What’s Changing This Fall at Great Escape & Aviation Mall

Drive past the east end of Aviation Mall on a Wednesday night in November and there are cars in the lot. Not many, but some, parked near an entrance that sat dark for seven years after Sears closed in 2018. That corner of the building is now an indoor go-kart track with a bar that faces the racing line, and it opened in the same season the mall itself was sold at a foreclosure auction at the Warren County Municipal Center.

Those two facts look like they should contradict each other. They don't. If you have lived in Queensbury for any length of time, you have read a run of headlines that sound like decline: a mall in foreclosure, a national fabric chain liquidating, Six Flags selling off the amusement park. What those headlines actually describe is a turnover of empty square footage, and the practical result for a resident is that the town has more places to spend a Saturday between September and April than it had two years ago. The vacancies got filled. That is the story, and almost nobody has written it that way.

The same four boxes, read in order

Here is the pattern in one view. Each of these is a building most of us drive past weekly.

That last row matters as much as the first three. Backfilling a big box is not automatic, and one of Queensbury's largest empty spaces had sat unfilled through two ownership structures. What changed recently is the rate at which the others got taken.

Fright Fest 2026 is the last one scheduled under the Six Flags name

The Glens Falls Chronicle reported that Six Flags entered a definitive agreement to sell the Great Escape to Kansas City-based EPR Properties, along with six other parks in the United States and Canada. The terms that matter to a household with passes on the fridge: the park continues normal operations through the 2026 season, EPR retains the right to use the Six Flags brand through 2026, and all 2026 season passes and active memberships are honored throughout the year, including multi-park access.

So the Fright Fest that opens September 26 and runs Saturdays and Sundays through October 25 is the last one on the calendar under the current brand arrangement. The daytime program is Boo Fest, with a trick-or-treat trail for younger kids; after dark it turns over to the haunted houses, Skull Manor, CarnEvil and Hell Block VI among them. Park entry is required, and the I Love NY events calendar carries the 2026 dates.

There is a smaller signal on the same property. The Chronicle also reported that Six Flags closed the Johnny Rockets attached to Great Escape Lodge on Route 9 and plans to demolish the building, with Great Escape communications manager Taylor Myers saying plans for a replacement space would be announced within a couple of months. A park changing hands does not usually knock down a restaurant on the way out the door. Somebody is planning for what comes after.

What $21 million bought, and what it did not

Aviation Mall sold at auction on September 10, 2025 for $21 million to Ariel "Eric" Jacobov, president of Concord Capital New York, who had already purchased the mortgage note earlier that year. The bidding history is the interesting part: it opened at roughly $7.4 million, and the underbidding group led by Michael Vopelak stopped at $19 million. Two parties were willing to go past nineteen million dollars for a regional mall in 2025, which is not what the national narrative about enclosed shopping centers would predict. The Times Union covered the sale the day it closed.

The building underneath that price is 630,000 square feet drawing more than 8,000 people a day and generating around $80 million a year in taxable revenue, according to figures general manager James Griffith gave the Saratoga Business Journal at the time of the sale. Nothing closed during the foreclosure. Existing leases transferred with the property, Target owns its own parcel and the lot in front of it, and the mall sits in the town's only enclosed shopping center zoning district, which means any change of use runs through Queensbury's planning process rather than an owner's spreadsheet.

The vacant Bon-Ton wing is where the whole thing gets decided, and Griffith was candid about why it was still empty:

"We've talked to many potential tenants. I think they want to see how ADK Karting does before they step up to the plate and make a decision on that space."

That is the mechanism, stated plainly. One entertainment tenant is being used by every other prospective tenant as a test result. ADK Karting was built by Jeremy Treadway, a Ticonderoga native who lives in Fort Ann and also runs ADK MX on Route 149, into the old Sears box near the food court: a 1,400-foot adult track and a 250-foot kids' track that can be combined into roughly 1,600 feet, electric karts, six racing simulators, an arcade-themed glow-in-the-dark mini golf course, and party rooms. When a Chronicle reporter drove it before opening, an eight-minute race ran $26 for adults and $16 for juniors. As of this year it operates Wednesday through Sunday, year-round, and current hours and pricing are worth confirming at adkkart.com before you load the car.

Upper Glen Street and Route 9 are the same road, and it has been busy

This trips up people who moved here recently and nobody else. When The Chronicle reported in February that Burlington was taking the former JoAnn Fabrics space on Route 9 and going before the Queensbury Zoning Board of Appeals for a sign variance, and when the opening announcement listed 756 Upper Glen Street, Suite 15, those were the same building.

Burlington opened there on August 28, ten days ago, with a ribbon cutting at 8:45 a.m., $10 bonus cards for the first hundred adult customers on opening weekend, and a $5,000 donation to Harrison Avenue Elementary through AdoptAClassroom.org. It is the 76th Burlington in New York State, running 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday, per the Glens Falls news roundup. A national chain filed for bankruptcy in 2025 and a different national chain was open in the same footprint inside eighteen months.

A block up the road, the swap was local rather than national. Kashi Sushi opened August 1, 2025 in the old Uno Pizzeria building at 900 Route 9, across from Walmart. It is the second restaurant for co-owners Henry Ni and Michael Lin, after Soho Asian Bistro in East Greenbush, and it runs all-you-can-eat alongside hibachi with twelve employees, eight of them chefs, seven days a week with a short break between the lunch and dinner services. The Post-Star covered the opening.

Add in the Adirondack Winery and Extreme Heights Cidery tasting room at 395 Big Bay Road, which runs a live music series, and the shape of a Queensbury evening in November looks different than it did in November 2023. Co-owner Sasha Pardy was recognized in June as one of the New York State Restaurant Association's ten women to watch in hospitality.

The outdoor half never went anywhere, but it ends in November

None of this replaces the reason people live here in the first place. Gurney Lane Recreation Area at 118 Gurney Lane carries mountain bike trails from easy to difficult, 1.3 miles of casual nature trail and about a mile of stroller-friendly family path, and it connects to the Rush Pond Trail, a 2.6-mile one-way crushed-stone route through the wetlands that links neighborhoods, schools and the park itself. Trailhead parking sits off West Mountain Road or Fox Farm Road. The wider network runs past thirteen miles, designed and built under retired NYS DEC Forest Ranger Steve Ovitt, and Gurney Lane hosts the Churney Gurney festival each August. The town's trail page also lists Meadowbrook Nature Preserve and the 83 acres at Hudson Pointe.

The Warren County Bikeway runs 9.4 paved miles from Platt Street in Glens Falls north to Ft. George Road in Lake George, with public lots on Leonard Street and on Country Club Road here in town. From December through March, a stretch of it becomes a shared-use designated snowmobile trail with the South Warren Snowmobile Club beginning at Bloody Pond Road, which Warren County DPW spells out.

September is the most active riding month in Warren County according to Trailforks ridelog data, and that is precisely the point. The trail calendar has a hard edge on it. What the last twenty-four months added was a set of places that work on the far side of that edge, when it is dark at 4:30 and the singletrack is frozen or slush.

Longer term, an Adirondack/Glens Falls Transportation Council plan for the town recommends building a 10 to 12 foot sidepath into NYSDOT's scheduled 2029 replacement of the two Gurney Lane bridges over I-87, which would link the Rush Pond and Gurney Lane trails toward Route 9 and the Warren County Municipal Center. That is a recommendation in a planning document, not a funded project, but it is the first serious proposal to connect the trail side of town to the retail side on foot.

Still on the boards

Two proposals worth watching, both unapproved. Lauren Forcier of Hudson Falls has proposed the Adirondack Food Truck Park on a 1.2-acre site at 332 Sherman Avenue, using repurposed shipping containers for permanent vendors plus seasonal vendor space and an onsite hydroponic program for greens and herbs. And The Summit at Bay Meadows, a proposed 110-unit senior living facility off Bay Road, drew mixed early reaction from the Queensbury Planning Board over density and stormwater running into Halfway Brook, with board member Brady Stark noting he counts more than 600 existing apartment and townhouse units on the Bay Road stretch between Lowe's and Surrey Field.

If you are planning the next six weekends

• The Adirondack Balloon Festival lands September 17 through 20, drawing about 100,000 people across Queensbury and Glens Falls. Balloons fly shortly after sunrise and near sunset, not midday, and admission and general parking are free. Plan Route 9 accordingly.
• Fright Fest weekends run September 26 through October 25. Boo Fest during the day, haunted houses after dark.
• Spirit Halloween is back at Aviation Mall for the season, per the mall's own event listings.
• Parking for ADK Karting is easiest in the lots to the left of Target and Peter Harris Clothes.
• If you are looking for the Saturday farmers' market, check glensfallsfarmersmarket.com first. The market moved to The Market & Event Center at 57 South Street in Glens Falls, and whether it returns indoors to the mall this winter is an open question rather than a settled one.

The thing to take from all of this is not that Queensbury is booming or struggling. It is that the ownership churn at our two largest attractions has been mostly invisible at ground level, and the visible change has run the other direction: emptier buildings turning back into places you can actually go on a Wednesday in February. That is a real shift in how a year works here, and it happened without a ribbon cutting for the town as a whole.

If you have been watching these corridors change and wondering what it means for the value of where you live, or what a fall listing looks like in a town whose weekday traffic patterns are being rewritten a box at a time, Dina Coluccio knows this stretch of Warren County street by street. Let's Talk.