Supermarket chain Fairway Market is expanding its presence in Brooklyn. The chain inked a 20-year, 40,000-square-foot lease for a second Brooklyn location at 2149 Ralph Avenue, according to a lease memorandum filed with the city Monday.
Fairway will be replacing a Waldbaum’s supermarket, which is currently occupying the space at the Georgetown Shopping Center in the Bergen Beach neighborhood in Brooklyn.
The chain currently has five Manhattan locations. A Chelsea outpost was the latest one to open. The chain’s first-ever store at 2127 Broadway on the Upper West Side is still open.
In a report about the company’s fourth-quarter 2014 finances, the company’s CEO, Jack Murphy, said the new location will be in a “densely populated submarket with ample parking in a dynamic section of Brooklyn.”
“This location will be the prototype for our new store model. It will have a smaller footprint and lower cost structure than our existing stores,” he added.
A Fairway representative couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Monday. When Fairway signed its lease in Chelsea, RKF’s Gary Alterman and Welco Realty’s Allen Cooperman represented the supermarket chain. Neither were immediately available for comment.
Fairway previously planned to open up in the Related Companies’ Hudson Yards mega development, but that lease was later scrapped.
“We have also spent a lot of time designing a more capital efficient store and believe that we can build this store with a lower cost per square foot than our existing locations,” Murphy said in the statement from May.
Fairway’s first Brooklyn location – located at 480-500 Van Brunt Street – closed after Hurricane Sandy damaged the area, but reopened in 2013.