Several times in conversation people have mentioned the old West Boca Walmart to us. For those who don’t know, there used to be a Walmart on the southeast corner of US-441 and West Palmetto Park Road. You can see the location on the satellite image below, with our annotations.
As you can see, it’s across from the Lowe’s and Walgreens, to the south, and “kitty corner” to the Chili’s.
Yesterday a reader said she noticed a construction trailer there. So we did a little research. We can’t confirm this, but a new Walmart Supercenter may open in this location in 2014. For now our only source for this is a brief mention in a Sun Sentinel article in June.
West of Boca Raton, a Walmart on Palmetto Park Road at U.S. 441 closed five years ago when a new supercenter opened a few miles away at Hillsboro Boulevard and 441. But the west Boca store will reopen next year as a supercenter.
We’ve searched quite a bit for other information. One friend told us he heard a rumor that the property is owned by the Rooney family who are going to turn it into a poker room. We checked the property appraiser record and the property owner is none other than “WAL MART STORES EAST LP”. They’ve owned it since 1992.
The property is appraised at $6.3M, and pays over $100K a year in property tax. So Walmart is spending a lot of money to hold onto that land. Also, any change of use would require zoning approval, and the powers that be in West Boca have been vocally critical of casino expansion in Coconut Creek, so it’s hard to imagine them liking a poker room here.
As we look at the property, it just doesn’t seem big enough for what we think of as a “Supercenter.” But we might be wrong about that. An article from The News back when it was built described it as being 136,000 square feet (reduced from what had been proposed as 145,000 square feet.
The Wikipedia entry on Walmart Supercenters says they can be as small as 98,000 square feet, with an average of 197,000 square feet. So this would be small by Supercenter standards, but not the smallest.
Update
We visited the property this morning. On the Palmetto side there is an entrance, closed when we were there, with signs out front.
On the larger sign are documents. A couple indicate application for a storm water discharge permit for construction work. A letter from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is dated November 26th and states that the permit is effective on the 29th.
A “construction site notice” indicates a 122,353 square foot building and a “Supercenter – expansion” for “Store #3858-00”.
Here’s the best photo we could get of what’s behind the fence. It doesn’t look like they’ve done much yet.
