World Golf Village, honestly: the name outlived the museum.

The tourist core emptied out in stages. The World Golf Hall of Fame closed in early September 2023 and reopened at Pinehurst in May 2024 — golf’s shrine went home to North Carolina. The IMAX theater went dark in December 2024. PGA TOUR Studios finished moving its production operation to Ponte Vedra Beach by January 2025. And in June 2026, after twenty-five years, Murray Bros. Caddyshack served its last Saturday — the village core’s longest-running tenant, gone with a gracious goodbye and no stated reason. The Walk of Champions retail ring had been fading far longer; what remains there today leases to local services, not tourists.

I tell you this plainly because pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence — and because the list of what closed is only half the story.

The golf never left. The King & Bear — the only course Palmer and Nicklaus ever co-designed — came out of a five-month, $2.5 million restoration in October 2024, and the Slammer & Squire plays on beside it, both managed under the Troon umbrella. The Renaissance resort sold in July 2025 for $24.25 million to a hotel group planning a reported $20 million renovation — a buyer does not spend that on a dying address — and the county-owned convention center keeps its calendar full. And the neighborhoods themselves — King & Bear’s gated streets, Cascades’ 55+ village, Turnberry, Heritage Landing, Murabella, the condos — never blinked.

Here is the kitchen-table version I give buyers. In 1996, the land under the village core was deed-restricted to golf-and-entertainment uses for fifty years. The foundation that ran the Hall of Fame sued in 2025 to lift that restriction so the core could become something new; two development visions surfaced that fall — a family golf-entertainment campus and a medical/senior-living village — and commissioners rejected both. In July 2026 a circuit judge upheld the restriction: it stands until 2046 unless the parties negotiate otherwise, and the county insists a negotiated path still exists. So the museum buildings sit dark, in legal limbo, while everything around them grows. My advice never changes: buy the home and the neighborhood that exist today, and treat whatever eventually fills the core as a bonus you didn’t pay for.

This is the part the “ghost town” headlines never print. While the museum wound down, International Golf Parkway became one of the fastest-building corridors in Northeast Florida — and I watch buyers discover it with something like disbelief. Florida’s first Buc-ee’s opened at the interchange in 2021. Costco followed in 2022 — St. Johns County’s first. Bass Pro Shops in November 2024. Home Depot in April 2025. A Walmart Supercenter is under construction now, and in March 2026 Publix opened its largest store in Northeast Florida at SilverLeaf, one parkway over — with a wine bar, because that is where this corridor is headed.

The infrastructure kept pace: the new County Road 2209 corridor opened through 2025–2026, finally connecting CR-210 to SR-16 behind the Village, and the SR-16/IGP widening is scheduled to finish in spring 2027. The county’s newer schools — Tocoi Creek High (2021) and the brand-new Magnolia Oaks Academy, a K-8 opened August 2026 — serve these ZIP codes. And Baptist Health opened its SilverLeaf medical campus in June 2026, with a full emergency center scheduled to open in September 2026. Grocery, roads, schools, a hospital: every fundamental a neighborhood actually lives on arrived after the museum closed.

Five miles east on US-1, Palencia runs the opposite model — and it is the comparison my golf-minded buyers actually wrestle with. Palencia is the private-club version: an Arthur Hills course whose club changed hands in October 2025 to a national club operator with a reputation for reinvestment, a village center, mature oak streets, and a boardwalk that walks you to the Intracoastal. World Golf Village is the play-without-joining version — two resort courses, generally more house per dollar, and the new corridor’s conveniences at the front gate. Neither answer is wrong; they are different lives. Palencia’s page is here — and when you’re ready, I’ll walk you through both in one afternoon; they’re fifteen minutes apart.