If you live in Henrietta and you have driven Jefferson Road at any point since New Year's, you already know the mall interior is closed. The signs on the doors have been there since December. What is less obvious, and what most residents have not quite pieced together yet, is that the corridor has quietly inverted this year. The action is no longer inside the building at 1 Miracle Mile Drive. It has moved to the outparcels, the plazas across the road, and a set of permit approvals that will decide what the mall becomes next.
This is a walk through what has actually opened, closed, moved, or been approved between the Thruway and Calkins Road since the start of 2026, written for the person who is already here and just wants to know what changed on the drive home.
The interior closed on December 31. The exterior is the story now.
Wilmorite closed the interior of the Marketplace Mall to the public at the end of 2025, and the property's own public notice still reads bluntly: no mall walking, no access to the interior, stores with exterior entrances must be reached from the outside. Those exterior tenants are the ones most residents are still using without thinking of them as "the mall." Dave & Buster's, IndyKart Raceway, Floor & Decor, JCPenney, Land's End, and Sportsman's Warehouse are all still open, per WHAM's January reporting on the shutdown.
The number that explains why this happened is the assessed value. WXXI reported in March that the mall property dropped from an assessed value of roughly $82 million in 2018 to about $28 million last year. A property losing two-thirds of its value in seven years does not get renovated. It gets repurposed.
Three restaurants, three different plazas, one summer
The most visible change on the ground is on the food side, and it is happening at three separate addresses that residents tend to lump together as "over by the mall" but which are actually three different plazas with three different landlords.
- Raising Cane's, 823 Jefferson Road. The Henrietta Town Board approved the special use permit in March for the Louisiana chicken chain to build in the Minotti Crossings Plaza between Shake Shack and Panera Bread. Per 13WHAM's coverage, developers were targeting late summer or fall 2026 to open. This would be the chain's first location in upstate New York, and the closest existing store to Rochester before this one is near New York City.
- MOSU Asian BBQ & Hot Pot, Marketplace Drive. The Albany-based restaurant group is taking the former Red Lobster building. Because the space was already a restaurant, the town confirmed the project did not require a Special Use Permit and involves only minimal site plan work. This is MOSU's first Rochester-area location.
- KPot Korean BBQ & Hot Pot, 390 East Henrietta Road. A Rochester location appeared on KPot's own website earlier this year. No opening date has been announced.
Two all-you-can-eat Asian BBQ and hot pot concepts landing within about a mile of each other, one in a former Red Lobster and one on the East Henrietta Road side, is not a coincidence. It is a bet by two national operators that the density of RIT students, hospital workers, and commuters on Jefferson can sustain the format. Whether both survive is the interesting question. Henrietta has room for one clear winner in this category, not two.
There is also a Henrietta-born story worth flagging even though the new address is in Pittsford. Mamma G's, the Troiano family Italian restaurant that has been on East Henrietta Road since 2015, opened a second location in Pittsford Plaza on February 18. The original is still open. A local independent expanding while national chains are landing on the same corridor is the kind of detail that only reads as significant if you have watched the strip for a while.
Where the mall tenants actually went
The interior tenants with no exterior door had until December 31 to be out. Most residents saw the coverage of the closure and did not follow what happened next. The answer, for many of them, was a short move across the corridor rather than out of town.
BestFit Menswear is the useful example. Owner Enfal Namver told WHAM in early January that the family business received notice from Wilmorite in November to relocate by year-end, and by January the store had reopened inside Jay Scutti Plaza in a former mattress shop. The pattern for smaller displaced tenants has been similar: they landed in the plazas along Jefferson, Hylan, and East Henrietta rather than shutting down. If you are trying to find a favorite mall store that vanished on you, the search radius is smaller than you think.
The redevelopment plan is not more retail. That is the point.
On May 29, the Henrietta Town Board approved special use permits tied to the redevelopment of the interior mall footprint. WHAM's coverage framed what the approval clears the way for: a shift of the property from a traditional shopping mall into a complex focused on medical, educational, residential, and civic uses.
The concrete pieces of that:
A new Mary Cariola Children's Center school, likely in the northern portion of the former mall, serving students with complex disabilities. A new University of Rochester Golisano Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Institute in the center. A new URMC medical center, focus not yet defined, filling the rest. Tom Golisano previously committed $75 million toward the shared facility. Governor Kathy Hochul announced an additional $4 million from the state. Erica Dayton of the Golisano Foundation told reporters the facility would have capacity for roughly 450 students.
The tax question is the one Town Supervisor Stephen Schultz has been asked most often, because most of the new uses are tax-exempt.
"The mall has already lost hundreds of millions of dollars of value over the years, and that's been absorbed by other new construction coming on."
Schultz's list of that new construction, in the same reporting, is worth naming because these are the projects meant to backfill the tax base: Skyworks on Calkins Road, the new Bob Johnson GMC dealership on West Henrietta Road, and Raising Cane's on Jefferson. A sale of the mall property is expected to close in the fall, with a community benefit agreement to be finalized by the end of the year. State approval is still pending.
For a resident, the practical read is this: the interior of the building you grew up walking through will, within the next few years, become a campus for children and adults who need specialized care and education, not another retail floor. The economic engine of the corridor will be the outparcels and the neighboring plazas, not the anchor.
Reading the corridor like a resident
Once you see the inversion, the whole strip gets easier to read. The interior is a chapter that closed in December. The outparcels are the new center of gravity. The plazas across the road absorbed most of the displaced small tenants. The two Asian BBQ openings are a category bet the market has not settled yet. The Cane's opening will pull traffic patterns in Minotti Crossings sideways whenever it lands. And the Mary Cariola and Golisano IDD Institute buildout will, over the next several years, put a very different kind of daily traffic through 1 Miracle Mile Drive than anything the property has seen since 1982.
If you have lived here long enough to remember when the food court was the destination and Sibley's was the anchor, none of that is nostalgia lost. It is a corridor doing what corridors do when the assessed value drops by two-thirds in seven years. The interesting part is that Henrietta seems to have caught it early enough to shape what comes next rather than letting the vacancy sit.
If you are thinking about how your street or subdivision sits relative to all of this, whether the changes on Jefferson affect your resale timing, or simply which of the new places is worth a Tuesday night trip, Lalla Fitzpatrick is happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
