Nine months after breaking ground, the Skyland Town Center officially has its anchor.

Wal-Mart has signed a lease to bring a big box store to the long-planned Ward 7 development, the fulfillment of a promise Mayor Vince Gray made near the beginning of his term. Gray will leave office on January 2.

When Gray began negotiating with Wal-Mart to bring the first Walmart stores to D.C., he made it known that, without Skyland, the deal was off.

“They’re interested in developing four stores,” Gray told the Post in 2011. “All of us said, ‘What about a fifth store?’ They hemmed and hawed, and it ultimately came down to — you have a choice. You can do five stores or you can do no stores.”

When Wal-Mart threatened to cancel plans for three stores, including Skyland, over the Large Retailer Accountability Act, Gray vetoed the minimum wage bill and Wal-Mart said the plans would move forward. At the March groundbreaking, a Wal-Mart representative said the company was “pleased to be the anchor” of the shopping center, but a lease was not signed until December, as the Washington Business Journal first reported.

When asked by NBC4’s Tom Sherwood on a recent episode of the The Politics Hour if Wal-Mart would sign an agreement before the end of his term, Gray said “there’s a good chance we could. … I can’t say with certainty.”

Wal-Mart has already completed stores on H Street NW and Georgia Avenue NW.