The developer of the hotly anticipated Wegmans in the Brooklyn Navy Yard filed plans for the building with the city last week in anticipation of the chain’s opening, but fans of cult supermarket will still have to wait until 2018 before it opens its doors, according to a spokesman for the Fort Greene industrial park.
Workers are knocking down all but two of the decrepit buildings on Admiral’s Row — a strip of historic houses along Flushing Avenue between Navy Street and N. Elliot Place where Naval officers lived when the area was a shipyard — to make way for the New York City’s first outlet of the upstate grocery empire.
Steiner New York City is planning to erect a five story building on the site — with Wegmans on the ground floor and a mezzanine level, and space for light manufacturing on subsequent stories — alongside a 246-space parking lot, according to plans it recently filed with the city.
The store will span just over a football field’s worth of space, snatching the title of the borough’s largest food emporium from the Whole Foods Market in Gowanus.
Steiner also recently filed plans for several retail stores along Admiral’s Row.
Preservationists fought for years to spare the once grand naval homes from the wrecking ball, but others argued the grocery store would provide food and jobs for locals, especially people living in the nearby Ingersoll, Whitman, and Faragutt houses.
The city and National Guard — which last owned the buildings — made a compromise in 2009 to spare two of the houses and raze the rest for development.
Developer Aaron Malinsky then signed on to build a Shop Rite supermarket on the site, but the Navy Yard gave him a dishonorable discharge in 2011 when he was arrested in a bribery scandal alongside state Sen. Carl Kruger (D–Mill Basin).
Steiner — which owns a massive movie studio at the Navy Yard — and Wegmans then signed on last year.
