved into a bigger space. None of these are closures. They are longtime tenants repositioning themselves around a construction project, which is a different story than the one you usually hear about aging malls.
Six New Leases in One Announcement, With an Anniversary Attached
Cherry Hill Mall turns 65 this fall, tracing back to its October 11, 1961 opening as one of the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping centers in the eastern United States. That anniversary happens to land in the same season PREIT announced six new retail brands committing to more than 25,000 square feet of space: Aritzia, Crocs, Indochino, Timberland, True Religion, and gorjana.
| Brand | Space | Location | Target Opening |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aritzia | 20,340 sq ft | Grand Court | Spring 2027 |
| Crocs | 2,000 sq ft | Near future Dick's | Opened June 2026 |
| Timberland | 1,800 sq ft | Near Dick's House of Sport | Later summer 2026 |
| Indochino | 1,200 sq ft | Off Grand Court, near American Eagle | Before 2026 holidays |
| True Religion | 2,230 sq ft | Near Dick's House of Sport | Early 2027 |
| gorjana | 1,107 sq ft | Grand Court | 2027 holidays |
Aritzia's store is the standout: at more than 20,000 square feet it will be the largest of the group, and it includes an A-OK Cafe, the brand's in-house coffee concept, which the company has only opened in a handful of U.S. locations. PREIT's senior vice president of leasing framed the timing as a signal in itself, noting that retailers at this level are being unusually selective about where they open right now, and six of them picked Cherry Hill in the same leasing window.
That wave follows two years of similar additions, including ALO, Coach, Columbia, Dr. Martens, Kendra Scott, Lacoste, OFFLINE by Aerie, and POP MART. The food court is adding to the mix too. DoneRight Doner Kebab, a Mediterranean fast-casual concept, is expected to open before the end of summer 2026, and Lululemon is moving into an expanded Grand Court location ahead of the holiday season.
The Same Story Is Playing Out Three Miles Down Route 70
If the mall's dead space was a demolished office tower, the H-Mart on Route 70 near the I-295 interchange had its own version: an entire upper floor that sat effectively unused for years, even while the grocery store below stayed one of South Jersey's most reliable stops for Korean and Asian groceries. H-Mart closed the whole building starting June 29, 2025, for a renovation the company had been signaling since the summer of 2025, and reopened in the spring of 2026 with 39,000 square feet spread across two full levels for the first time in the store's 25 years in Cherry Hill.
The lower level is still the grocery store, remodeled with an expanded produce section and a redone fresh seafood counter. The upper level, previously the ghost floor, is now home to a Market Eatery food hall with a set of named vendors that gives it a genuinely different identity from the food court a few miles away:
- KyoDong Noodle, a Korean-style Chinese noodle restaurant
- Daily Seoul, a Korean lifestyle food brand
- Mirim, serving traditional Korean dishes
- The Dak, focused on Korean fried chicken
- Dduk Dabang, a Korean street food concept
- Tiger Sugar, Taiwanese bubble tea
- Paris Baguette, a bakery cafe with pastries and brewed coffee and tea
- JAWS Topokki & Gimbap, known for tteokbokki, which the company's own site listed for a Cherry Hill opening in July 2026
There is also a small K-Arcade with skill games on the second floor, and a "Hello Home" section for home goods, which rounds the space into something closer to a destination stop than a grocery run.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this is really about shopping trends in the abstract. It is about two specific buildings on two specific roads that residents already drive past every week, each moving from underused to active within the same year-plus stretch. If you have avoided the mall's back lot because it has been a construction zone since last year, that changes by the time Dick's House of Sport opens later this year. If you have not been to H-Mart since before its closure in mid-2025, the store you remember is not the one that is there now.
The Moorestown comparison matters here too. Three miles apart on the same road, one mall is filling in blank space with brands willing to commit multi-year leases, while the other sits mostly quiet on a rainy Saturday. That is not a universal story about malls dying. It is a specific story about why this stretch of Cherry Hill keeps getting new construction fencing instead of new vacancy signs.
If you are already living in Cherry Hill and keeping an eye on what changes around you, this is the kind of shift that tends to show up later in conversations about property values and neighborhood demand, even when nobody set out to track it for that reason. When you are ready to talk about what that means for your own address, Ashley Moorhouse and the team at Ray Moorhouse Real Estate Group know this corridor block by block. What's My Home Worth?
