If you have walked the stretch of Queens Boulevard between Junction and 63rd Drive in the last few months, you already sense it. One side of the corridor is emptying out and getting bought for a hospital system. The other side is filling up so completely that a national retailer just took the last big vacancy on a fifteen year lease. Rego Park is not adding a chapter this summer. It is rewriting which side of the boulevard does what.
The rest of this note is for people who already live in 11374 and want the specifics behind the construction fencing, the leasing signs, and the new plov counter that quietly opened on 99th Street.
The split down Queens Boulevard
For roughly thirty years, both sides of the Rego Park Center complex sold the same thing: discount retail. Sears, then Marshalls and Burlington on one side. Costco and a stack of big boxes on the other. That symmetry is over.
Target inked a 15-year, 135,000-square-foot lease at the Rego Park Shopping Center at 61-35 Junction Boulevard, and the Costco-anchored, 600,000-square-foot open-air mall is now 99 percent leased, according to owner Alexander's. That is the south side. On the north side, Northwell Health acquired a 338,000-square-foot abandoned department store at 96-05 Queens Blvd. in Rego Park for $235.5 million from Steve Roth. The retail spine you grew up crossing at 63rd Drive is now, functionally, a retail block facing a healthcare block.
What Northwell actually bought at 96-05
The building most locals still call "the old Sears" has a longer resume than the sign remembered. It was most recently home to Marshalls and Burlington, which moved out approximately one year ago, leaving the site vacant. Before that it was Sears, and before that Alexander's, which filed for bankruptcy and closed its eleven locations in 1992.
Two details from the transaction matter for anyone who lives on 62nd Drive, 63rd Avenue, or the blocks running south toward Yellowstone. First, the sale included the garage. Northwell Health has not yet gone into detail about its plans for the property, which also includes a parking garage with 1,236 spaces. That is a lot of stored cars on a site whose future traffic pattern is still an open question. Second, Northwell was already the neighbor. Northwell Health also owns properties across the street from Rego Park I, including the Rego Park Tower at 95-25 Queens Blvd. and a 1-story building adjacent to it.
Read together, this is the pattern of a health system assembling a campus, not a landlord flipping a box. Long Island Jewish Forest Hills is only one mile away, at 102-01 66th Rd., and it is possible the space could be transformed into another hospital more accessible to residents in the area. Whatever the final program, expect years of construction staging on the north side of Queens Boulevard, and expect the block to draw a different kind of foot traffic than the shoppers who used to pull into Marshalls. For additional detail on the transaction, the March filing is worth reading in full.
Why Target closes the loop at 61-35 Junction
The Target lease is the mirror image. Instead of losing an anchor, the south side is completing its bench. Asking rents for retail space in Queens recently averaged $42.47 per square foot, per CommercialCafe data cited in Commercial Observer. A fifteen year commitment at that scale, in that submarket, means the operator is betting Rego Park II's daytime population keeps climbing.
The Target lease brings the property to 99 percent leased. For a 600,000-square-foot center, that is the practical ceiling. There is nowhere left for a competing big box to land inside the complex, which means the next new retail entrants in Rego Park will have to take street-front space along 63rd Drive, Queens Boulevard, or Junction rather than a mall bay.
That last point is the one to sit with. When the mall runs out of vacancies, the pressure moves outward. Storefronts that have quietly under-performed for a decade start getting quiet phone calls. Watch the block between the Q60 stop at Queens Boulevard and the 63rd Drive-Rego Park subway entrance over the next eighteen months.
The 99th Street corridor keeps compounding
While the boulevard reshuffles, the neighborhood's Uzbek and Bukharian restaurant belt on and around 99th Street is doing what it has done for twenty years: adding one more room. Eater's Queens heatmap in July 2026 highlighted an Uzbek spot in Rego Park among the hottest new openings in the borough this month.
That spot is Registan Kitchen. Registan Kitchen, at 63-24 99th St., calls itself the "Plov Center" and opened as the latest addition to what its early Yelp reviewer described as the Uzbek food capital of Queens. A Samarkand plov with beef there runs about twenty dollars. That is a useful price to hold in your head, because it sits right between the older Bukharian rooms on 108th Street and the sit-down Uzbek restaurants closer to Queens Boulevard. The corridor is not turning over. It is thickening.
If you have not eaten your way down 99th Street in a while, here is the practical map for a summer weekend:
- Registan Kitchen, 63-24 99th St. New. Counter-service plov, halal, small room.
- Cheburechnaya and Marani, longer-standing Bukharian and Georgian rooms in the immediate blocks.
- Fatsa Mediterranean and Peri Peri Original, closer to 63rd Drive if the group is not committing to Central Asian.
The reason this matters for the boulevard story is that the 99th Street food corridor is where the two sides of Queens Boulevard converge on foot. Northwell staff walking south for lunch and Costco shoppers walking east for dinner will meet on the same three blocks. That corridor is about to be busier than it has been in a decade.
A working summer at Lost Battalion Hall
Residents forget how much the Lost Battalion Hall Recreation Center actually does. It sits at 93-29 Queens Boulevard, right in the middle of the block that is changing. Recreation centers operate in seasonal schedules, with program availability affected by Parks' afterschool and summer camps, and programs rotate in January through March, April through June, July through September, and October through December windows. That means the current summer program cycle is a fresh one, not a leftover spring schedule.
Lost Battalion Hall is one of the city's premiere homes for weightlifting, and it regularly hosts local and regional Olympic Weightlifting competitions each year. If you have only ever used it as a pass-through on the way to the Q60, the summer window is the cheapest time to actually try the facility.
The building's name is not decorative either. The Lost Battalion Hall on Queens Boulevard is named after nine companies of the 77th Infantry Division who fought in World War I, was erected in 1939 as a hall for the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, and was taken over as a community center by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in 1960. It is one of the few pre-war civic buildings still doing its original job on this stretch of the boulevard.
What to watch between now and next summer
If you want to track how the split plays out without following every leasing memo, three things are worth checking each month:
- Signage at 96-05 Queens Blvd. The first public sign of Northwell's program will show up as filing notices and site fencing before any press release names the use.
- Storefronts on 63rd Drive between Queens Boulevard and 99th Street. With Rego Park II full, the next wave of new retail lands here or nowhere.
- The Yellowstone Boulevard side of the neighborhood. The Rego Park Green Alliance has been active in the community, planting flowers and trees, arranging the installation of new garbage cans, pushing for the repair of some sidewalks, and creating a large mural under the LIRR overpass on 63rd Drive. The residential half of Rego Park often gets its infrastructure attention in the same summer as commercial turnover on the boulevard.
Rego Park is not being reinvented. It is being sorted. North side to healthcare, south side to retail saturation, 99th Street doing what it has always done, only more of it. If you live here, the summer of 2026 is the one where you can still remember what the block looked like before.
If you own a co-op, condo, or house near this corridor and want a practical read on what these changes mean for your specific building, Skyline Residential & Commercial Inc. works this market every week and is happy to talk. Contact us.
