The World Golf Hall of Fame Closed Three Years Ago. A 1996 Contract Might Keep It Empty Until 2046.

"It is literally a ghost town." That's how Kerry Naione, who lives near World Golf Village, described the old Hall of Fame corner to News4JAX this August. Anyone who has looped past Kelly Lake in the last three years knows exactly what she means. The IMAX marquee is dark. The granite Walk of Champions still lists every Hall of Fame inductee by name, but there's no museum behind it anymore. And Caddyshack, the restaurant that anchored that stretch of World Golf Village for more than two decades, has closed too.

Most people who live in St. Johns County have a working theory about why: something about a lawsuit, something about the PGA Tour moving out. That's the surface version. The real answer is more specific and more interesting, because it isn't really a story about golf. It's a story about a single paragraph of paperwork written in 1996, and why that paragraph might outlast the golf boom it was written for by two more decades.

What actually closed, and when

The timeline is worth laying out plainly, because the pieces closed in a sequence that made the site's decline feel gradual rather than sudden. The World Golf Hall of Fame ended operations at World Golf Village on September 1, 2023, and relocated to Pinehurst, North Carolina, where the organization originally started. The IMAX theater kept running documentaries into 2024 before it shut down as well. The PGA Tour Productions facility, the other anchor tenant on the site, moved out to Ponte Vedra Beach at the end of 2024. Caddyshack's closure this year was the last of the original attractions to go dark.

St. Johns County ended up owning the Hall of Fame building and the IMAX theater outright after the ground lease on that property was terminated in April 2024. That sounds like it should simplify things. A local government owns a vacant building on land it also owns, so it can decide what goes there next. Except it can't, and the reason why is the actual story.

The paragraph from 1996 that's still in charge

Back when World Golf Village was created as a 6,300-acre Development of Regional Impact, the master developer wrote a use restriction into the deed. The exact language, which has surfaced in county records and local reporting, states that for fifty years from July 31, 1996, the Hall of Fame and golf course parcels can be used only for the Hall of Fame, an 18-hole golf course and clubhouse, a PGA Tour Productions facility, a sports medicine facility, an IMAX or similar entertainment facility, and nothing else. The restriction runs with the title, meaning it doesn't disappear when the land changes hands or when the county takes ownership. It attaches to the dirt.

That single clause is why the county owning the building changed nothing practical. St. Johns County can hold the deed all it wants, but it still can't legally turn that building into, say, a community theater, a mixed-use retail hub, or anything else outside that narrow original list, unless the restriction itself is lifted or expires. And it doesn't expire until 2046.

Why suing over it didn't work

The World Golf Foundation, which still owns roughly 36.7 acres nearby including the former PGA Tour Productions building, tried the direct route. It sued the master developer, a company now called IT Land Associates, arguing that the original vision for the site no longer exists and that the restriction should be lifted because it's no longer economically viable to comply with it.

In August 2026, St. Johns County Circuit Judge R. Lee Smith ruled against that argument. The court found that the covenant still provides a real legal benefit to IT Land Associates, and that a building sitting empty or losing money isn't the kind of changed circumstance that lets a court void a decades-old deed restriction. The trial that had been scheduled for later that month never happened. Greg McLaughlin, the World Golf Foundation's CEO, told the St. Johns Citizen afterward, "We're disappointed that the judge ruled as he did," and said the Foundation was weighing whether to seek a rehearing or appeal to the Fifth District Court of Appeal.

For anyone hoping the courts would force a quick resolution, that ruling closed the door. But it isn't the only door.

The narrow path that's still open

A few days after the ruling, News4JAX reported that county officials were framing the situation as stalled, not finished. The mechanism they described is a little unusual: one of the parties that owns land subject to the restriction is reportedly working to acquire the remaining Development of Regional Impact rights from IT Land Associates directly. Buying those rights would come with the authority to terminate the restriction itself, without needing a judge to do it. If that deal closes, the next step is negotiating with the other affected property owners, including the county, to extinguish the covenant entirely. Once that happens, the land can be sold and redeveloped free of the 2046 clock.

County officials told News4JAX that if a deal comes together, residents could see an actual redevelopment proposal within 45 to 60 days. That's a strikingly short window for a property that's been in limbo for three years, and it's the detail most coverage of the lawsuit has buried under the more dramatic headline about the ruling itself.

What residents want, and what it's costing to wait

The county has already run one attempt at a public-private partnership process for the Hall of Fame building on its own, separate from the Foundation's land. That request for proposals went out in June 2025, drew 49 respondents by the end of the month, and moved toward a shortlist through the back half of 2025. In December 2025, the county rejected both shortlisted proposals after learning about a $20 million private renovation planned for the Renaissance Resort next door. Commissioner Christian Whitehurst argued that the hotel investment strengthened the county's negotiating position enough to justify starting over, calling it a private-sector gift that changed the math.

That reset says something the lawsuit doesn't: there's still real capital circling this site. Investors are willing to put money into World Golf Village even with the anchor building empty and boxed in by a covenant, which suggests the demand problem isn't demand at all. It's the paperwork.

Residents seem to sense that too. When News4JAX asked people living nearby what they'd want to see there, one resident floated something informal, using the existing walking loop around Kelly Lake for food trucks and craft vendors rather than waiting for a single large-scale answer. It's a modest idea, but it reflects a broader mood: people aren't attached to rebuilding a golf museum. They just want the corner to do something again.

Back in mid-2025, County Administrator Joy Andrews put a number on what waiting costs: budgeted maintenance for keeping the vacant building's air conditioning running and preventing damage was running close to $400,000 a year, even though actual spending stayed minimal while the space sat unused. That gap between budgeted and actual cost is itself a signal of how temporary the county expected this arrangement to be, or at least hoped it would be.

What this means if you already live here

If you're timing your expectations around a rebuilt Hall of Fame corner, the honest answer is that nothing changes fast on its own. The judge's ruling this August means the legal shortcut is gone, and the restriction stands until 2046 unless the private buyout path plays out. But that path is active right now, not theoretical, and the county's own 45-to-60-day estimate suggests the next real update could land well before the end of this year if the ownership transfer goes through.

The site everyone drives past on the way to the Bucee's or the World Golf Village exit off I-95 is frozen for a specific, traceable legal reason, not because nobody wants to touch it. That's the part worth knowing the next time someone asks what's going on out there.

If you're weighing a move into St. Johns County or watching how a corridor like this one might reshape the neighborhoods around it, Pamela Hoffman can walk you through what these kinds of shifts tend to mean for the area long term. Let's Talk About Your Move.