The Anchor Site Signed Its First Tenant. It's Not a Restaurant.

Ask a Northwood resident what they expect to open on the old Anchor Site and the guesses tend to cluster in two directions: another restaurant with a patio, or a gallery to sit alongside Arthouse 429 and LOT23. Both are reasonable bets. The parcel sits inside the Northwood Arts District, wedged between 23rd and 25th Streets, a block or two from wherever the Second Saturday Art Walk happens to be pouring wine that month. For eight years it has been fenced, rezoned, financed and renamed as exactly that kind of place.

The first business to actually sign a lease there is a gym.

Elev8tion Fitness, a Miami-based studio, signed a 10-year lease for 7,617 square feet in the ground-floor retail space at what's now called The District at Northwood. It's the company's first physical location in West Palm Beach. The announcement came in March 2026, and it's the only confirmed retail name attached to the project so far. Everything else in that 60,772-square-foot Class A commercial footprint, the restaurants, the galleries, the small shops the neighborhood has been picturing, remains unannounced.

That gap between what the site was built to represent and who actually showed up first is worth sitting with, because it tells you something about how these projects actually fill up, not how the renderings suggest they will.

Two Decades on One Parcel

The 4.68-acre site was known simply as the Anchor Site for most of its life, the centerpiece parcel the West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency assembled to catalyze the rest of Northwood Village. The pace of that assembly is its own story.

Six years passed between the first RFP and a shovel in the ground. Two more years passed between groundbreaking and a tenant with an actual name. For a neighborhood used to the informal, low-overhead pace of a monthly art walk, that timeline is its own kind of tell: institutional development on CRA land moves in bank-loan and site-plan increments, not gallery-opening increments.

What the Square Footage Actually Holds

The District at Northwood pairs a nine-story residential building with two four-story structures, 382 apartments total, designed by Kobi Karp. Ten percent of those units, 38 apartments, are reserved as workforce housing at below-market rents for five years, set aside specifically for police officers, firefighters, teachers and medical technicians.

The ground floor is where the neighborhood's attention has actually been. It's built out as Class A retail, dining and gallery space, just over 60,000 square feet according to the project's own marketing, plus more than 12,000 square feet of public open space that the CRA describes as intended to function as a village square. Amenities for residents include a rooftop pool and spa, a private fitness center and a racquetball court, plus more than 500 parking spaces split between building tenants and public use.

As part of the build, Broadway is being extended from Northwood Road to 23rd Street, and Pinewood Avenue is being realigned. Anyone who currently cuts through that block on the way to Café Centro or Table 427 will be walking a different street grid once construction wraps.

The Tenant Nobody Guessed

Northwood Village's identity has been built for years on a specific combination: small restaurants like Café Centro, Malakor Thai Café and Mestizo Fusion Cuisine, a walkable gallery row, and a monthly guided art tour. The District at Northwood's own marketing leans into that identity too, describing itself as a complement to the Northwood Arts District, with language built around dining and gallery space.

So the fact that the first confirmed name is a fitness studio, not a chef or a gallerist, is a genuine departure from the story the project has been telling about itself. Florida YIMBY, which broke the tenant news in March, reported that additional tenants are expected to sign as the project gets closer to completion. That's a normal leasing pattern for a project this size. It also means that for now, the only retail identity attached to more than 60,000 square feet of ground-floor space is a 10-year commercial gym lease.

That matters for how the block will actually feel in its first year open. A fitness studio with a decade-long lease brings daily foot traffic at hours a restaurant wouldn't, morning and early evening, seven days a week, rather than dinner-service hours. It's not a bad anchor. It's just not the anchor the arts-district framing led people to expect.

What Changes on Foot

The Historic Northwood Village Art Walk has run on the second Saturday of most months for over a decade, a roughly 90-minute guided loop that starts at the Center for Creative Education building on 24th Street and winds through galleries and restaurants that contribute to a shared community garden behind several storefronts. It's an event built on small storefronts and short walking distances, the kind of thing that doesn't need much infrastructure beyond sidewalks and a few open doors.

The District at Northwood sits close enough to that route to eventually fold into it, once retail space actually opens. Right now it doesn't. The site remains under construction, and with delivery pushed to Q4 2026, the project will not be open in time to appear on this year's art walk calendar at all. The Broadway extension and Pinewood realignment will likely change the walking geometry of that corridor before a single storefront opens, which means residents may notice construction-related street changes well before they notice new retail.

The Rest of the Calendar Doesn't Wait

Northwood Village's other recurring event, Nights in Northwood Village, runs on a quarterly schedule set by the CRA: March 27, June 26, September 25 and November 27 in 2026. The September date has already passed. The next one, on November 27, will land squarely inside the same quarter The District at Northwood is now targeting for delivery.

It's worth being precise about what that overlap does and doesn't mean. A Q4 target is not a fixed date, and residential and commercial delivery on mixed-use projects rarely land on the same day, first units typically open before ground-floor retail is fully built out and leased. The realistic scenario is that November's Nights in Northwood Village happens against a backdrop of a mostly finished building with a still-mostly-empty ground floor, Elev8tion Fitness aside. The site's transition from construction fence to functioning retail corridor is more likely to be gradual through early 2027 than to arrive all at once this quarter.

What's Confirmed and What's Still a Sign

None of this changes what the project is built to become. A nine-story residential building with workforce housing set-asides, more than 60,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space and a village square component is a meaningful addition to a nine-block district that has run for years on small, independently owned storefronts. It's also, per the CRA's own framing when the project was proposed in 2018, meant to act as a catalyst for further investment in the surrounding blocks.

But catalysts take time to show their actual shape, and right now the only shape on record is a 10-year lease for a gym. Whether the rest of the retail roster leans toward the restaurants and galleries the neighborhood has been picturing, or toward something closer to Elev8tion Fitness, a use built on daily membership traffic rather than evening reservations, is still an open question. The answer will show up in leasing announcements over the next several quarters, not in the renderings.

For now, the fence stays up, the art walk still starts at CCE, and the only name on the building is a gym's.

Questions about how projects like The District at Northwood are shaping property values and buyer interest in Northwood Village are worth a direct conversation. Elizabeth DeWoody tracks development activity like this across Palm Beach County as part of her advisory work and is glad to talk through what it means for anyone with a stake in the neighborhood.