February 7, 2022 – The Marketplace Mall in Rochester, N.Y., has a food court, arcade games and plenty of fashion boutiques. Soon, it will perform hip replacements and rotator cuff surgeries, too.
A closed Sears department store and an adjacent wing of the mall are being reborn as a roughly 350,000-square-foot orthopedic healthcare campus. It will include operating rooms, outpatient facilities and medical and administrative offices.
The University of Rochester Medical Center’s $227 million project is part of the recent boom in mall-to-medical conversions. Malls have long been home to urgent-care facilities or doctor’s offices. But in recent years more property owners have started turning entire sections over to hospitals or clusters of medical tenants.