Trader Joe’s opening second 14th Street location
Rendering of 432-438 East 14th Street via Benenson Capital Partners, LLC
It’s been 11 years since Trader Joe’s opened its first NYC location on Union Square, and now the discount grocer has three others in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. This past year, they announced that new outposts will open in Brooklyn Heights, the Upper West Side (their second in the neighborhood), Soho, and on the Lower East Side at Essex Crossing, and today The Real Deal reports they’ve inked a deal for a 23,000-square-foot space across from Stuyvesant Town, just three avenues east on 14th Street from their original store. The site at 432 East 14th Street is replacing the former Stuyvesant Post Office, a controversial closure that even launched a local “save the post office” campaign.
Union Square’s Trader Joe’s via Wiki Commons
Trader Joe’s first scoped out space at Extell’s larger forthcoming residential/retail project on the corner of 14th and Avenue A, but Target recently signed a 30-year lease there and the grocery chain settled instead on the storefront at Mack Real Estate and Benenson Capital Partners’ 432 East 14th Street. Here, they’ll have 8,531 square on the ground floor and 14,170 square feet on the lower level. In total, the $107 million development will have nearly 88,000 square feet of residential space for 113 units, 23 of which will be affordable.
Their decision to open a second East Village location stems from the long lines and crowds at the Union Square store. When the Extell deal was still on the table, the development company’s vice president Ari Goldstein told DNAinfo, “[Union Square] is their most profitable store right now, and the line to get in that store … is insane. They’re concerned they’re losing credibility with their customers because they’re not offering a good quality experience. So this would supplement that and pull a lot of traffic away from that store.”
[Via TRD]
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