Start at the dog park inside Empie Park, cut across to the Gary Shell Cross-City Trail, and follow it north past the tennis courts toward Oleander Drive, and the loop ends where it always has: at the back doors of Independence Mall's JCPenney wing. For years that wing was just a place to turn around, half empty, half forgotten. This year it isn't.
Construction started in mid-January on an 8,000-square-foot space between Belk and JCPenney, and on the eight-week timeline crews were working toward, it was ready by early spring: Discovery Cove, a satellite outpost of the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. The main aquarium is in the middle of a renovation and expansion, and rather than shut its doors while that work continues, it moved a piece of itself into the mall wing closest to Forest Hills - South Oleander. Aquarium director Joanna Zazzali described the move as a way to keep visitors connected to the aquarium while its home base is under construction. Animal encounters, marine habitats, education programs, a gift shop. Life support systems for the tanks, built into a space that used to sell shirts and housewares.
If that sounds like an odd fit for a mall, it is worth remembering this isn't the first time a dead department-store wing here got a second life.
The Sears Wing Already Did This Once
When Sears closed its Independence Mall location in 2018, the space sat dark for two years while the city and the mall's owner worked through demolition approvals. Then, weeks apart in October 2020, Five Below opened in part of the old Sears footprint and Dick's Sporting Goods opened in the rest of it, relocating from its previous spot on College Road. What had been an anchor-store dead zone became two working retailers almost overnight.
That is the part of this story that matters if you live nearby and have watched the mall shuffle its wings for the better part of a decade: nothing here happens as one announcement. It happens wing by wing, years apart, until one day the thing you used to walk past is the thing you're walking toward.
Nobody Ever Announced the Big Reveal
Independence Mall has been promising a full transformation since 2017, when Rouse Properties (later folded into Brookfield Properties) bought the property for $45 million and put language on its own website about turning the enclosed mall into an open-air retail destination, with a grocery-anchored power center and a modern dining streetscape. That same language, almost word for word, is still on the mall's site today. The property changed hands again, with a new owner announced in August 2025.
None of this means the promise was empty. It means the redevelopment is happening in the only way a mall this size actually can: piece by piece, tenant by tenant, over a timeline measured in years rather than months. The Sears wing took two years to go from vacant to Five Below and Dick's. The JCPenney wing took until this year to get its own new tenant, and this time the tenant has fish tanks instead of shoe racks.
The Walk Was Already Taking You There
None of this required a special trip. The route was already built.
Empie Park sits on Park Avenue, tucked behind Wilmington Fire Station 2, and it has been the starting point for a lot of Forest Hills routines long before any of this mall news broke. The park's Althea Gibson Tennis Complex runs 24 lighted courts used for clinics, school matches, and pickup games year-round, and the two-acre dog park nearby is one of the more established off-leash spots in the city. One tennis complex manager described the place as feeling like a public country club, minus the fees.
From Empie Park, the Gary Shell Cross-City Trail heads out in both directions. The city's own trail page puts the full route at 15 miles, running from Wade Park through Halyburton Park and Empie Park to the Heide-Trask Drawbridge at the Intracoastal Waterway. Trail-tracking apps that measure the pavement directly tend to land closer to 13.8 miles, which is the kind of small discrepancy you only notice if you actually walk the thing end to end. Either way, a shorter out-and-back from Empie Park toward the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus runs about five miles round trip, passing through the Rosemont Avenue neighborhood, by Flying Machine Brewery, and around the pond along Randall Parkway, with a picnic spot near Mill Creek Apartments if you need a break. The one stretch that requires real attention is the crossing at South College Road, one of the busier corridors in the city.
Forest Hills–South Oleander has the kind of neighborhood feel that invites you outside—whether you’re walking the dog, heading to a nearby coffee shop, or simply enjoying the tree-lined streets. Just next door is Cape Fear Country Club, one of the oldest golf clubs in North Carolina, with a Donald Ross-designed course that may even look familiar to fans of Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, which filmed scenes around Wilmington for all three seasons of the hit show.
What's Actually Different This Fall
Put those two threads together and the shift is specific, not vague. The walking and biking loop that already ran through Forest Hills - South Oleander, out past Empie Park's courts and dog runs, along the Cross-City Trail, toward the mall on Oleander Drive, used to dead-end at storefronts that were either closed or irrelevant to daily life. Now one of those storefronts has sea turtles in it, and the mall around it is still, slowly, turning itself inside out one wing at a time.
There is a seasonal marker worth watching for too. Every April, when the azaleas peak, some of the same historic homes in Forest Hills open their gardens as part of the Cape Fear Garden Club's Azalea Garden Tour, one of the longest-running events tied to the North Carolina Azalea Festival. It is not new this year, but it is the other half of what makes this pocket of Wilmington distinct: a neighborhood old enough to be on a garden tour, sitting a few blocks from a mall wing that just got an aquarium in it.
If you already live here, the loop hasn't changed. What's at the end of it has.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Wilmington and want a read on what a specific block, HOA, or price range actually gets you here, Kristin Freeman and the Thirty4 North Properties Group team know Forest Hills - South Oleander block by block. Contact us when you're ready to talk specifics.
