Gourmet Food Store's Snub Leaves CB 9 Hungry

Columbia Spectator

Gourmet Food Store's Snub Leaves CB 9 Hungry
By Lindsay Schubiner Spectator Staff Writer

March 23, 2005

Residents of West Harlem won’t be getting their gourmet groceries anytime soon.

Citarella, a gourmet grocery and restaurant with multiple locations in the New York area, has yet to open its doors on property it purchased in West Harlem over five years ago. This has upset several community members, who complain that the store is wasting a prime piece of real estate—land Community Board 9 had originally hoped would be used for affordable housing.

“Citarella has systematically not met the terms of the sale of the property,” said Maritta Dunn, chair of Community Board 9’s committee on Harlem piers and economic development, which oversees the use of Citarella’s property.

In 1999, Citarella purchased a large warehouse on 126th street between Amsterdam and Morningside Avenue from the city to develop into both corporate headquarters and a storage and processing facility for their groceries. The warehouse, which previously housed a Taystee Bakery, was also to have a connected storefront facing 125th Street to serve the neighborhood.

Development was delayed soon after Citarella acquired the property, when the building’s roof suffered extensive damage because of a snowstorm. Citarella and the city disagreed about who technically owned the building when the damage occurred, and who, therefore, would have to pay the costs of repair.

According to the minutes from an early February meeting of the Harlem Piers and Economic Development Committee, Citarella has since built a processing facility in the Bronx, eliminating the need for a site at 126th street. But the company still plans to open up the storefront on 125th Street. After pushing back the date for the store to open several times, Citarella has now slated the opening for this May, over three years after the store was originally supposed to be finished.

Citarella is asking the New York City Economic Development Corporation to approve a different use for the property. Janel Patterson of EDC’s press office said that Citarella was revising their plans for the warehouse and that the EDC was waiting to see what plans Citarella developed. She refused to answer any more questions.

Citarella’s owner did not respond to repeated phone calls.

Stephen Hayes, vice president of real estate for EDC and the principal EDC representative who has handled issues regarding the warehouse, said at the CB9 committee meeting that Citarella has been in violation of their contract for over a year. Hayes also discussed the process of suing Citarella to take back the property.

Some CB9 committee members voiced their hopes that EDC would initiate a suit, but Hayes said it was an “onerous, cumbersome” process, and that it would not be undertaken lightly. Hayes did not respond to subsequent calls for comment.

Community Board 9 Chair Jordi Reyes-Montblanc maintained that Citarella needed to follow CB9’s 197-A plan when developing the buildings. “They’re worse than Columbia,” Montblanc said.

More recently, Citarella has considered turning the warehouse into affordable housing. But some board members worry that Citarella does not have the experience or expertise necessary to build an appropriate housing facility.

Speculation about the cause of Citarella’s actions abound. One community member guessed that the store intends to use the warehouse as a tax write-off and that they never planned to open the store at all.

“They would’ve opened it by now if they wanted to,” Dunn said. The rising real estate value over five years of a large plot in a central location also casts suspicion on Citarella’s motives for some Harlem residents.

“The whole thing stinks,” Dunn said.