Eagle Ridge Mall opened in 1996 on the north side of Lake Wales, Florida, with JCPenney and Dillard’s as anchors and Sears relocated from the older Winter Haven Mall in a neighboring city. A large sinkhole opened in the mall’s central pedestrian corridor in June 1998, measuring roughly 80 feet across and 14 feet deep in the children’s play area, an early structural event in the property’s history tied to the sinkhole-prone Florida limestone geology common across the region.
Regal Cinemas runs a twelve-screen multiplex on-site, alongside Lake Wales Bowling, an entertainment center combining a bowling alley, video arcade, restaurant and meeting rooms, and a food court and carousel on the mall’s north side. Sears closed and its space was taken over by Spirit Halloween on a seasonal basis starting in October 2025, though that seasonal tenancy has since gone quiet; Dillard’s remains the property’s sole remaining department store anchor, JCPenney having closed as part of a 154-store nationwide closure plan announced in June 2020, with the Lake Wales location shutting down by around September of that year.
Dyer Auto Group has built out a cluster of dealerships directly across US Highway 27 from the mall, including Dyer Chevrolet, which opened a new $5 million, 19-bay facility in 2024 next to the existing Dyer Kia store, part of a broader pattern of auto retail concentrating around the mall’s highway frontage even as traditional mall tenancy has thinned.
That combination, a single remaining department store anchor alongside a still-active bowling and cinema entertainment core and a growing automotive retail cluster across the street, reflects how mid-size regional malls in smaller Florida markets have increasingly repositioned around entertainment and adjacent big-ticket retail rather than fashion anchors alone.
