For most of the time anyone behind the Hawks Landing gate has lived in Plantation, the land at 321 N. University Drive has been a punchline more than a plan. Fashion Mall opened there in 1988 with Lord & Taylor and Macy's as anchors, took real damage from Hurricane Wilma in 2005, and closed for good within a year. The site then spent the better part of two decades doing nothing but sitting there: a bankruptcy filing in 2014, a demolition in 2016 that hauled away more than 28,000 tons of concrete, and a groundbreaking in January 2019 for something called Plantation Walk that, for most residents, was just another rendering promising a future that kept not arriving.
That reputation is now out of date, and today is proof of it. Check Plantation Walk's own live music calendar for August 30, 2026, and you'll find Robert "Dubwise" Browne playing a free reggae set on the Outdoor Plaza Stage from 4 to 8 PM, free entry, free parking, no cover. If your mental picture of that corner of University Drive is still a fenced-off lot or a half-finished frame, the picture is wrong, and it has been wrong for a while.
The mall everyone gave up on
The Fashion Mall story is worth the two minutes it takes to read, because it explains why so many longtime residents still treat the site with suspicion. After Wilma's damage, Macy's announced its closure in mid-2006, and occupancy across the property fell to fewer than 20 stores. The city and the mall's owner never reached an agreement on required fire safety upgrades, and by October 2007 every remaining tenant had been told to vacate. The property changed hands more than once over the following years, and the developer that eventually held it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2014. It sold at a bankruptcy auction in April 2015 for $37.7 million, was demolished in 2016, and only broke ground on its current form, a $350 million mixed-use project backed by Encore Capital Management, in January 2019.
That is fifteen years between "closed" and "under construction on something new," which is long enough for an entire generation of Hawks Landing buyers to have moved in, raised kids, and never once treated that corner as a place worth driving to. The habit of writing it off is understandable. It just isn't current anymore.
What's actually running, week to week
Plantation Walk today includes The Rise Plantation Walk, a 700-unit residential building, alongside the renovated Sheraton Suites hotel, a Class-A office tower, and roughly 200,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space built around a walkable plaza. The Spot Barbershop is open. A rotating slate of restaurants and shops fills out the ground floor. And the part that matters most for anyone who lives nearby without any intention of renting or dining there every night is the Plaza Live music calendar, which runs on a real weekly rhythm rather than as an occasional promotional stunt.
Here's a representative week, pulled straight from the venue's own calendar for late August 2026:
| Day | Time | Performer |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday | 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM | Germán Dhers |
| Friday | 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM | DJ Vivi |
| Saturday | 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM | Stephen Korka |
| Sunday | 4:00 PM – 8:00 PM | Robert "Dubwise" Browne |
Start times shift a little from week to week, but the pattern holds: four nights of programming, Thursday through Sunday, covering everything from Latin sets to reggae to top-40 covers. Encore's own pitch for the project, back when it was still a rendering, promised what its CEO called "a walkable, enjoyable hotspot unique to Plantation and South Florida." For a long stretch that line was aspirational marketing copy attached to a construction site. It now describes something that happens on a schedule you can actually check before you leave the house.
The layer most people never notice
The weekly plaza calendar is only the base layer. On top of it, Plantation Walk has built a recurring set of larger, holiday-tied events that show up year after year: a Fat Tuesday night of street performers each February, a Halloween Trunk-or-Treat with decorated vehicles rolling through the plaza, a Super Bowl watch party built around a video wall and stilt walkers, and a New Year's Eve countdown split into an early kid-friendly version in the afternoon and a later one for adults. None of it requires a ticket, and parking stays free in the multi-level garage accessible from University Drive off either the north or south roundabout.
The one place money does change hands is inside the restaurants and bars that line the plaza, since outside food isn't permitted there. The newest of those sits just off the plaza proper on West Broward Boulevard. Saiko-i Sushi Lounge & Hibachi opened there in January 2026 with the kind of grand-opening theatrics that tend to get written about: a balloon arch at the entrance, singer-waiters carrying sparkler-topped mochi between tables, and a dining room built around hibachi tables and a sushi bar. A review published that same month described a Monday night dining room already in full swing, birthday tables scattered throughout, hibachi grills going, which tells you the concept was built for a crowd from the start rather than easing in quietly.
The Publix a mile away, and the pattern it points to
Plantation Walk isn't the only piece of this corridor that quietly finished becoming something while residents weren't watching closely. The City of Plantation's own development tracker confirms that a new Publix at the West Broward Shopping Center held its ribbon cutting on June 4, 2026, part of a broader facelift for that center that included a new facade and improved parking. Put the two projects next to each other and a pattern emerges: for years, this stretch of University Drive and West Broward Boulevard was defined by what it was waiting to become. In 2026, it's defined by what already opened.
That distinction is easy to miss if your last real look at the area was a few years back, before the concrete cleared and the plaza filled in. It's the kind of gap between reputation and reality that tends to persist longest among people who already live nearby and have no particular reason to double-check their assumptions. A ten-minute drive from Hawks Landing gets you to a functioning weekly concert calendar, a barbershop, a hotel that survived the whole ordeal, and a sushi lounge that's still drawing a Monday-night crowd. None of that requires planning a special outing. It just requires updating what you think is there.
What this means if you live behind the gate
If you've been treating that corner of Plantation as background noise, a permanent construction zone, or a project that's still "coming soon," the correction is small but worth making. Check the Plaza Live calendar before you assume there's nothing happening on a Thursday night. The acts change, the schedule holds steady, and the drive is short enough that it barely counts as leaving the neighborhood.
If you're weighing a move into or out of Hawks Landing and want a clearer read on how the surrounding area has actually changed, not just what the listing photos suggest, Colleen Rodriguez & Duffy Dillon know this stretch of Plantation from the ground up. Schedule a free consultation and get the version of the neighborhood that's current, not the one that's five years stale.
