With most of the vacant land in the Route 58 commercial corridor already built out — or already in the development pipeline — some commercial developers are looking within, and plans for detached retail “pads” within existing sites are popping up.
The latest to join that group is the owner of the Target shopping plaza, which is marketing a 1.5 acre “outlot” located in front of the 126,000-square-foot retail store.
On a conceptual site plan available with the NYC broker’s online listing, an 8,900-square-foot, 250-seat proposed restaurant is shown on the “outlot.” It’s being offered for $2 million.
The 1.5-acre “outlot” would be located mostly in an area currently paved and striped for parking, south of an internal roadway on the site.
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The lot however, does not exist — at least not yet.
“It would require an amendment to their site plan,” Riverhead building and planning administrator Jefferson Murphree said. It would also require a subdivision approval, if the owner is looking to sell the new parcel. Both applications would be made to the Riverhead Planning Board.
No applications have yet been filed by the owner, though its representatives have made inquiries at the planning department, Murphree acknowledged.
“It is certainly over-parked,” Murphree said of the center, which is currently developed with two free-standing buildings, the Target store and a 45,975-square-foot Sports Authority.
A portion of the proposed new lot takes in a formerly wooded area cleared by the developer in 2002. The tree-clearing, at the center of a dispute between the town and the developer at the time, caused an uproar in the community. The developer wanted to remove the trees, but town officials said the natural vegetation was to remain in place — as it had required previously of the developer of the BJ’s/Kmart site to the east. The developer bulldozed the trees anyway, arguing that it had to clear the land for a 17-foot dedication required by the town for future road-widening and for county and town water district easements.
It was not immediately clear whether the developer will be required to purchase agricultural development rights in order to increase development density on the site, a requirement imposed by the planning board on the owner of Gateway Plaza (Wal-Mart/Bob’s Discount Furniture) when it sought approval for a free-standing pad to house an urgent care facility for Peconic Bay Medical Center.
At least one other shopping center owner already has plans to build two new commercial buildings within an already-developed parking lot. Riverhead PGC, a subsidiary of Manhattan-based Philips International, the owner of the former Wal-Mart/King Kullen shopping center, submitted a preliminary site plan this spring for two proposed freestanding restaurants — one 6,300 square feet and another 2,600 square feet with a drive-through window.
The site was vacated by Wal-Mart last year and this month by King Kullen.
The restaurants would be a nice complement to a movie theater at the site, Philips International sales and leasing director Andrew Aberham said in April. Aberham told RiverheadLOCAL in April that the company has been negotiating with “several” movie theater companies interested in coming to Riverhead.
But real estate broker Neil Siegal, who is marketing the site, said last week until the town changes its zoning code to once again allow movie theaters on Route 58, negotiations with any interested theater company could not be brought to fruition. The vacant former Wal-Mart still has no tenant; the owner is willing to subdivide empty the 120,000-square-foot store. (There is a new tenant for the King Kullen site, Siegal said, though a confidentiality agreement bars him from disclosing its name or what kind of store it will be.)
Town officials have been talking about changing the zoning code for some time. The town removed movie theaters from the list of permitted uses in zoning districts along Route 58 — and added it as a permitted use in the town’s downtown zoning district — in 2004. The change was made at the request of the Riverhead Business Improvement District Management Association, in the hope of getting a movie theater built on Main Street.
Board members all say they support the change, but no one has put up a resolution to make it happen. Councilwoman Jodi Giglio said in an April 7 interview, after meeting with Aberham during a planning department work session, that she would introduce a resolution to amend the town code to reinstate the use in certain zoning districts along Route 58.
The owner of the Applebee’s restaurant site recently got a prior approval renewed for a retail building that appeared on the original site plan but was never built out. The new building, which will house two retail stores — a Verizon Wireless store and a vision center, according to the developer’s representatives, will go up in the vacant grassy area to the east of the restaurant.
Shopping center owners gaining permission to build free-standing buildings within existing sites is not exactly new. The practice goes back more than a decade, when the owner of the TJMaxx plaza got approval to build a freestanding CVS pharmacy within its shopping center in 2003. Other buildings fronting Route 58 where large shopping centers were developed behind them were either building pads depicted on original site plans, like the Starbucks and Vitamin Shoppe stores, or were existing outparcels developed after the shopping centers went up, like the former Blockbuster video strip and the shops along the south side of Route 58 east of Ostrander (in front of the former Wal-Mart/King Kullen center).
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