Destiny USA in 2026: Margaritaville out, Regal’s $15 million rebuild, IKEA on the way

Staff Reporter

Destiny USA spent the last 12 months closing one chapter and opening several others. Margaritaville, the Jimmy Buffett themed restaurant that anchored the third floor dining concourse for a decade, shut its doors in early 2025. Regal Cinemas is deep into a $15 million gut renovation of its 19 screen multiplex, one of the largest single tenant reinvestments at the mall since the 2012 expansion. IKEA quietly became the biggest story of all. Upstate New York’s first IKEA store opened at Destiny USA on November 21, 2025, drawing a line that started forming at 7 a.m. and stretched past the Canyon escalators by the time the ribbon was cut at 9:45. And Pyramid Management Group, the Syracuse based developer that owns the 2.4 million square foot complex, has filled the rest of the pipeline with new leases, a 40,000 square foot indoor pickleball club, and a 14,000 square foot virtual reality venue under construction.

IKEA opens the biggest story of 2025

Three years of rumors ended at 9:45 a.m. on Friday, November 21, 2025, when a ribbon dropped on the west end of the mall and the first IKEA store in Central or Upstate New York opened its doors. The line had formed at 7 a.m. Games and giveaways started at 8. A live DJ ran the crowd through the countdown. Stephen Congel, CEO of Pyramid Management Group, told reporters on site that welcoming IKEA was one of the most significant milestones in his company’s history.

The store fills the 88,500 square foot former At Home space at the west end of Destiny USA, which sat vacant after At Home closed the Syracuse location in August 2024. IKEA’s build out takes up roughly 70,000 square feet of that box. Unlike the company’s large format Brooklyn and Long Island stores, Syracuse is built on the Plan and Order Point model. There is no warehouse floor and no flat pack self serve aisle. Shoppers walk a showroom, hit a marketplace with about 3,000 products in stock for immediate takeaway, and browse roughly 75 small furniture items. Larger items like sofas, beds, and wardrobes are ordered for home delivery or store pickup. A central planning area with IKEA staff helps customers design kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms on site.

The Swedish food line made the trip too. An IKEA Restaurant inside the store sells Swedish meatballs, plant based options, cinnamon buns, and the other café standards the brand is known for. A temporary click and collect pickup point that IKEA had been running at 4530 S. Steelway Boulevard in Liverpool closed as the Destiny USA store came online. Starting pay for the store leader role posted before opening ranged from $23.61 to $33.67 an hour, a useful read on what the base retail roles at the location are paying in the benefits eligible range.

Syracuse is IKEA’s third New York store after Brooklyn and Long Island’s Hicksville. The company first confirmed the Destiny USA lease in July 2025 and held to a fall 2025 opening target.

Margaritaville exits after 10 years

Destiny USA and Margaritaville Holdings announced on January 22, 2025 that the two sides had made what the mall described as a mutual business decision to part ways as the restaurant’s lease expired. The Syracuse location opened in the summer of 2015, which made it one of a short list of Margaritaville sites in the Northeast and a trophy tenant for the Canyon, the third floor food and entertainment concourse that Pyramid carved out during the 2012 expansion.

The restaurant spanned roughly 12,500 square feet with a two story dining room, an outdoor patio overlooking the Oil City parking deck, and a retail shop selling branded flip flops and margarita mix. Live music, karaoke nights, and the rotating volcano bar drew steady traffic in the first years after opening, but regional dining competition from Dave and Buster’s, The Cheesecake Factory, and Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill (which itself shuttered in 2017) ate into the concept over time.

Rob Schoeneck, general manager of Destiny USA, called Margaritaville a treasured part of the mix over the past decade and said the space will be backfilled as part of the broader third floor repositioning that Pyramid is pitching to tenants and brokers in 2026.

Regal pours $15 million into a full theater rebuild

On the same third floor, Regal Cinemas is spending $15 million to rebuild its Destiny USA Stadium 19 multiplex from the seats up. Construction started in spring 2025 and is rolling out auditorium by auditorium so the theater can keep selling tickets through the work. The investment is part of a larger Regal commitment across Pyramid owned centers and represents one of the most aggressive cinema capital projects in the Northeast since the pandemic.

The Destiny USA theater is the largest Regal in Central New York and houses the region’s only commercial IMAX screen, which measures 72 feet wide by 40 feet tall. The adjacent RPX auditorium runs a 58 foot by 31 foot screen. Both premium houses are being refit with laser projection, and the RPX room is getting Dolby Atmos sound.

Every standard auditorium is receiving full luxury recliners, replacing the traditional stadium seating that has been in place since the 2012 addition. The 4DX format, which used motion seats and environmental effects, is being retired at the location and replaced with ScreenX, a three wall panoramic format that extends the picture onto the side walls. The first ScreenX auditorium opened to the public in late 2025 and is marketed as the only immersive theater of its kind in Central New York. The lobby, corridors, and restrooms are being redesigned. The concessions counter is expanding to include a full bar serving beer and wine, a new Lavazza coffee café, and a B.fresh smoothie bar. Self service ticket kiosks are being added, and new exterior and interior signage reflects Regal’s 2024 corporate rebrand.

Stephen Congel said in a statement that Regal shares Pyramid’s dedication to innovating to meet changing consumer preferences. Translation: Pyramid wants fewer trips to the mall for errands and more trips for experiences that cannot be ordered online.

A short history of the mall Syracuse built

The site opened on October 15, 1990 as Carousel Center, named for the 1908 Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters number 18 carousel that still turns on the second floor. Pyramid founder Robert J. Congel, who started the company with Michael J. Falcone and Joseph T. Scuderi in 1968, picked a former oil tank farm and scrapyard known as Oil City for the build. The brownfield cleanup added years to the project and drew heavy opposition from rival developers Wilmorite and Eagan Real Estate, both of whom argued the mall would gut downtown Syracuse retail.

The original center opened with Bonwit Teller, Kaufmann’s, Chappell’s, Steinbach, JCPenney, Lechmere, and Hills as anchors. Lord and Taylor was added in 1994. Best Buy moved in during 1998. The biggest change came on August 2, 2012, when Pyramid cut the ribbon on an 874,200 square foot expansion that lifted the total footprint to 2.4 million square feet and triggered the rename to Destiny USA. The expansion added the third floor Canyon, the current Regal multiplex with IMAX and RPX, WonderWorks (which opened in November 2012 as the chain’s first Northeast location), and a wave of restaurants that Dave and Buster’s later joined in 2015 with a 26,000 square foot arcade and 144 games.

The pandemic wiped out two anchors in the same summer. JCPenney closed its Destiny USA store in June 2020 as part of the chain’s Chapter 11 restructuring. Lord and Taylor shut down in August 2020 during its own liquidation. Barnes and Noble returned on August 28, 2024 into the Level 2 space once held by Banana Republic. Mystery Bins opened in the old JCPenney box on August 2, 2025.

Pyramid Management Group today owns nine properties, eight of them in New York and one in Massachusetts, as of September 2024. It is the largest privately held mall developer in the Northeast, and Destiny USA is the company’s flagship asset. Founder Robert Congel died February 3, 2021 at age 85. His son Stephen, who has run Pyramid as CEO since June 2008, took over the firm after his father stepped back from day to day operations. Stephen Congel holds a degree in entrepreneurial studies from Babson College (1991) and lives in Skaneateles.

What is filling the rest of the mall

IKEA is not the only lease signed in the last 18 months. The leasing team has brought a steady run of openings in front of the cameras. JD Sports opened a 7,000 square foot store in January 2025. Charcoal Grill and Modern Buffet signed for a new restaurant in the Canyon and opened in May 2025. Mystery Bins cut the ribbon on its reuse of the former JCPenney box on August 2, 2025. Bounce Party Supplies, Funitvity Arcade, Wetzel’s Pretzels, Wendy’s, Y-10 Beauty, US To Future, POPMART Robo Shop, and Twisted Aesthetics all opened between April 2025 and March 2026. Victoria’s Secret renewed its lease for five years and is in the middle of a store remodel. American Eagle renewed for seven years and has a refresh on deck.

Margaritaville is not the only departure. Eddie Bauer’s parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on February 9, 2026. After no qualified bidder surfaced before the March 3 deadline, the company canceled its planned auction and moved to liquidate all 174 stores. The Destiny USA location is scheduled to close along with the rest of the fleet by April 30, 2026. Lord and Taylor vacated its anchor box in 2020.

Two experiential tenants are also under construction on the third floor. An indoor pickleball club will occupy roughly 40,000 square feet and is scheduled to open in 2026. A 14,000 square foot virtual reality concept is going into an adjacent space. Pyramid has not named either operator publicly. Both fit the Pyramid playbook of replacing floor area once held by soft goods retailers with entertainment uses that drive longer dwell times.

Levels and the experience bet

The third floor, rebranded Levels by Pyramid marketing, is the clearest example of how the mall is shifting. Dave and Buster’s takes up 26,000 square feet with 144 arcade games and opened in July 2015. WonderWorks, the upside down science museum with a 4D motion ride and indoor ropes course, opened in November 2012 as the chain’s first Northeast location and anchors one end of the concourse. Apex Entertainment, a 55,000 square foot entertainment venue in the Canyon, arrived in spring 2019 with 24 lanes of bowling, axe throwing, laser tag, and a 50 plus game arcade. Zero Latency VR opened on Level 2 in May 2023. Other experience tenants include Billy Beez (a 25,000 square foot indoor play center for kids), 5 Wits (a series of themed escape room adventures), Pole Position Raceway indoor go karts, Canyon Climb Adventure (a four story ropes course), and an escape room operator. TBones Steakhouse left the mall in 2023, and its former space is part of the inventory available to new restaurant concepts.

Dining anchors that remain include The Cheesecake Factory, Texas de Brazil, Tully’s Good Times, PF Chang’s, Melting Pot, and the Johnny Rockets kiosk. The second floor food court still feeds the office and retail workers who fill the mall during weekday shifts. On the retail side, Macy’s remains the lone traditional department store anchor since JCPenney closed in 2020 and Lord and Taylor liquidated the same summer. The 2021 occupancy figure reported by the International Council of Shopping Centers placed Destiny USA among the top 20 most visited shopping centers in the United States.

Balance sheet pressure, and what 2026 means for Syracuse

The 2026 moves are landing against a loan file the mall has been working to resolve since 2024. Pyramid missed a $38.9 million paydown on more than $430 million in overdue mortgage loans last summer, and the special servicer ended the forbearance agreement. The outstanding balance on one loan is roughly $325.2 million, including $25.2 million of deferred interest. Kroll estimated the liquidation value of the complex at $65.3 million, a figure that has been used by ratings commentary to argue the servicer has limited appetite for foreclosure. Stephen Congel told reporters last year that Pyramid was engaged with the special servicer on a loan modification and that the mall would continue to serve its 17 million annual guests.

The mall also operates under a 30 year payment in lieu of taxes agreement signed with the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency in 2002. Pyramid pays about $800,000 a year in property tax on the land. The building itself will remain off the tax roll until 2037. A parallel agreement for the surrounding parking lots generates $499,200 a year. Pyramid’s annual PILOT payment, under the current structure, totals roughly $4 million split between the city of Syracuse and Onondaga County.

Destiny USA remains one of the largest private employers in the city of Syracuse outside of the hospital systems and Syracuse University, with retail and entertainment jobs estimated in the several thousands across all tenants at full occupancy. The complex shares its exit ramp with the Central New York Welcome Center, a state run tourism stop operated in partnership with Visit Syracuse and stocked with a Taste NY store selling locally made food, maple products, and gifts. The Welcome Center funnels I-81 traffic directly to the mall’s front door.

The 2026 moves are not a turnaround story. They are a repositioning. Retail headwinds have not spared Destiny USA any more than they have spared American malls generally, and the Eddie Bauer liquidation is a reminder that national chain decisions continue to flow through Syracuse whether local leasing likes it or not. But the IKEA opening, the $15 million Regal project, the pickleball and virtual reality investments, and the run of smaller openings add up to something the national mall narrative has mostly missed. Somebody is still betting on physical retail and entertainment in Upstate New York. In 2026, most of that money is being spent at 1 Destiny USA Drive.