If you've driven past the corner of Queens Boulevard and Junction Boulevard any time in the last year, you've probably asked the same question everyone else in Rego Park has: what's going on with that building?
The three-story structure at 96-05 Queens Boulevard, the one that used to be Sears, and before that Alexander's, has sat dark since Marshalls and Burlington cleared out. No signage. No construction fencing yet, either. Just a 1,236-space parking garage with far fewer cars in it than the neighborhood is used to seeing.
Most residents assume the eventual answer is housing. It usually is, in New York. A vacant retail hulk on a major boulevard, sitting on nearly six acres, reads like a textbook site for the kind of mixed-use residential tower that's gone up all over Queens Boulevard over the past decade. That assumption is wrong here, and the reason it's wrong tells you something real about where this corridor is headed.
The buyer is Northwell Health. And this is not Northwell's first move on this exact stretch of Queens Boulevard. It's the second one, and the second one is much bigger than the first.
What actually closed, and what it cost
The building itself dates to 1959. It was built as an Alexander's department store, went through a bankruptcy in 1992 when Alexander's closed all 11 of its locations, became a Sears in 1996, and most recently housed Marshalls and Burlington before both stores relocated next door.
That relocation is the detail worth sitting with. Alexander's, Inc., the real estate investment trust that owns the property, spent roughly a year moving tenants out of the old building and into the adjacent Rego Park II shopping center rather than just closing up shop. That's not how you treat a building you plan to demolish quietly. That's how you clear a building you've already lined up a buyer for.
In March 2026, Alexander's announced it had agreed to sell the vacant building to Northwell Health for $235.5 million, or roughly $697 per square foot for 338,000 gross leasable square feet. Net proceeds to Alexander's come to about $202 million, with a financial statement gain near $147 million. The companies had targeted a third-quarter close, but the sale actually finished early, completing on May 28, 2026. Northwell has owned the building outright for months now.
Northwell hasn't put out a detailed plan for the site. What the company has said, in a statement to Commercial Observer, is that the acquisition is "a strategic investment" tied to expanding access to care across Queens regardless of ZIP code. That's a corporate way of saying they bought it because they want more space in this specific part of the borough. And Rego Park residents already have evidence for what "more space" tends to mean when Northwell says it.
The building across the street already answered part of the question
One block from the vacant Sears site, at 95-25 Queens Boulevard, Northwell opened a 70,000-square-foot medical facility in November 2023. It cost $52 million to build. It's anchored by the largest outpatient cancer center in Queens, with 42 infusion chairs, and it houses primary care, OB/GYN, cardiology, neurology, orthopedics, and a dozen other specialties under one roof, along with an on-site pharmacy and imaging center.
That facility didn't appear out of nowhere. Northwell's own Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital sits about a mile away, and the Rego Park location was built specifically to extend that hospital's reach into a denser, more central stretch of the borough. The 2023 building was Northwell's first real foothold on this exact corridor. The 2026 purchase of a building nearly five times its size, directly across the street, is the second.
No one at Northwell has confirmed what goes into the old Sears building. But residents don't need a press release to notice the pattern: a health system that already built one facility here, on a corner it chose deliberately, just bought the much larger building right across the street from it. Whatever fills those 338,000 square feet is very unlikely to be apartments.
Next door, a different kind of anchor is locking in for the next fifteen years
While the healthcare side of the story was developing, the retail side of the same corridor was moving in the opposite direction, toward more certainty, not less.
Rego Park II, the open-air shopping center that absorbed Marshalls and Burlington when they left the old building, just signed a much bigger tenant. In June 2026, Alexander's announced a 15-year lease with Target for 135,000 square feet at the center, located at 61-35 Junction Boulevard. That single lease brought the 600,000-square-foot center to 99 percent occupancy.
The Target isn't a brand-new store opening from scratch. It's a relocation. The Target currently inside Queens Place mall in Elmhurst, less than a mile away, is moving to Rego Center, with an opening date set for 2028.
Here's the part that matters for anyone who actually shops there: Rego Park II already anchors around Costco, and the rest of the tenant mix isn't changing. Best Buy, TJ Maxx, Aldi, Petco and Five Below all stay put. What changes is that the mall's remaining vacancy, the space that used to have some churn to it, is now spoken for through the early 2040s given the lease term. If you've been hoping for something new to fill in the gaps at Rego Park II, the answer for the next decade and a half is largely: this is the lineup.
What this means if you live here right now
Nothing changes tomorrow. That's worth saying plainly, because both halves of this story move slowly.
The old Sears building will likely sit empty for a while longer. Even with the sale closed, Northwell hasn't announced a construction timeline, and a health system converting 338,000 square feet of retail space into clinical use typically takes years, not months, given the permitting and build-out involved in medical construction.
The new Target won't open until 2028. That's not a typo, and it's not unusual for a relocation of this scale. Fitting out 135,000 square feet inside an existing structure, especially one where the space still houses working tenants during part of the transition, takes time.
So the corridor between Queens Boulevard and Junction Boulevard is going to look, for the next year or two, almost exactly like it looks today. A vacant building on one side. A busy, nearly full shopping center on the other. That stability is itself the useful information here, because it tells you the disruption, when it comes, will arrive as a healthcare buildout rather than a residential one, and it will arrive on a timeline measured in years.
For a neighborhood that's spent the past decade watching co-ops convert and construction cranes go up along nearby stretches of Queens Boulevard, that's a different kind of change than most people were expecting. Not more units. More exam rooms.
Watching the corridor for what comes next
The specifics of Northwell's build-out plan, when they surface, will say a lot about how this part of Rego Park functions for the next generation of residents. A hospital campus draws differently than an outpatient wing. A large ambulatory surgery center draws differently than more primary care suites. None of that has been announced yet, and anyone telling you they know the exact program for that building is guessing.
What isn't a guess is the pattern of two deliberate moves by the same health system, one block apart, roughly two and a half years apart, on a boulevard that's already dense with services. That's not typical mall redevelopment. It's a health system building toward something specific, one purchase at a time.
If you're trying to make sense of what a corner like this means for property values, rental demand, or the long-term character of a block, that's the kind of read that takes someone who tracks these filings as they happen, not after the ribbon-cutting. Alan Mann works this stretch of Queens regularly and keeps an eye on exactly this kind of corridor-level shift. If you want to talk through what it might mean for your block, reach out anytime.