The mostly vacant Seminole Towne Center — once billed as a premier mall for well-heeled shoppers in Seminole County — will shutter most of its property by the end of the month, after years of struggling with closed stores and acres of empty parking lots.

Mall owners told the few remaining tenants last month they had until Jan. 31 to vacate the property.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Asad “Eddie” Hussain, owner of Venetian Jewelers, as he spent most of this week packing merchandise in boxes in preparation to move out to his other store at the Florida Mall. “A lot of my customers have tears in their eyes. We did everything we could to stay in this mall.”

But Hussain, who began working at his family’s store as a teenager in 2005, said he knew the end was near.

“This year, they never brought in Santa Claus. There was no Christmas tree. There was no Christmas music,” he said.

Representatives for Seminole Mall Realty Holdings, which owns most of the roughly 60-acre mall property and 500,000-square-foot building, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Demolition for a large section of the mall building is scheduled for the coming months. The mall’s main retail anchor businesses — including Dick’s Sporting Goods, JCPenney, Elev8 Fun and Dillard’s — will remain open, city officials said. Those sit on separately owned parcels, according to the Seminole County Property Appraiser’s Office.

Sanford city leaders said they hope the prime real estate, visible from Interstate 4, can soon be turned into a bustling center filled with hundreds of apartments, along with offices and retail stores.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Sanford Commissioner Claudia Thomas, whose district includes the mall property. “I think mixed-use is a good thing. … It’s an ideal location. And I am going to encourage something to happen.”

Development plans have not been filed yet for any portion of the property. However, city officials have been working with the owners in recent years about potential future developments.

Thursday morning, the mall was nearly empty, with most of the stores closed and only one of the food court’s 11 vendor spaces open and selling food.

“I’m actually surprised that it’s still open and that we can still come in and walk around,” said John Chambers, an Orange City resident. “My wife wanted to go for a walk and it’s too cold outside for her so that’s mainly why we’re here.”

He said he’d likely view it as a shopping destination if there were more retailers. “If you build something that can attract people, people will come. I’d come back,” he said.

For now, Thomas said the city will do as much as it can to help tenants find new locations within Sanford.

Douglas Filler, owner of Curious Lore, a book binding shop, said he has had a “blast” at the mall, and its end is okay for him as he was planning to retire soon anyway. But he still said news that the mall was closing as soon as this month was a shock.

“We didn’t expect this, it was just the worst-case scenario. For us, I should say, not for the owners or whatever because they’re busy making their money,” he said.

The mall’s leaky roof seemed to create a lot of problems over the years, he said as water damaged stores that then remained closed. He thinks a more “open air” shopping center would do better.

When the Seminole Towne Center opened in 1995, the split-level mall was considered one of the toniest shopping centers in the region with upscale department stores Parisian and Burdines, alongside the everyman’s Sears and JCPenney.

The concept was to draw shoppers from the affluent neighborhoods in nearby Seminole, Volusia and Lake counties.

Those heavy-wallet anchors are long gone. The mall started to struggle during the Great Recession of 2008, officials said, and never recovered. Like many malls across the country, the Seminole Towne Center was also hurt by the growth of online shopping and the ease of same-day deliveries.

Even Macy’s closed in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. An adjacent movie theater turned off its projectors and shuttered its doors. That building has since remained empty.

Last February, the mall closed for three days after the property managers failed to pay its utility bill to Florida Power & Light and the electricity was shut off.

Peter Hwang, a DeBary resident who works at Escape Games in the mall, said he has been there for about five years and been visiting the mall for far longer.

“I feel pretty sad about it. I’ve been coming to this mall since I was a little kid. I’ve seen all the stores come and go, from the major name brands to the smaller niche stuff to mom and pop businesses,” Hwang said.

He remembers when there were more high-end stores and more variety, including a pet store, an Asian market, pageants and talent shows. Santa and the Easter Bunny would make appearances, too. And, of course, there were crowds, especially at the holidays, with few empty parking spaces available.

“I do kind of miss on Black Friday when a lot of people would come in here, and you could watch the hustle and bustle as people rocked around the mall,” he said. “It was cool to just have a community of people checking out this place.”