The Arcadian Shopping Center in Ossining will receive a makeover during the next seven months.
The end result is that the Route 9 shopping plaza will gain a larger Stop & Shop grocery store and some of its tenants will be reconfigured.
Urstadt Biddle Properties, a real estate investment trust in Greenwich, Conn., last month received a site plan approval from the town of Ossining slightly to change the construction of the new Stop & Shop building.
The new grocery store building will be 10,000 square feet larger than the existing one, and the site will be regraded to make it flatter, said Willing Biddle, president of Urstadt Biddle.
“It will make it more accessible for customers,” he said.
The old building will be demolished and the new one constructed on the same site.
Construction will take about seven months, Biddle said, during which time the Stop & Shop will not be open. It closed Aug. 16.
When completed, “the shopping center will look different,” said Biddle.
As part of the construction, 12,000 square feet of building space next to the grocery store has already been torn down.
Four tenants were affected by that construction and have already been relocated to other parts of the shopping center, said Biddle. Those relocations were done in the spring.
Biddle said the previous building that housed the Stop & Shop and the four smaller stores was antiquated and an upgrade was needed.
“It really was out of date,” he said. “This will be a much-improved building and store.”
The previous building was constructed in the 1970s, said Biddle, and first housed a department store. Finast Supermarkets moved there in the early 1980s. Stop & Shop arrived in 1997.
Tim Mahoney, senior director of real estate for Stop & Shop, said the construction would remedy a number of problems, including limited front-of-store parking, and making a more conducive interior layout for the supermarket.
“What we are going to do is to knock it all down and start over again,” he said. “We are flattening the parking area, moving all the parking to the front of the store in reorienting the parking . We’re providing not only a better shopping experience for our customers and offering more convenience but we’re also offering our workers a better working experience.”
Mahoney said the reincarnated building would face Westchester Community College.
He said Stop & Shop has been working for some time with the town and its Planning Board on the project, and that construction would commence “any day now.”
Urstadt Biddle purchased the property in 1998 with plans to redevelop the shopping center over a period of time. The new Stop & Shop is part of that redevelopment plan, as is a reconfigured parking lot, Biddle said.
Urstadt Biddle owns shopping plazas in several parts of Westchester County, including White Plains, Somers, Rye and Scarsdale.
Stop & Shop has twelve stores in Westchester, according to its Web site.
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