Ask someone in New Town where they buy groceries and you'll get an answer that means nothing to anyone who doesn't already live here: Old Publix or New Publix. Not Searstown Plaza or Key Plaza. Not the store's actual name on the sign. Just old and new, spoken like everyone already knows which is which.
Here's the problem. The names are about to stop making sense, and not in a small way. Old Publix is getting torn down and rebuilt from the studs. New Publix isn't new at all anymore. And Key Plaza, the shopping center everyone still calls Kmart Plaza even though Kmart left in 2022, is next in line for its own rebuild. If you live in New Town and run errands on North Roosevelt Boulevard, you're looking at years of construction fencing on both ends of the strip, happening at the same time, on two properties whose nicknames are already lying to you.
Searstown is coming down first
Searstown Plaza has anchored North Roosevelt since 1966. Publix bought the whole center in January 2022, including the Sears building that had sat empty since August 2020, and this summer the demolition finally became visible. Crews cratered a hole in the front of the old Sears store by the end of June 2026, and a construction fence now wraps that end of the plaza, including the freestanding Sears Auto Center building next door.
The plan, approved by the Key West City Commission in April 2025, unfolds in four phases specifically designed to keep the rest of the plaza open while the rebuild happens around it. Publix will move into the demolished Sears footprint first, then a new supermarket goes up at the opposite end where the current store sits. The businesses staying put during construction include:
- TJ Maxx
- Outback Steakhouse
- Royal Furniture
- Imagination Station
- Medical offices
- The Monroe County driver's license office
That last one matters if you've ever needed to renew a license or register a car in Key West. It's staying in the plaza through the rebuild, though which building it ends up in by the time the dust settles is still an open question.
The full project, which the developer's attorney has told the city will replace the center's roughly 180,000 square feet of retail space, is expected to finish in phases through 2031, with the first phase opening by fall 2028. That's a five-year construction timeline for a shopping center New Town residents pass through several times a week.
The plaza is also getting a new name: Conch RePublix Shoppes. It has not landed well with everyone. One longtime local columnist recently admitted the rebrand made a friend of hers audibly groan when she mentioned it.
Key Plaza is right behind it
While Searstown demolition was already underway, Key Plaza, the roughly 19-acre center at North Roosevelt and Kennedy Drive, had its own project clear its first city hurdle. The Development Review Committee reviewed the proposal in late June 2026, the earliest formal step before a project reaches the Planning Board and a City Commission vote.
The scope is comparable to what's happening down the street. Nearly the entire center would be demolished and rebuilt in four phases, with a new Publix raised a full story above the floodplain and parking tucked underneath, matching the approach at Searstown. Total commercial square footage would actually shrink, from about 256,000 square feet down to roughly 190,925, with the extra land going toward landscaping and stormwater improvements instead of more retail. The project's estimated cost runs north of $20 million, close to the roughly $37 million currently being spent on the Searstown rebuild.
The catch is timing. The developer's own attorney estimated the city approval process alone, everything from HARC review to the Tree Commission to a final commission vote, could take six months to a year and a half before construction even starts. That puts Key Plaza's ground-breaking somewhere in 2027, which lines up almost exactly with the middle stretch of Searstown's five-year build. For a while, New Town residents may be navigating active construction at both ends of North Roosevelt Boulevard at once.
The Old Publix, New Publix problem
Here's where the nicknames stop working. Publix numbers its stores by age, the lower the number the older the location. The Searstown store is #500. The Key Plaza store, which was an Albertsons until July 2012, is #1445. Locally, the #500 store became known as Old Publix and the #1445 store became New Publix, shorthand that had nothing to do with the buildings themselves and everything to do with which corporate flag went up first.
That shorthand is about to invert. Once the Searstown rebuild finishes, the store everyone calls Old Publix will be sitting in a brand new building, built to current flood codes with a covered parking deck, while the store everyone calls New Publix will still be occupying the same structure it's had since 2012, waiting for its own turn under the wrecking ball. A recent column in Key West Island News walked through exactly this tangle, joking that once Key Plaza gets its rebuild too, the old New Publix will need a new nickname just to keep up: something like New New Publix, which nobody is actually going to say out loud.
None of the obvious alternatives have caught on either. Calling them Searstown Publix and Key Plaza Publix works until you remember Searstown itself is getting renamed to Conch RePublix Shoppes, and half the neighborhood still calls Key Plaza by a store that's been closed for four years. Store numbers are accurate and completely useless in conversation. So Old Publix and New Publix persist, even as they become less true with every month of construction.
What this actually means if you live here
The practical version of all this: expect construction fencing, shifted parking, and phased store closures on both ends of North Roosevelt Boulevard for a good chunk of the next five years, not sequentially but likely overlapping. The businesses that have anchored these two plazas for decades, from Outback Steakhouse to Royal Furniture to the driver's license office, are staying through the process, just not necessarily in the same spot they've always been. And the two-word system New Town has used for years to tell one Publix from the other is going to keep drifting further from the truth the longer both projects run.
It's a strange kind of continuity. The buildings change, the businesses mostly stay, and the names everyone actually uses stop matching what's on the ground. If you've lived in New Town long enough to already know exactly which Publix someone means when they say "old" or "new," hang onto that instinct. It's going to be tested.
If you're watching what's happening on North Roosevelt and want to talk through what it might mean for a specific property in New Town, Dan Serban knows this corridor block by block and is glad to walk through it with you.
