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Shopping Centers Today -> May 2004
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FOREST CITY PLANS ANOTHER NYC-AREA RETAIL CENTER
BY IAN RITTER
Yonkers is the fourth-largest city in New York state, though you would not know that from its sparse retail offerings. But Forest City Ratner plans to put the town on the retail map with a major mixed-use center.
The company plans to break ground on Ridge Hill Village Center, a development with 1.2 million square feet of retail, up to 800 residential units, 150,000 square feet of office space and a hotel, by next spring. The center will sit off the New York State Thruway, near Stew Leonard’s, an upscale, regional grocery store; and a Costco.
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“It will be a type of experience that doesn’t exist in the [New York City] metropolitan area,” Pesin said.
Anchors at Ridge Hill Village could include department stores and discounters, he says; the other tenants will probably be a mix of upscale and more moderately priced stores. A movie theater and restaurants are in the works too. No names have been announced yet, however.
Paul Guthrie, president of Guthrie Retail Development, a Yonkers-based brokerage and development firm, lives five minutes from the Ridge Hill site by car and says there is little competition in the area for a large shopping center.
“There’s a lot of room for retail here,” said Guthrie, who isn’t affiliated with the project. “I think it will be a big success.”
Yonkers has nearly 200,000 residents; the surrounding Westchester County is home to nearly 1 million people. Currently, local consumers are driving more than 15 miles north to Hawthorne, N.Y., to shop and watch movies. The most significant retail in the area consists of two undersized grocery stores, he says, and there is little in the way of discount or upscale shopping.
The retail Forest City will build on the site could attract residents not only from the southern portion of Westchester, but also the nearby Bronx, which lacks the quality of stores Forest City is likely to bring in, Guthrie says.
Forest City is already active in the New York City area. In Brooklyn it has a $2.5 billion project in the pipeline around a future home for the New Jersey Nets basketball team that would include 300,000 square feet of retail, 2.1 million square feet of office space and 4.4 million square feet of residential units. Forest City Ratner President and CEO Bruce Ratner is in negotiations to buy the Nets, though the deal had not closed at press time. The firm hopes to complete much of that project in time for the 2007 basketball season.
In June 2000 the firm completed the revitalization of a portion of Manhattan’s Times Square. That 306,419-square-foot retail-entertainment development includes an AMC theater and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.
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