Private development partners and public officials recently wielded gold-plated shovels to break ceremonial ground in the town of Greenburgh on a $20-million retail project that a county official called “a beginning of a new way of looking at land use in Westchester.”
That new vision cited by Westchester County Planning Commissioner Edward Burroughs will bring retail uses and eventually residential development to underutilized parking lots and undeveloped parcels on office-park properties in the county.
White Hickory Associates L.L.C., a partnership that includes some pioneers of office-park development in Westchester, hosted a groundbreaking ceremony in a parking lot and weedy field of broken asphalt beside the Sheraton Hotel on Route 119 in Greenburgh. On a 14-acre site last occupied about 25 years ago by the Premier Theater, the developer will build Premier Plaza, anchored by a 58,000-square-foot Super Stop & Shop grocery store. Targeted for completion by the end of this year, the plaza also will include a 12,500-square-foot retail store.
The developer later plans to add a 3,800-square-foot bank and a 14,500-square-foot retail building to the office-park site, for which Greenburgh officials approved mixed-use zoning.
A Stop & Shop official said the grocery, which will replace a smaller Stop & Shop store in the nearby village of Tarrytown, will employ about 200 full-time and part-time workers. Stop & Shop, based in Quincy, Mass., will invest some $4 million in its supermarket build-out.
“The example we have here of a supermarket within an office park is advanced thinking,” said developer Robert F. Weinberg. Weinberg is president of Robert Martin Co. L.L.C. in Elmsford, one of the country”™s first office-park developers. His company”™s partners in White Hickory Associates are J.A.H. Realties L.P. and Warren Lesser.
Elmsford Village Manager Michael Mills said the supermarket will benefit his community as well as the villages of Tarrytown and Irvington. “In this day and age, to get a project done like this, we have to reach across municipal lines to make it work,” he said.
The project is financed by Webster Bank. General contractor is KBE Building Corp., of Farmington, Conn.
The project will create about 125 construction jobs.
