National retailers look to Atlantic Avenue

A stretch of Atlantic Avenue once known for its junk shops has moved upscale, and may soon be a magnet for national retail chains, according to eager commercial brokers in Brooklyn.

The storefronts of bric-a-brac that lined the artery from Hoyt Street to Third Avenue are gone, replaced by upscale boutiques. The shift has been noticed by more than the neighbors, with a recent New York Times story celebrating the upgrade.

But retail brokers have their eyes on commercial space in an overlapping area from Bond Street to Fourth Avenue where the storefront properties of 5,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet are large enough for national chain retailers.

“There are at least four sites that I know of today that have a large enough footprint to fit the criteria for a national tenant,” says Eric Brody, director of development sales at Corcoran Group Brooklyn. “People have called me looking for space.” He declined to specify which national chains are in the market.

Currently, Two Trees Management Co. is marketing a 9,000-square-foot retail space with a 3,000-square-foot mezzanine on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, about four blocks west of the area under consideration. The company is negotiating with a national chain to fill that space, said Two Trees representative Scott Fletcher.

Brody said these spaces are underutilized, but many of them aren’t yet on the market. One, a borough medical center, has signs indicating its availability.

“These sites will certainly be developed over the next few years,” he said.

A Mobil gas station now sits a block east of Court Street, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Boerum Place. The site was recently purchased by a developer who wants to convert it to a residential property with retail on the ground floor, said Candace Damon, president of the Atlantic Avenue Local Development Corporation.

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“I think whatever is done at that site will be national, as well,” Damon said.

The three blocks from Bond Street to Fourth Avenue could be where a large chain bookstore like Barnes & Noble or Borders could find a home, Brody said. There is already a Barnes & Noble on nearby Court Street, as well as a Starbucks and Blockbuster, but the additional demand is there, Brody said.

“If you look to Boerum Place, if you look to State Street, you’re talking about heavily residential streets with professionals, and those brownstones are extremely expensive,” Brody said.

“That same demographic would be well served by a gym, since the closest ones of any size are near Boerum Place,” he said.

Another national outlet could be in the cards for Atlantic Avenue and Smith Street, where Boymelgreen Developers plans to develop condominiums and a boutique hotel with 11,000 square feet of retail space.

Residents clamored for a grocery store, Damon said, but that is unlikely to be a national outlet.

“It’s very unlikely [the whole space would] be developed as a national chain, unless it’s a national hotel chain, and in that case, it would be a franchise, because the floor plate is so small,” she said. “The community was very anxious to see a food store, but the developer wasn’t sure the floor plate supported that.”

Brody and other brokers are now seeing a future for Atlantic Avenue that’s a far cry from trendy boutiques and tacky junk shops. If plans for an arena for the Nets basketball team come to fruition, it will be a destination for sports fans, diners and shoppers, rather than a haven known only to local shoppers.

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