A hyped-up, high-end grocery store in one of Brooklyn’s best-heeled residential towers won’t be serving the community after all.
Downtown officials have long been touting the supermarket — which was supposed to occupy the spacious bottom floor of the swank, 240-unit Toren skyscraper on Flatbush Avenue Extension in the booming area between the Manhattan Bridge and DeKalb Avenue — but the lease has fallen through.
Toren developers blame the store’s would-be founder, Mark Goris, who said earlier this year that he was excited to set up shop on the highly trafficked strip.
“The lease was subject to certain conditions being met by the tenant within a fixed time frame,” said Donald Capoccia, founder of Toren’s development firm, BFC Partners. “Those conditions were not met.”
Now Capoccia’s back is against his own building’s beautifully Modernist wall — he’s hired a new brokerage team to sell the space, which has been on the market since Toren started leasing condos in 2008. The future of the site is yet unclear, but the new brokers said that they’ll take another whack at a grocery store.
Still, the squabble that ended the lease agreement is a substantial hurdle for BFC Partners, which rallied with Downtown officials in April and called it “the very first supermarket of its kind to open along the Flatbush Avenue corridor.”
Goris has not returned calls since The Real Deal reported the lease failure last week.
