The biggest empty box at the Shops at SunVet now has a date on it. Ross Dress for Less has set its Holbrook grand opening for Saturday, October 10, according to the company's own store locator, which lists the new store at 5801 Sunrise Highway with a phone line already assigned and a full week of operating hours ready to go.

The store fills 22,913 square feet of the rebuilt center at the corner of Sunrise Highway and Veterans Memorial Highway, according to the site plan published by Regency Centers, the national shopping center owner behind the redevelopment. That makes it the third-largest space in the project, behind only the 40,000-square-foot Whole Foods that anchors the center and the 26,780 square feet held by Nordstrom Rack next door. An off-price clothing giant beside an off-price department store is not an accident: it is the pairing that fills parking lots.

A national opening day, with Holbrook on the list

The October 10 date is part of a coordinated opening wave. The same locator shows grand openings that Saturday for new Ross stores in Long Island City, in Hamden and Poughkeepsie, and in Parsippany, New Jersey. Holbrook is the only one of them in Nassau or Suffolk.

Once it opens, the store will run from 8:30 in the morning to 11 at night Monday through Thursday, until midnight on Friday and Saturday, and from 9 to 11 on Sundays. It joins an Island footprint that already includes West Babylon, which the locator currently flags as newly open, along with Lake Grove, Hempstead, Farmingville and Riverhead. For anyone in the Sachem area, the nearest Ross runs until now have meant a drive to Lake Grove or Farmingville. After October 10, it is the corner nearly everyone south of the Expressway passes anyway.

The corner that keeps coming back

The ground under the store is the reason this is more than a retail listing. For roughly half a century, that corner held the Sun Vet Mall, the enclosed shopping center that generations of Holbrook, Sayville and Bohemia families walked in every season, and then, in its final years, mostly drove past. Regency Centers won Town of Islip approval to rebuild the property and started demolition in 2023, reshaping a 280,000-square-foot enclosed mall into a 168,000-square-foot open-air center.

The bet was that a dead mall could come back as a row of names people actually drive to, and the tenant list has been filling in ever since. Whole Foods anchors it. Nordstrom Rack, Sephora, Warby Parker and Starbucks are in the lineup. Crumbl opened its bakery in August. The center's own directory now counts 28 merchants.

What is still coming behind Ross

Read that directory closely and the more interesting story is the coming-soon column, because Ross is one of nearly a dozen names in it. Tony's Tacos, the Nassau-grown taqueria chain whose Instagram promised in late August that its Holbrook location opens soon, is still listed as on the way. So is Naya, the Lebanese fast-casual chain making its first stop in Suffolk County, which this publication covered when its lease appeared on the tenant plan in August.

The directory also confirms where Riko's Pizza is headed. When the Connecticut chain announced in early September that it had bought back its Merrick and Levittown restaurants from their founding franchisee, it said a brand-new restaurant was coming to Holbrook without saying exactly where. The answer is on the SunVet tenant list.

Beyond the food, the coming-soon column includes Mogu Modern Chinese Kitchen, a Fine Wine and Spirits shop, M-Nail Bar, Perspire Sauna Studio, IVX Health, California Closets and a FedEx Office. Regency's leasing plan shows just three small spaces left, totaling under 12,000 square feet in a center of 168,000.

What it means if you live near it

Three years ago this corner was a demolition site, and five years ago it was the kind of mall people described in the past tense. On October 10 it gets a discount anchor with hours that run to midnight on weekends, and behind that, a taqueria, a Lebanese kitchen, a pizza bar and a wine shop are all in the pipeline at once. The Saturday-morning crowd that Sun Vet Mall lost a generation ago is being rebuilt one opening at a time, and this fall the openings finally have dates.