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Shopping Centers Today -> July 2001
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RETAIL ’HORIZONS’ BRIGHTEN IN SOUTH BRONX
By Edmund Mander
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| New Horizons will provide an economic boost for the Bronx's Crotona Park East. |
By Edmund Mander Ralph Porter has worked hard over the years to create a more positive reputation for his neighborhood, portrayed as a blighted urban battleground in the 1981 film starring Paul Newman, "Fort Apache, the Bronx."
Finally his efforts are paying off, with a new shopping center — appropriately called New Horizons — that will provide a badly needed economic boost to the Crotona Park East section of the South Bronx. Fulfilling a 30-year dream for Porter, who heads a community development organization, work began this spring on a $30.7 million, 134,000-square-foot shopping center on a 10-acre, formerly industrial-zoned site. "It’s going to change the environment," said Porter, president of the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes, the South Bronx community housing and development group that is building the project.
A Pathmark supermarket will anchor the center, providing residents something they haven’t had for decades — a 24-hour source for groceries, pharmaceuticals and other items, all within walking distance of their homes. Additional stores will include The Athlete’s Foot, Petland Discount, Blockbuster Video and Ashley Stewart.
The center also will directly generate about 300 jobs, Porter said. But it will do a lot more than simply give residents a place to shop and work, he added.
"It will spur other businesses to start looking at our community," he said, explaining that this has always been the main goal of his group. Up to now the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes has focused on housing, providing about 2,300 apartments and 440 new family homes over the years in an area laid to waste by the loss of industry, poor city planning and social upheaval. "Our major mission was to stop the devastation and to save the housing stock."
It has taken years for Porter to get the project off the ground with his co-developer, the Neighborhood Enhancement and Training Services (NETS), a Bronx-based, not-for-profit group. A big hurdle was persuading city officials to rezone the industrial site, which Porter said has been unused since 1986, for retail. This challenge has faced retailers elsewhere in Harlem and the Bronx, who have found themselves blocked by officials reluctant to acknowledge that heavy industry isn’t returning to American cities. The group, which began planning the project in 1993, broke ground in January, and aims to have the supermarket completed in the late fall, with the rest of the center opening next year.
Also working on the project is The Hutensky Group, a Hartford, Conn.-based development and management firm that is leasing the center.
Up until now the neighborhood’s 110,000 residents have been without a supermarket, something that would be unheard of in the suburbs, said Joe French, senior vice president of The Hutensky Group.
"The greatest reward is that you’re able to bring people something they deserve, something that people in the suburbs have known forever," he said. The Hutensky Group has made something of a specialty of inner-city retail projects, having built a 64,000-square-foot Pathmark supermarket-anchored center in Harlem, and other centers in Chicago and New Haven, Conn. "We’re responding to a need."
French concurred with Porter’s view that the center will encourage further commercial development in the area, observing that the process is already well under way with some of the residential construction the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes has completed.
"You have homes; you have a solid economic base," he said. "This is an area that he has turned around."
 | Current Issue November 2008 |