This past June, on the last weekend of the month, more than fifty artists set up shop inside the Hudson Valley Mall. A GameStop that had sat dark since January 2025 became a group show called "Pharmakon." The old Hot Topic filled with loud music and dramatic lighting for an exhibit on teen nostalgia. Sculptures lined the main promenade. By Sunday night, Vogue had run a piece asking how a dead mall became an art exhibition.
If you live in the Town of Ulster, you already know the mall has been thinning out for years. What you might not know is what actually replaced it, because the answer isn't nothing. It's a few hundred feet in every direction. The commercial energy that used to sit under one roof on Ulster Avenue didn't disappear when the anchor stores left. It moved next door, across the highway, and down to the old Red Lobster lot, and if you've noticed more construction fencing and full parking lots around the mall lately, that's why.
What's Actually Left Inside
The mall itself is down to a short list of tenants. Target remains the last true anchor. NCG Cinema still runs its twelve screens. The rest of the interior is now mostly fitness and service businesses: Innate Movement Parkour, Kingston Athletics, and Mauceri Muay Thai occupy space that used to hold retail chains, alongside Northwell Health's clinic and the Boy Scouts of America's Rip Van Winkle Council office. Unisex Hair Palace is one of the only storefronts left from the mall's earlier decades.
The closures came fast once they started. Jimmy Jazz shut down by late December 2024. GameStop closed abruptly on January 5, 2025, with almost no notice to staff. Then, on the same day in May 2025, both the mall's dental office and its U.S. Postal Service branch closed for good, with postal customers redirected to the Kingston Post Office on Cornell Street. Mall owner Hull Property Group has responded to the vacancies with carpet, new lighting, and murals covering entire hallways of empty storefronts. The June art show worked with that same emptiness instead of against it, using the vacant shells as gallery space rather than pretending they were still stores.
Where Dick's Sporting Goods Actually Went
The clearest sign that shopping in the Town of Ulster didn't decline so much as relocate is Dick's Sporting Goods. The chain didn't leave the area. It moved a short distance away, into the former Gander Mountain and Gander Outdoors building at Hudson Valley Plaza, the shopping center that sits adjacent to the mall. The Town of Ulster approved the relocation, and by June 2025 construction was underway at the new site. The plan called for a March 2026 opening, and as of mid-March 2026, the new store was in transition, with the mall location largely cleared out even while Dick's technically remained on the books as an active tenant during the handoff.
That single move explains a lot about the corridor. Hudson Valley Plaza isn't struggling. Alongside the new Dick's, it holds Walmart, PetSmart, and a Raymour & Flanigan Outlet. Directly across Route 9W, Ulster Crossings has kept its own tenants steady with Michaels, LL Bean, and Five Below. None of these stores needed the mall to succeed. They needed parking close to the door and visibility from the highway, which is exactly what the open-air plazas around the mall offer and what the enclosed mall format increasingly can't.
The Red Lobster Lot Is Filling Back In
Down the same 9W corridor, at the corner of Route 9W and Miron Lane, the same pattern is playing out with a restaurant instead of a big-box store. The Red Lobster that once stood at 1 Miron Lane closed in 2024. Its site made a brief national appearance when comedian John Oliver bought the location's kitchen equipment and furniture for a segment on his show. The Town of Ulster Board approved a Chick-fil-A to take its place in October 2025, and by this spring construction was visibly underway, with a target opening by November 2026.
The new restaurant will be smaller than what it replaces, at 5,198 square feet against the old building's 8,400, but it's expected to employ between 125 and 150 people, with extra staff flown in temporarily for the opening. It will be the first standalone Chick-fil-A in Ulster County. Until now, the nearest full locations have been in Albany and Rensselaer, with the only closer options being takeout counters at the Thruway's New Baltimore and Plattekill travel plazas. The site plan accounts for something else too: county planners flagged that the Route 9W, Ulster Avenue, and Miron Lane intersection carries more than 20,000 vehicles a day, and they're already studying a roundabout there in anticipation of continued growth from the nearby iPark 87 business complex. That's not the kind of traffic planning a dying commercial corridor usually gets.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this is really a story about a mall failing. It's a story about a commercial format failing while the businesses inside it simply relocated to formats that work better. Dick's didn't go out of business. It moved uphill. Chick-fil-A isn't filling emptiness. It's filling one of the busiest intersections in the town. The mall's own second act, as event space for a regional art scene, only works because the emptiness is now legible as something other than failure. It's raw square footage that a different kind of tenant, in this case dozens of visiting artists for one weekend in June, can put to use in a way retail no longer can.
For anyone who's lived here through the last few years of watching storefronts go dark, that distinction matters. The Town of Ulster's commercial base hasn't hollowed out. It's redistributed itself along the same stretch of road, from an enclosed building built in 1981 to the open-air plazas and standalone pads surrounding it. If the mall building itself never fully finds a new use, the corridor around it almost certainly will keep growing regardless, because the traffic, the anchors, and the retailers never actually left the area. They just stopped needing a roof to do business under.
That's worth knowing the next time you drive past the half-empty parking lot and wonder what's going on. The Town of Ulster isn't quieter than it used to be. It just doesn't all happen in one building anymore.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near the 9W corridor, or you're just curious how a shifting commercial strip affects home values nearby, Jennifer Mangione and the team at Grist Mill Real Estate know this stretch of Ulster County block by block. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually changing here.
