 |
| Photo courtesy of tcpalm.com |
Manufacturer's Outlet Center / Florida Furniture Mart / Florida Nexus Park
2817 Peters Road, Fort Pierce, FL
 |
| Today's post is a presentation of St. Lucie County retail |
Some lost history, an old outlet mall, and a plot twist coming toward the end of this post - what more could you ask for from My Florida Retail?! What looks like a relatively innocuous highway-side outlet mall actually has some level of intrigue to it - high points, low points, and a few wins here and there - and unlike many of these ill-fated retail ventures, a decently happy ending for a change. While the history of this place would have been enough to write a post about, a recent development here is what finally got me to head down and check this place out after all these years. I'll save the best for last, so for now, let's learn about the rise, the fall, and rise again of the shopping center originally known as the Manufacturer's Outlet Center:
The junction of Interstate 95 and Okeechobee Road in Fort Pierce is unique due to the fact that it is the first interchange southbound (and last northbound) where drivers can cross between the interstate and Florida's Turnpike. Running roughly parallel to each other from Miami to Fort Pierce, I-95 and the Turnpike are the two major north-south highways in South Florida. However, once you get to Fort Pierce, Interstate 95 continues its northward journey along Florida's east coast to Jacksonville, while the Turnpike curves westward to begin its trek toward Orlando and Interstate 75 along Florida's west coast. As such, the Fort Pierce crossover between the two highways is a popular transfer point between the two roads, and as such, the stretch of Okeechobee Road between I-95 and the Turnpike has become home to a plethora of motels, restaurants, and truck stops over the years. In addition to the usual off-highway fare, there's another business venture that's tried to take advantage of highway travelers - the outlet mall. Cropping up at popular highway junctions nationwide, outlet malls were originally designed to go after travelers looking for a pit-stop while on road trips. With a 21-acre site available along Okeechobee Road between I-95 and the Turnpike, the Russell Corporation couldn't pass up the opportunity to develop an outlet mall on this prime highway-side parcel, which also had the advantage of many travelers already getting off here to switch between I-95 and the Turnpike too.
What's interesting about the Manufacturer's Outlet Mall is that instead of being built by one of the large outlet mall owners of the time (such as Tanger or Belz, for example), the Manufacturer's Outlet Mall was constructed by one of the outlet tenants themselves. Russell Corporation is the same company behind the Russell athleticwear brand, with the Fort Pierce center part of the company's small foray into developing outlet malls themselves (Fort Pierce would end up being one of four malls developed by Russell). Plans for the new outlet mall first came to light in early 1988, and following a smooth approval process, Russell Corporation was able to get the new mall open by November 1988, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
Comprising 51 storefronts in its 150,000 square feet of sales space, Manufacturer's Outlet Center included a number of 1980's and 1990's outlet mall stalwarts, such as Bass Shoes, Van Heusen menswear, Converse, L'Eggs-Hanes-Ball, American Tourister, Revlon cosmetics, and various other name brand manufacturer outlets (hence the center's name). Being the developer behind the mall, Russell also has a space reserved for an outlet store of their own, pictured above shortly before the mall's grand opening on November 3, 1988.
Opening with full occupancy, Manufacturer's Outlet Mall got off to a strong start, fueled by local shoppers and travelers alike. The late 1980's was a high point for new retail in Fort Pierce, a period that was kicked off by the 1984 opening of the Orange Blossom Mall down the street. The Okeechobee Road exit was looking to be the new hot spot for retail on the Treasure Coast.
Unfortunately, Fort Pierce's time in the retail spotlight was short-lived. By the mid-1990's, a new outlet mall (originally called Horizon Outlet Center, now Vero Beach Outlets) opened just off Interstate 95 approximately 15 miles north of here in Vero Beach, which stole many of the stores (and shoppers) from the Fort Pierce mall. The nearby Orange Blossom Mall also began to crash swiftly around the same time too, following the openings of the Treasure Coast Square Mall in Jensen Beach and the Indian River Square Mall in Vero Beach. With shoppers now traveling out of Fort Pierce to the new malls with better selection, Fort Pierce was now left with two blighted mall buildings - the outlet mall and the traditional mall.
The fall of the Orange Blossom Mall is a story for another day, but that old Labelscar article I linked to earlier is a good synopsis of the place complete with some nice photos of the mall from before it fully transitioned into a business park (although as a consolation - it's still technically a "mall" today - but an extremely boring looking one now following its full transition into office space). Back to the outlet mall though, following the opening of the new outlet center in Vero Beach in 1994, Manufacturer's Outlet Center began to bleed tenants left and right. By 1996, the outlet mall was only at an 80% occupancy - not terrible, but not good considering the mall's owners were having a hard time finding new tenants to fill those empty spaces, leaving management to consider opening the outlet mall to any retailer interested in space over exclusively leasing to factory outlet stores.
By 1998, that occupancy rate continued to drop. While the author of the article didn't specifically cite a percentage, she described the center as follows: "There used to be 40-some stores and the place was lively. In Novembers and Decembers, the hardest thing to find was a parking space. Saturday, the two dozen cars in the vast [750 car] lot were clustered near two shoe stores that remain open, one with significantly reduced stock, another with a huge sale in progress. A handful of other stores are still in business, isolated at intervals along the strip, dying on the vine."
With tenants continuing to leave into the early 2000's, the Russell Corporation contemplated selling the mall. Not gaining much interest with potential buyers, Russell decided to give the mall one last try at new life, this time with a rebranding. In 2003, the Manufacturer's Outlet Mall became the Florida Furniture Mart, a new outlet-style mall focused on retailers of furniture and home decor.
Russell Corporation hoped the retooling as a furniture-centric destination would make the mall stand out from the numerous outlet malls that now dotted the Floridian landscape (as when it originally opened, the Manufacturer's Outlet Center was only the 2nd such mall in Florida - by the early 2000's, it was one of nineteen). At full occupancy, the Florida Furniture Mart would become the largest furniture store in Florida, and its location at the junction of I-95 and the Turnpike was poised to draw shoppers from as far as 150 miles away looking for a vast and eclectic assortment of furniture styles under one roof.
 |
| I decided to leave the bonus coverage of the Orange Blossom Mall in the clipping too - the continuation of that article can be seen in the next photo as well. |
While the Florida Furniture Mart seemed poised for a strong performance, including 10-12 furniture or furniture-related stores, an event space, and a visitor's center, the furniture-centric retooling was even shorter-lived than the original.
While a state-wide furniture destination sounded good on paper and could have been successful if the timing was right, the mall fell on hard times yet again due to the burst of the Florida housing bubble in the late 2000's, an event that coincided with the beginnings of the Great Recession. By 2008, the mall was mostly empty again, with Russell Corporation having pulled out all interests in its outlet stores and outlet mall real estate by 2006, when the brand was sold to mega-conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway.
I pulled this timeline out from the article above, which summarizes the mall's history from its opening in 1988 until the time the article was published in 2003. I thought it was a good summary of events, and it also gives us a glimpse of the mostly empty mall in the early 2000's.
In 2009, a proposal was made to transform the outlet mall into a biotech research center, focused on the eyewear industry. That plan eventually fell apart, with the mall continuing to sit mostly empty through the majority of the 2010's.
Even while the property withered away for the majority of a decade, the mall's post-Russell owners, ComNet - the same people who pushed for the biotech redevelopment - took a new approach to the center going into the 2020's. With Fort Pierce's population growing in the late 2010's and early 2020's, bolstered with new development on the city's western fringes around the two highways, the owners saw the necessity for additional retail and office space in the area. As such, the Florida Furniture Mart was rebranded in 2024 as the Florida Nexus Park - positioned to be a new mix of retail, professional, and entertainment space to serve the residents of western Fort Pierce.
By the end of 2024, the Florida Nexus Park had a 100% occupancy again, bringing the center back to its glory days. Even though the modern tenant mix is eclectic (the strip contains a Goodwill Store & Outreach Center, Bravo Supermarket, Play Money pinball arcade, a Comcast office, a comic book store, and a few medical offices currently), taking a once vacant outlet mall and getting the building back to 100% occupancy is quite the achievement, especially when the owners could have taken the easy route and ripped down the entire outlet mall structure and replaced it with two hotels and a bunch of apartments to "maximize the real estate value".
 |
| Photo courtesy of tcpalm.com |
For reference, here's a map of the current Florida Nexus Park showing the current tenant line-up, the space marked "available" is now home to Play Money pinball arcade. As of 2026 the building marked "Creative Learning School" may have become available again, but otherwise the rest of the strip is still holding on well.
For our tour of the former Manufacturer's Outlet Mall in the present day, we'll start from its westernmost point and work our way east. The mall's largest (and westernmost) tenant is Goodwill, who uses most of the space for a retail store, but uses some of the extra space for offices and donation processing.
The Goodwill stores along Florida's Treasure Coast are run by the Goodwill branch out of West Palm Beach, which operates all the stores between Sebastian in the north to Boca Raton in the south. While still operated as its own independent branch, Goodwill of the Palm Beaches & Treasure Coast (formerly known as Gulfstream Goodwill) became a subsidiary of Goodwill Manasota (out of the Bradenton area) in 2024. As such, the stores in this area have become clones of their west coast counterparts. I did go inside the Goodwill store briefly when I was here but didn't take any pictures inside - the store wasn't very exciting and there wasn't anything left over from any prior tenants either.
Other than some new paint, the facade of the old outlet mall hasn't really changed at all since the strip was built in 1988. Being a roadside outlet mall, the architecture isn't anything unique or spectacular, but the brick accents were a nice touch, especially for an area where brick isn't a common building material.
Looking away from Goodwill, this portion of the center is now home to a tech company of some kind - one with a fairly discreet presence considering the lack of signage (but it appeared to still be in business when I was here).
While I'm not certain of the placement of most of the original outlet store tenants, I do know the Russell store was the unit all the way to the left in the above photo, under the arch, as we saw in the old photo at the beginning of the post. That space is now part of the Comcast office.
Looking down the next segment of the strip after rounding the first bend, we see the other two large tenants of this center's modern iteration - Play Money arcade and Bravo Supermarket.
In addition to the main segment, the Manufacturer's Outlet Center has one outbuilding in the parking lot that serves as an expansion of the main strip (visible to the left side of the photo above) and seen in more detail below:
The outbuilding originally contained a few additional small outlet stores. In more modern times all the units in this building were combined into one large space, supposedly housing a school according to the 2024 leasing plan we saw earlier. As of my recent visit, it appears the school may have closed, as it looked like the building was being used as storage while I was here.
Moving along, we now find ourselves at the Bravo Supermarket. Bravo opened its store here in January 2026, again, combining a number of the small outlet tenant spaces into one larger space.
The majority of the remainder of this post will focus on the Bravo store. While this dying outlet mall always intrigued me, this store is what finally motivated me to pay it a visit. Why? Well, let's step inside:
As soon as I clicked on the photos of this store on Google Maps to see if it would be worth my time to step inside, I saw the department signs, and soon began planning my visit. While Winn-Dixie tried to save as many of these Winn Win sign panels as they could to recycle for the new Centennial decor, many of the early Winn Win stores that closed for an Aldi conversion had the signs sold off. Bravo must have found one of those early auctions, as this store is fully decked out in Winn Win!
The front right corner of the store is home to the deli, which like most Bravo stores, is heavily skewed toward a hot foods cafeteria. While most Winn Win stores have a sign that says "Kitchen" (which sounds like it would have been more appropriate here), they opted for the deli one.
Behind the deli/hot foods counter is the produce department, which ended up being placed in a little alcove along the right side of the store. While there's some discussion to be had about the produce signage, I would like to point out someone else's decor remnant that we're seeing right now, one a little less obvious. Those hanging wooden trellises above the produce department are a remnant from Kash n' Karry's purple decor (from the wine department specifically), and we actually saw those same trellises in their original home at the Valrico Sweet-Dixie, which closed for its Aldi conversion back in October 2024 (and - foreshadowing alert - these weren't the only decor pieces Bravo picked up from that Valrico Sweet-Dixie auction either). Those old wine trellises actually work well as props to hang over the produce department, especially since other supermarkets have done something similar in the past.
 |
| The pepper sign under the produce wall panel is from Winn Win too! |
Kash n' Karry remnants behind us now, it's back to Winn Win for a little bit! If you know of some of the quirks of Winn Win, this produce sign should jump out at you, as Winn Win never had an official "Produce" sign - produce is signed as "Fresh" in that decor. That means Bravo cobbled together this sign from random leftover Winn Win lettering they acquired. It's actually a pretty convincing job, but that uppercase "P" is very clearly an upside-down lowercase "d"!
Produce bumps up against the store's first aisle, which is officially home to condiments, but also has random displays of beer and other promotional merchandise too.
This store isn't all that large - it's no more than 20,000 square feet - but it does benefit from the wider than it is deep design. Here we're looking across the back of the store as seen from produce, where you can see all the width there is. However, the grocery aisles themselves are pretty short, but this store still packs a decent amount into what is really a small space.
Outside of the deli/kitchen, the only other service department in this store is the meat and seafood counter, seen in the center of the back wall up ahead.
Entering the grocery aisles, we see the recycled Winn Win aisle markers come into view. Much like Winn-Dixie has been doing with the Centennial remodels, Bravo covered the old Winn-Dixie checkmark logo on the aisle markers with their own logo. If you look closely at the signs though, Bravo's circle sticker doesn't quite cover the checkmarks all the way, with the tip of them still sticking out on many.
 |
| If I still posted regularly to flickr, this probably would have been one of the top contenders for the most random sight in the aisle 12 group! |
The Bravo store we're touring only has 11 aisles, but the Winn-Dixie all this signage came from must have had 12. Considering the discrepancy, Bravo decided to hang the aisle 12 sign over the cart corral in order to give it some use, removing all the placards in the process and leaving a rather random sight! I guess if you're at this store and hear a page for "cleanup in aisle 12", someone must have made a mess of all the carts!
It was hard to tell, but I'd have to guess much of the shelving in this store was also from Winn-Dixie, as Winn-Dixie was installing similar bright white shelves in Winn Win stores. Any supermarket operators that managed to get their hands on these newer Winn Win fixtures certainly got some good deals on nearly new items!
As the seafood and meat counters come into view, we'll see yet another supermarket's decor comes into view as we get closer to the service counter:
Underneath the Seafood sign is a Publix-issued Sienna/Classy Market 3.0 infographic, an interesting meeting of the worlds with the way it's mounted! Two photos back, we also saw a Sienna/CM 3.0 restrooms sign, which was actually hanging just over my head when I took this shot.
Moving over to aisle 4, here's a better close-up of the recycled Winn Win aisle marker, but even more interesting to me is that customer service sign in the background...
What's interesting about that customer service sign is that brings another supermarket into the decor remnant fold - Sweetbay! That's a Sweetbay 2.0 customer service sign - just repainted from its original purple to black (although there was also a red variant too), and the icon in the center was switched from a line to an information symbol. The Valrico Sweet-Dixie the wine trellises came from was the last Sweet-Dixie to still have a Sweetbay 2.0 customer service sign, which would mean that's where this piece came from too. While the use of Winn Win decor for the majority of the signage in this store is fun, could you only imagine if the rest of the decor from that old Sweetbay was used here instead?
So far we've seen remnants from Winn-Dixie, Kash n' Karry, Publix, and Sweetbay in this store, but we still have one more supermarket's remnants to be represented before we leave. A preview of that last remnant can be seen in the above photo, but more detail on that in a little bit too.
Aisle 10 and half of aisle 11 was home to non-foods, with the product between the two aisles just stacked in its original shipping boxes instead of on shelves. It appears I didn't get a picture of aisle 11, but the portion of that aisle against the wall was home to a small frozen foods department. There was some signage against that wall as well (including the "Beer" sign seen here, and one for "Frozen"), but those signs were hard to capture from aisle 11 itself with how narrow the aisle was and how much stuff was stacked on top of the coolers. Here's a cleaner photo of the frozen food sign that someone on the pre-opening set-up crew took, which also shows that wine was originally where all those boxes of Angel Soft are now, and that aisle 11 was originally intended to be aisle 12 (which seems to explain why that aisle 12 sign was stuffed over the cart corral without much of a use - it was demoted!).
Looking across the store's front end, I spy another Sweetbay relic - the lightboxes over the check lanes, again from Valrico. Below those are the last supermarket relic we have yet to see...
…how about some Save A Lot check lane lights for good measure to wrap up this tour?
Even though the Bravo store wasn't a direct reuse of a former supermarket space, there sure were a lot of different supermarket relics to see in there - we had 5 different chains represented! I'm even more impressed I was able to identify the exact store some of those pieces came from too, and better yet, it was a store I visited and photographed previously! I wasn't expecting to ever get a true before and after shot of those pieces, but it's nice to see these things go full circle!
The previous photo (as well as the one above) look toward the easternmost end of the former Manufacturer's Outlet Center, showcasing the current location of the comic book store (Sky High) as well as a few medical offices.
While the Bravo Supermarket of many supermarkets past stole the show in this post (and rightfully so), I hope you still found the entire story of this former outlet mall interesting. I've seen a number of these former 1980's/early 1990's outlet malls around in various states of decay and reuse, and I think what was done here in Fort Pierce was a great way to breathe new light into this center without it straying too far from its original retail use. Certainly an eclectic set of subjects for this weekend's AFB/MFR double shot, but I actually liked this arrangement - I may have to try this again to knock out some backlog one of these days when I have a light posting schedule for AFB. Anyway, if you haven't seen this week's AFB counterpart post, be sure to click here to check on the results of the Aldi conversion of a Winn-Dixie we recently toured, and more to come on AFB in two weeks (and hopefully here on MFR sooner rather than later!)
So until the next post,
AFB
