What's Finally Moving Into the Empty Corners of the Village at Waugh Chapel
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Drive Route 3 through Gambrills any weekday afternoon and you already know the rhythm of the Village at Waugh Chapel. Safeway anchors one end, HomeGoods and TJ Maxx hold the middle, Chick-fil-A and Newk's Eatery keep the lunch line moving, and LA Fitness fills the far corner with cars that show up before sunrise. What you might not have clocked is how long the rest of that center sat still. Urban Edge Properties bought the shopping center on October 29, 2024, for $126 million, financed in part with a $60 million interest-only mortgage. For close to two years after that purchase, the tenant roster barely moved.
That changed all at once. Four leases signed this month brought the center to 97 percent occupancy, and the businesses filling those last storefronts tell you more about where this corridor is headed than another grocery anchor would.
The new signees are J.Crew Factory, MINISO, Quickway Hibachi, and a Wonder food hall, together taking up 23,791 square feet. None of them are strangers to Anne Arundel County. J.Crew Factory's Gambrills store will be its third in the county. MINISO is opening its second local expansion here, and at 8,581 square feet, it's the largest of the four new leases. Quickway Hibachi will be its fifth county location. Wonder, at 7,788 square feet, becomes the brand's third Anne Arundel outpost, joining locations already running in Annapolis and Glen Burnie.
That's worth sitting with for a second. A landlord with a nearly-full property and two years of quiet didn't fill its last gaps with unproven newcomers betting on Gambrills as a test market. It filled them with concepts that had already found an audience a few exits away. Kyle Irwin, Urban Edge's senior director of leasing, described the leases as reflecting demand from retailers and restaurants already seeking well-located centers, which lines up with a roster built entirely from repeat performers rather than experiments.
Wonder is the one most likely to change your Tuesday night. It's a tech-driven food hall built around a single kitchen that turns out meals from more than 20 different concepts, several of them designed with chefs including Bobby Flay and Jose Andres. The Gambrills location doesn't have a confirmed opening day yet, but a company representative told Patch to expect it sometime in October, which puts it on track to open within weeks of this post.
The rest of the mix reads less like a gamble and more like an update to an established formula:
A few minutes down Route 3, at 1166 Maryland Route 3, a different kind of storefront gap just closed. Back Nine, an indoor golf simulator club, opened in a roughly 3,866-square-foot space earlier this year, and it runs on a schedule nothing else on this stretch of road does: 24 hours, every day of the year. The simulators use Full Swing technology, letting members play recreations of well-known courses regardless of what the weather is doing outside, and reviews posted in March and April describe the buildout as new enough that the smell of fresh paint was still part of the experience.
What makes Back Nine a different story from the retail leases up the road is who's behind it. This is the first franchise location for Nate and Nirali DePasquale, both Anne Arundel County residents, and the company's own materials frame the opening as bringing the concept directly into a community they already live in rather than expanding a distant chain into new territory.
There's a small detail that connects both stories more than the map does. Back Nine's own website markets the location under the URL "thebackninegolf.com/crofton-md," even though its street address puts it in Gambrills. The same is true of the Village at Waugh Chapel coverage, most of which ran through outlets covering "the Crofton area" despite the center's Gambrills mailing address. That's not a factual error repeated by multiple sources. It's how this stretch of Route 3 actually gets talked about by the people who live and do business along it. Zip code and identity have drifted apart here, and everyone from a golf simulator franchisee to a national food hall's local franchise partners seems to have made peace with it.
Put the two stories together and the corridor looks less like scattered leasing news and more like a single shift. For most of 2025, this stretch of Route 3 had one mode after dark: national anchors and drive-through lines that thinned out by early evening. By the end of this October, it will have a food hall built around a rotating set of chef-driven concepts and a golf facility that never closes its doors. Neither of those existed here a year ago.
None of this changes what the corridor has always done well. Safeway is still the anchor grocery run. LA Fitness still fills its lot before most people are awake. Chick-fil-A and Newk's aren't going anywhere. What's different is what happens after those errands are done. A food hall with an October opening date and a golf club that's open at midnight both point toward the same answer: somewhere to be, on this same stretch of road, later in the day than the center has ever really offered before.
If you've been driving past the same fenced-off pad site for two years wondering what would eventually go in, the wondering is mostly over. J.Crew Factory, MINISO, and Quickway Hibachi will fill in the retail side through the rest of the fall, Wonder is aiming for October, and Back Nine is already running bays around the clock a few minutes away. The corridor didn't get bigger. It got busier for more hours of the day than it used to be.
Route 3's changing lineup is the kind of local detail we track because we live in this area too. If you're curious how shifts like this one connect to what's happening with homes nearby, the Lucas Knott Laye Team of Lofgren-Sargent Real Estate is always glad to talk through it. Contact Us.
Photo credit source: www.shopwaughchapel.com
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