A Florida Mall Day, Done Right: Southchase’s Big Trip North
Just north of Southchase at Sand Lake Road, The Florida Mall — opened in 1986, about 1.7 million square feet, 250-plus stores — plus the Crayola Experience inside it. How locals do it.
3 minute read
Label first, because our Southchase hub insists on it: The Florida Mall is not in Southchase. It stands just north of the community, at 8001 South Orange Blossom Trail at Sand Lake Road, in the 32809 ZIP — close enough that for Southchase households it is simply the mall, the default big shopping trip, and the place out-of-town guests get taken. This guide treats it exactly that way: nearby, plainly labeled, and worth doing deliberately rather than by drift.
The scale, briefly
The mall opened on March 12, 1986, and by Simon Property Group’s own description spans about 1.7 to 1.8 million square feet with more than 250 retail, dining and entertainment options, making it Central Florida’s largest shopping center, and one of the largest single-story malls in the United States. Anchors named by Simon include Macy’s, Dillard’s and JCPenney, alongside Apple, Zara, Primark, UNIQLO and lululemon; the Dining Pavilion holds more than twenty eateries, and the complex includes an on-site hotel, the Florida Hotel and Conference Center. Simon puts annual visitation in the tens of millions, with a heavy international-tourist mix — which explains both the currency-exchange counters and why locals time their visits like locals.
The family anchor: Crayola Experience
Inside the mall, the Crayola Experience is the family anchor: roughly 70,000 square feet of hands-on color, with more than two dozen activities by Crayola’s count, including naming and wrapping your own crayon, drip art, a live crayon-making show and a two-story color playground. Crayola suggests planning three to four hours, and the attraction opens daily in the morning, with closing times varying by day — check its site for the day you intend. For Southchase families, it is the rainy-day and visiting-cousins answer that does not require a theme-park ticket or a resort-district drive, and it pairs naturally with a mall lunch. We build it into our Southchase family weekend for exactly that reason.
Local tactics
Go early on a weekday if you can; the mall’s tourist gravity peaks on weekend afternoons and rainy days, when every visitor in south Orlando has the same idea simultaneously. Pick one anchor wing as your base rather than attempting the full single-story circuit with small children — the footprint is the attraction and the trap. Eat in the Dining Pavilion or step outside the mall entirely: the Trail corridor south toward Southchase, covered in our corridor food guide, offers independent kitchens at local prices a short drive away. And plot the trip on the Orlando Top Spots Map: from Southchase it is one road, north on the Trail to Sand Lake — the simplest big outing in the area’s weekly repertoire.
What the mall means to the south side
It is easy, from the trendier retail districts, to treat The Florida Mall as a tourist artifact. From Southchase it looks different: it is the south side’s department-store district, prom-dress and back-to-school headquarters, and the place where generations of local teenagers held first jobs. Its 1986 opening predates most of Southchase’s housing, which means the community effectively grew up in the mall’s orbit — the subdivisions filled in south of a retail anchor that was already there. That history explains the loyalty underneath the logistics in this guide. A Southchase family at the Florida Mall is not visiting an attraction; it is using its mall, one that happens to draw twenty million visits a year and shoppers from three continents. Go with that dual citizenship in mind — tourist scale, local errand — and the place makes a kind of sense no amount of parking-lot circling can obscure. And when the errand list is done, the Trail home runs past dinner options the mall’s food court cannot match, which is its own south-side dividend.
Photo: Miosotis Jade, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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