Drive south on Tamiami Trail past Bee Ridge Road and you will pass a building that looks, from the parking lot, like it is closing for good. The Macy's sign came down after the store shut its doors in March 2025. Half the storefronts sit dark behind paper-covered glass. If you did not live in 34239, you would keep driving.
But step past the empty anchor pads at The Crossings at Siesta Key, the property most longtime residents still call by its old name, Southgate Mall, and you will find something that does not fit the eulogy. Three community theater companies are operating inside this mall right now, and one of them just moved into a bigger space.
That contradiction is the actual story here, and it tells you something useful if you live nearby: the years between "redevelopment approved" and "redevelopment finished" are not empty years. Something moves into the gap. In this case, it is a stage.
What's Actually Open Right Now
Rise Above Performing Arts, a youth-focused theater company, relocated into a larger space inside the mall in August 2026. The new venue seats 193 patrons, up from 160 in its previous spot. That is not a company hedging its bets on a dying property. That is a company betting the opposite.
A few storefronts away, the Sarasota Players, a company with 97 years of history in the city, is still performing out of the mall while it waits on its actual long-term home. The Players are slated to move into a permanent space in Payne Park in an upcoming season, but until that building is ready, this mall is where the shows go on.
Then there is Tree Fort Productions, run by Katherine Michelle Tanner, operating classes, plays, and cabarets just a short walk from both of the other two. Three theater operations, all within footsteps of each other, all inside a property that outside observers have already written off.
On the commercial side, CineBistro and Connors Steak & Seafood remain in place and are expected to stay part of the site even after redevelopment reshapes everything around them. If you want dinner and a show on the same block right now, this stretch of Tamiami Trail can still deliver it, even with a demolition crew somewhere on the horizon.
Why The Mall Looks Half-Dead When It Isn't
The empty storefronts are not a sign of neglect. They are a sign of a plan already in motion.
Benderson Development bought the largely vacant mall in 2022, the same company behind the Mall at University Town Center. Two years later, the Sarasota City Commission approved a Comprehensive Plan amendment that clears the way for a mixed-use overhaul of the nearly 35-acre site at 3501 South Tamiami Trail, the stretch between Bee Ridge Road and Siesta Drive. The vote followed a Planning Board recommendation and a public transmittal hearing, the standard path any project of this size has to clear before construction can start.
The eventual plan calls for as many as 848 residential units on the property, with a share designated as attainable housing, plus new retail, office space, and a boutique hotel replacing the old enclosed mall structure. Benderson has described the goal as a walkable town center in the same vein as projects like Mercato in Naples, built around a grid of streets instead of a single building ringed by parking.
None of that happens overnight. Benderson itself has said the full build-out could take somewhere between 10 and 15 years. Demolishing the main mall building, dealing with stormwater infrastructure that does not currently exist on the site, and honoring existing tenant leases all take time before a single new unit gets built.
That is the part easy to miss from the road: this property is not caught between one identity and the next. It is going to spend most of the next decade being exactly what it is right now, a partially occupied mall with a plan attached to it.
The Part That Actually Matters If You Live Here
If you live in 34239, the practical question is not "when will this finish." It is "what do I do with this place in the meantime." And the answer, based on what is actually operating inside it today, is more than most people assume.
You can catch a youth production at Rise Above's new 193-seat space. You can watch a nearly century-old theater company perform in a building that has nothing to do with its history, because the mall is a placeholder stage while its real home in Payne Park gets finished. You can walk from a Tree Fort Productions class to dinner at Connors Steak & Seafood without moving your car. None of that requires waiting for the apartments, the hotel, or the new street grid to show up.
The redevelopment itself, when it does arrive in phases over the coming years, is worth tracking for a different reason. A 35-acre urban mixed-use project built at the doorstep of Siesta Key changes the texture of daily errands for a wide radius around it, not just for people who end up living in the new units. More retail, more restaurants, and better pedestrian connections along a stretch of Tamiami Trail that has functioned as a parking lot with a mall attached to it since 1988 will eventually shift where people in this part of Sarasota go for a night out.
For now, though, the honest read is simpler. This is not a ghost mall waiting to be torn down. It is a working theater district that happens to share its address with a demolition timeline. If you have not been inside in a while, you are missing more than you think.
Keep An Eye On This One
Projects like the Crossings at Siesta Key rarely move in a straight line, and the gap between a city commission vote and a finished building is usually where the most interesting local changes happen quietly. Watching what fills that gap, in this case three working theaters instead of an empty shell, tells you more about a neighborhood's actual rhythm than any rendering of the finished project ever will.
If you are curious about how developments like this one tend to ripple through daily life in 34239, or you just want a longtime local's read on what is changing block by block, Marlin Yoder is glad to talk it through. Reach out anytime to compare notes on the neighborhood, or schedule a quick consultation if you want a deeper look at how this corner of Sarasota is shifting.
