NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — The popular ice rink is returning to MacArthur Center this winter season as the city continues to try and support their struggling downtown mall.

Sean Washington, the city’s economic development director, made the announcement about the return of the attraction during Monday’s City Council retreat.

He said the hope is for it to be up and running by this weekend.

“We want to make sure we are bringing foot traffic downtown,” Washington said. “We truly believe that this was a good commitment we should bring back to our great city of Norfolk.”

The rink was not in place last holiday season, the first holiday season that the city of Norfolk owned the 26-acre property. They purchased it out of receivership last year.

As of a year ago, the occupancy rate for the more than one million-square-foot mall was just below 58%. Since then, Dillard’s closed, leaving the mall without a major anchor store.

Currently, there are 83 full-time clients still within the mall, according to Washington.

“If you walk through the facility, the asset is kept in a very pristine manner,” Washington said.

Still, the long-term plan is to redevelop the property.

Washington D.C.-based design firm Gensler produced a gleaming image of a mixed-use property on the site that was first shown at this year’s State of the City address.

At the time, Mayor Kenny Alexander went onto detail that there would be a 400-room headquarters hotel and 518,000-square-feet of high-rise living, offering rental and ownership options, along with 172,000-square-feet of destination and community-serving retail, accessed by a 2.5-acre pedestrian promenade.

Washington said Gensler did their research to come up with those figures, finding the city needs more hotel rooms to keep up with a 74% increase in occupancy since before the pandemic.

Since May, Washington said his team has spoken with developers that specialize with headquarter hotels.

“There is a probability that this particular proposal can be done,” Washington said. “There is a lot of excitement from those private developers about doing work and partnering in the city of Norfolk. Everybody is saying the same thing — we did not realize again the jewel that exists in the city of Norfolk and we really expect some proposals to come in, in a short amount of time.”

He did, however, say some developers were skeptical with moving forward due to the interest rate environment and lack of more firm details.

“We need to get a little more in the detail and in the weeds about what specifically we are looking to see,” Washington said.

By spring, he hopes to have a master developer hired on who can work in parallel to take down this whole particular site.

However right now, S.L. Nusbaum Realty Co. has been told to continue leasing. Just don’t lease anything past 2026.

City Council members didn’t have any immediate questions, but rather, comments surrounded around making sure the process doesn’t go the way redevelopment efforts went at Military Circle Mall.

“I just hope moving forward that this doesn’t move into another Military Circle, in which we put it out to bid, we got all these great proposals and we find out every single one of them want a lot of money from the city of Norfolk,” Councilman Tommy Smigiel said. “We can’t be the one to have to give everything towards these properties.”

Alexander responded that there would be no deals that require a tax rate increase.

“If it’s new revenue that’s generated from the project, we can look at performance grant,” Alexander said. “… Until we get into the weeds, we just don’t know.”