A two-story office building on Route 38 near the Moorestown Mall is planned to be converted into a Giant Fitness and Jersey Girls fitness gym, with each of the fitness brands to be located on their own dedicated floors.

The Route 38 commercial office building most recently was home to a mortgage company, and sits across from the Strawbridge Lake Park less than 1/2 mile from the Moorestown Mall property.

With demand for office space decreasing in the nation and locally, this type of “new use” conversion is something we are likely to see a lot more of in the coming years.

The Moorestown Zoning Board approved the use-variance to operate the former office building as a fitness center. The Giant Fitness team will return in early 2025 for approvals on signage and landscaping… but the use-variance approval is clearly the important one.

Giant Fitness is a well known and locally owned gym and fitness center with several locations in South Jersey and Philadelphia. Several years ago they created a second fitness brand “Jersey Girls Fitness Centers”, which is a women’s only gym space focused on women’s fitness including dedicated equipment and classroom workout spaces.

Actually Jersey Girls is much more than just a space carved out of a larger gym… Owner Sam Balducci and family are developing Jersey Girls as fully separate operating gyms, either adjacent to an existing Giant Fitness location or in some cases such as Westville NJ, a dedicated freestanding Jersey Girl facility.

For the planned Moorestown location the almost 60,000 square foot two-story building is perfectly configured to support each of the two brands on different floors.

Each floor will offer a large cardio area of approximately (80-100) cardio machines on each floor, workout machines, free weight areas and more.,

It’s interesting to note that with Giant Fitness on the first floor where space is also allocated to associated fitness retail as well as the building reception area, the Jersey Girl space on the 2nd floor (including dedicated Pilates and Aerobics rooms)… is actually larger than the Giant Fitness gym below it!

As mentioned the Giant Fitness team has already presented in front of the Moorestown Zoning Board.

It was originally intended to be completely reviewed and approved in the December hearing but the Board and Professionals offered suggestions for better signage options which would be more visible to commuters in Route 38, as well as requesting additional clarity on some landscaping aspects… so the more important use-variance aspect was addressed and approved, and the applicant will return for approval (likely February) on the smaller aspects.

The applicant noted during the hearing that there is over 2 Million square feet of available office space in the areas surrounding Morristown and that commercial office use is on the decline.

This has developers and business owners looking at unused office buildings in different ways… at times introducing innovative uses to reutilize the spaces (such as a fitness center) and make them a positive part of the community and the Township.

In fact at the end of the hearing during the vote, several Board members volunteered that they were happy to see the now empty building planned for utilized in a positive way for the community.

This plan follows a pattern that we’re seeing in other areas… both related to the declining needs of office space as well as reuse or redevelopment.

An eight-story office tower in Voorhees (adjacent to the Voorhees Town Center mall) is expected to become converted into senior apartments but meanwhile a nine story office tower at the Cherry Hill mall will be demolished to make way for a new Dick’s House of Sport retail store.

Link and Location

Giant Fitness & Jersey Girls Moorestown – Planned
304 Route 38
Moorestown NJ