The Riverhead location of the building-material supply 84 Lumber chain is closing down. The West Main Street store is being consolidated into a “more capable” storefront in Patchogue, according to a company spokesman.
The company believes the consolidation will allow it to better serve its professional contractors, which make up 85 percent of its customer base in Riverhead, 84 Lumber’s vice president for marketing and public relations Jeff Nobers said.
The company serves “do-it yourself” customers as well, but Nobers said that the Patchogue storefront has been better suited for the casual consumer.
“We realize that people aren’t going to drive from Riverhead to Patchogue to buy a shed,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday, “but [the consolidation] will make us more capable of servicing professional business.”
The Riverhead storefront is already closed to walk-in traffic, but it will finish existing professional jobs as the consolidation winds up. Nobers said he did not have an exact date for the cessation of all operations in Riverhead.
Nobers said that the recent renovations of the Patchogue store, including “hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of remodel[ing] and remerchandis[ing],” will make the Patchogue location, at155 Sills Road E., a larger store more suited to both professional and consumer retail business.
84 Lumber also closed its Islip location in October 2011.
“We’re here to stay on the island,” Nobers said, “but we’ve really looked at the market and how we can service the market now, and it made a lot more sense to consolidate the location.
Founded in 1956 in Eighty Four, Penn. where it is still headquartered, 84 Lumber owns and operates more than 280 stores nationwide. Its Patchogue store is located at
84 Lumber built the existing 18,000-square-foot main building and two storage buildings (12,000 square feet and 6,000 square feet respectively) in 1984, according to a flyer prepared by the company soliciting tenants for the site.
The fate of the 5.6-acre property at 1751 W. Main St., near Tanger Mall Drive, is still up in the air, Nobers said. Title to the property is currently held by Spirit Spe Portfolio 2007-2 LLC and 84 Lumber plans to buy it back, he said. The company will then sell the property, he said.
Riverhead Industrial Development Agency director Tracy Stark-James said she’s been told the property is not currently for sale. She provided RiverheadLOCAL with a flyer she got from 84 Lumber’s real estate division offering the site for lease.
“People who have approached the IDA are looking to buy, not lease,” Stark-James said.
The property lies within the state-designated recreational rivers protection zone, Riverhead Town planning director Rick Hanley said. That makes potential reuse of the site somewhat tricky.
“I believe someone looking to re-establish the same use would be able to get a variance from the DEC,” Hanley said.
The recreational river designation, put in place in the late 1980s, comes with stringent land use restrictions under the state Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act and regulations promulgated by the DEC pursuant to the statute.
RiverheadLOCAL photo by Emil Breitenbach Jr.
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