From the Bronx to Bay Ridge, there are growing signs that New Yorkers are getting fed up with the gradual replacement of the city’s supermarkets with chain drug stores and other retailers. Those who want their Key Foods, Fine Fares, and Met Foods to stay put are now taking to the streets with increasing frequency in attempts to keep their local supermarkets from closing. City supermarkets have faced increasing pressure as tight profit margins, changing zoning regulations, and rising rents make it difficult to continue to do business, and many are folding across the five boroughs.
In Bay Ridge, which has lost a Grand Union, a Kings Supermarket, and an A&P, State Senator Martin Goldin will lead a rally on Saturday, May 31st, at 11 A.M. outside a threatened Key Food store (planned to become a Walgreens) on 3rd Avenue at 95th Street. He recently commented on the brewing “crisis,”
“I remember when Bay Ridge was home to a great number of supermarkets, including the A&P where I worked as a teenager. The closing of the Key Food is just the most recent example of how supermarkets are leaving this neighborhood and being replaced by stores we do not have a great need for in this community. Many residents have expressed their concerns about the absence of supermarkets in the recent past, and now, with Key Food closing, we are facing a crisis…Purchasing the most basic of necessities, has become a challenge to many people, including our seniors, who are forced to walk great distances to a supermarket.”
In Pelham Gardens in the Bronx, residents staged a protest to try and halt the imminent loss of a Met Food at 2504 Eastchester Road. The supermarket is the only one left in the neighborhood and it is being pushed out by a rent increase–plans are to replace it with a Walgreens drug store.
Further north in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, a local Business Improvement District is trying to bring a Fine Fare into the space recently vacated by a Pioneer supermarket. Current plans for that site call for a more profitable CVS pharmacy.
In Manhattan’s East Village, negotiations between NYU and the owner of a Met Foods continue after a public outcry forced the university to reconsider its plans to kick the food retailer out when its lease came up for renewal.
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