2026 Top 10 Retail Center Experiences: No. 6 — Blue Star Shopping Center
Not every great retail experience requires 3 million square feet, an indoor ski slope or a theme park.
Blue Star’s distinction is different. It is one of the nation’s clearest examples of how a thoughtfully merchandised, open-air suburban center can generate amplified visitations typically associated with much larger destinations.
Over the past few years, Blue Star’s operator, Levin Management Corp. (LMC), executed a major reshuffling of spaces to accommodate footprints for both long-time tenants and exciting new brands.
To make room for a new 72,000-sq.-ft. ShopRite at the 55-year-old center that resides on northern New Jersey’s Route 22, a busy retail corridor, LMC performed a major reshuffling of tenants both old and new. It moved long-time tenant Marshalls into a 27,000-sq.-ft. space at the grocer’s vacated site along with Burlington, a new arrival at Blue Star.
[READ MORE: 2026 Top 10 Retail Center Experiences: No. 9 — Park West Village]
Other new tenants that opened at the center in the past year included Taco Bell in a 2,900-sq.-ft location and Nails Spa & Beyond in a 5,800-sq.-ft. space.
Honeygrow — a fast-casual concept that specializes in customizable stir-fries, salads and honeybars — recently opened at Blue Star in a 2,400-sq.-ft. space. Sakura Teriyaki recently signed a lease for a 4,000-sq.-ft. freestanding restaurant with a dedicated pickup drive-thru.
Another new brand at Blue Star, Back Nine Golf, stays open 24-hours a day to help duffers to tune up their games in full-swing simulator bays.
“Our vision for the makeover of Blue Star was to create a complementary mix. It’s a place where you can do almost all of your typical retail shopping,” said Sid Singer, LMC’s VP of leasing. “We brought in a Planet Fitness to drive multiple, per-week visits, and we’ve introduced some new entertainment brands. One of them that’s doing very well is I-Smash. They have Smash Rooms where folks can release their pent-up energy, smashing up old TVs with sledgehammers and bats.”
In June of this year, LMC released Placer.ai data revealing that Blue Star drew 3.8 million visitors in the first year of its renovation — a remarkable 40% increase over the previous year.
“The 40% increase in visits is not a one-time spike,” said Melissa Sievwright, LMC’s VP of marketing. “It reflects the success of a leasing strategy built around a simple question: Does what we’ve done at Blue Star give people another reason to leave home and come here?”
