"Let's be honest, we never stopped calling it that," one downtown regular posted back when the mall at 700 South Rosemary Avenue announced it was reverting to CityPlace after a run as Rosemary Square and, briefly, just The Square. Another resident put it more bluntly: after all the rebrands, calling it anything else "never stopped being CityPlace to most people."
That was the spring of 2024. Two years later, the debate over what to call the parking garage looks almost quaint, because the property itself has moved on to a bigger question than its own signage. Right now, two office towers are rising on the CityPlace site, backed by the largest construction loan in the city's history, and they have nothing to do with shopping bags or the fountain in the plaza. Meanwhile, three other pockets of downtown, none of them inside CityPlace's footprint, have spent 2026 building reasons of their own to leave the house. If you live here, the mall's old identity crisis was never the real story. This is.
CityPlace Is Quietly Becoming an Office Address
The retail core still looks the way it always has, but walk toward the old AMC theater site and you'll see cranes instead of a marquee. Two towers, known simply as 10 and 15 CityPlace, are going up there now, together adding roughly a million square feet of Class AA office space. The financing behind them is the largest construction loan ever assembled for a West Palm Beach project, and the anchor tenant is ServiceNow, which has committed to an AI innovation hub expected to bring 850 jobs downtown.
That's a different kind of foot traffic than the district was built for in 2000. CityPlace spent two decades as a place people visited after work. It's becoming a place people work, period, which means the retail and restaurant tenants around it are now competing for weekday lunch crowds and after-work happy hours instead of just weekend shoppers. Related Ross, the West Palm Beach-based developer behind the project, has made a similar bet before: a 2021 office tower called 360 Rosemary drew Goldman Sachs downtown when institutional-quality space here was still unproven. The CityPlace towers are the same wager at a larger scale.
North of Downtown, NORA Is Building Its Own Reason to Stay Out
Past the Brightline tracks, in what used to be a warehouse district, sits NORA. By the time it's finished, NORA will have its own hotel and its own dining anchor, neither of which needed CityPlace's name recognition to work.
The centerpiece is the NORA Hotel, a 201-room property built around Pastis, the Parisian brasserie import from STARR Restaurants, occupying more than 13,300 square feet of indoor and outdoor space on the hotel's rooftop. Loco Taqueria & Oyster Bar, known for its oysters and tequila-forward cocktails, was one of the first tenants to actually open its doors in the district rather than just announce a lease, and it's already running while the hotel itself finishes construction. That sequencing matters. NORA didn't wait for its anchor to open before proving people would show up.
South of Downtown, Flamingo Park Is Building the Opposite Kind of Night Out
If NORA is importing recognizable brasserie and hotel names into new construction, Flamingo Park is doing something narrower. This is the historic residential pocket just south of downtown, mostly bungalows and duplexes, and in 2026 it picked up two restaurants that read more like a planned reservation than a walk-in.
Emelina opened in late January with a single tasting menu built around Cuban tradition, run by a team with Michelin-trained credentials. Midorie followed in March a few blocks away, a minimalist Japanese room from chef Álvaro Pérez Miranda, who holds an actual Michelin star. This August, APM Restaurant Group announced Niwa, a Japanese-Latin concept going in next door to Emelina with premium seafood and an outdoor tea garden. Two open, one announced, all inside a residential neighborhood rather than a shopping district.
That's a different growth pattern than NORA's, and it says something about who's already living in Flamingo Park's renovated homes: people willing to walk a few blocks to a chef's counter instead of driving to a district built around one.
Caroline Station Is the Quiet Fourth Option
South of downtown but distinct from Flamingo Park's residential streets, Caroline Station has grown into a walkable micro-district built on adaptive reuse buildings and independent businesses rather than a single hotel deal or restaurant group. It doesn't have a marquee tenant the way NORA has Pastis or Flamingo Park has Midorie. What it has is a community feel built out of spaces that used to be something else, the kind of growth that shows up when you're the one walking the block on a Tuesday rather than reading a press release about it.
The Sunset Lounge Reopening Is the Piece That Isn't About Growth
Everything above is new construction or a new lease. The Sunset Lounge is the opposite. It hosted Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong during its original run as one of South Florida's defining music venues, then sat dormant for years. A major restoration brought it back this past December, and what reopened isn't a plaque in a museum room. It's a 20,000-square-foot cultural hub with a two-story expansion, a restaurant, a bar, a rooftop lounge, and event space built to actually be used.
That distinction is worth sitting with. Everywhere else downtown, 2026 has been about adding square footage that didn't exist before. Sunset Lounge is downtown reinvesting in something that was already here, at a scale that treats its own history as infrastructure worth rebuilding rather than a footnote to clear out of the way.
Here's how the pieces sit relative to each other and to the district that used to be the only story downtown had:
| Area | Location relative to downtown | What's happening in 2026 | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| CityPlace | Center, 700 S. Rosemary Ave | Twin office towers under construction, ServiceNow's 850-job hub | Shifting from a retail destination to a weekday office anchor |
| NORA District | North, past the Brightline tracks | NORA Hotel construction, Pastis rooftop, Loco Taqueria open | A hotel-anchored district building its own nightlife |
| Flamingo Park | South, historic residential | Emelina and Midorie open, Niwa announced | Chef-driven dining inside a walkable bungalow neighborhood |
| Caroline Station | South, adaptive reuse blocks | Continued independent business growth | A quieter, locally-run alternative to both |
The Part That Doesn't Show Up in Any One Headline
None of this requires you to do anything differently tomorrow. But it's worth noticing that the four things happening downtown right now aren't variations on the same idea. One is an office bet, one is a hotel-anchored import, one is a scattering of chef-driven counters inside a residential neighborhood, and one is a historic venue getting its second act. Two years ago, the only thing anyone downtown was arguing about was what to call the mall. Now the mall itself has quietly become the least interesting part of the conversation.
If your own routine has been CityPlace out of habit rather than choice, or if you're the kind of resident who tracks these shifts because you're weighing a move within the city, whether that's a unit closer to the NORA corridor or a renovated bungalow near Flamingo Park's new restaurant row, the West Palm Beach neighborhood page keeps a running picture of what's opening and where it sits relative to downtown.
Have questions about how any of these pockets connect to a property you already own here, or one you're thinking about? Sergey Shulga can walk you through what's changing block by block. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
