Nearly a decade after abandoning its plan to build a store in northern Palm Beach County, the sporting goods retailer Bass Pro Shops appears ready to make another attempt.
The Missouri-based retailer is seeking to construct a two-story, 80,430 square foot store at the Oakbrook Square Shopping Center at the northeast corner of Jack Nicklaus Drive and PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens, according to city records.
A proposal submitted to the city April 6 by the land planning firm Urban Design Studio showed that Regency Centers, the real estate company that operates the shopping center, is seeking to modify a site plan to include construction of a new building to accommodate World Wide Sportsman, also known as Bass Pro Shops.
The project seeks to demolish and replace the building at the north end of the site once occupied by the Jacobson’s department store.
The shopping center, also known as the Shoppes of Oakbrook, is home to a Publix supermarket, Duffy’s Sports Grill and a CVS pharmacy, among other businesses.
The city staff will review the Bass Pro Shops proposal before it is submitted to the Planning and Zoning board and the City Council for their consideration. No public meetings on the plan had been scheduled as of April 28.
Bass Pro has long history seeking store sites in Palm Beach County
Bass Pro Shops, based in Springfield, Missouri, has nearly 200 locations across the U.S., with its closest outlets to Palm Beach County in Port St. Lucie and Dania Beach.
It has long searched for a site for Palm Beach County outlet and has been linked to several prominent retail sites since the 1990s.
The sporting goods retailer previously planned to build a 64,000 square-foot store at the site of the former Carl’s Furniture Plaza along U.S. 1 in suburban Palm Beach Gardens, less than a mile north of the proposed new store.
Bass Pro Shops bought the site in 2014 for $5.5 million but sold it four years later for $7 million. The company did not say why it abandoned the location.
In 2010, when the former Palm Beach Mall in West Palm Beach still was in play with potential buyers, there were talks about bringing Bass Pro to the property at Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and Interstate 95. The mall was torn down instead and became the Tanger Palm Beach outlets.
In 2009, the county’s Business Development Board was working to open a Bass Pro store at Okeechobee Boulevard and I-95 in West Palm Beach. The store would have stood on the southern lobe of Clear Lake, which was to be partly filled in so the outlet would jut into the water. That deal never happened.
In the 1990s, Bass Pro considered the Quantum Corporate Park in Boynton Beach for a location but chose to build a 150,000-square-foot store in Broward County instead.
Staff writer Alexandra Clough contributed to this story.
Julius Whigham II covers northern Palm Beach County and public safety for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach him at jwhigham@pbpost.com and follow him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, at @JuliusWhigham. Help support our work: Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Bass Pro Shops eyes Palm Beach County for latest store location
Reporting by Julius Whigham II, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
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