Discounts luring scores of national retailers to the East Bronx

The shopping renaissance in the East Bronx continues to roll along, with multiple large-scale retail projects in various stages of development.

Prestige Properties & Development, the developer of The Bay Plaza Shopping Mall, is building a suburban style mall, the city’s first new enclosed mall in four decades. The 780,000-square-feet mall is located at Hutchinson River Parkway and I-95, where hundreds of thousands of cars pass every day.

The mall, adjacent to The Bay Plaza stripmall, is expected to open in August.

Throggs Neck Shopping Center, a Gun Hill Square (on the west side of I-95) open-air retail center and an outlet center at the Whitestone Multiplex site are also being developed in the same area.

Gun Hill Square will be a two-story retail project, between 350,000 and 425,000 square feet, aimed at pedestrians and comprised of “six mini-blocks,” Drew Greenwald, a principal at Grid Properties told the Commercial Observer.

A three-level, 160,000-square-foot Macy’s as well as the already existing 166,000-square-foot J.C. Penney will be the mall’s anchor stores, according to the Observer.

David Scotto, a vice president at NAI Friedland, told the Observer that he is confident about the Bronx. He said that new large scale retail developments are getting $80 and $100 per foot asking rents.

“The national retailers are seeing potential, because the sites are more affordable than in Manhattan and you have a great amout of population density here,” Scotto told the Observer. “They are seeing value in it.”  [NYO] — Claire Moses