Fairway moves forward from bankruptcy with a new Brooklyn store

Eye on Real Estate: January 2017 opening set for Georgetown supermarket

December 21, 2016 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Tick tock, tick tock: Workers are turning this site on Ralph Avenue in Georgetown into a Fairway Market that is scheduled to open in January. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

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Bye-bye, bankruptcy. Hello, Georgetown.

In January, Fairway Market will open a 40,000-square-foot store at 2149 Ralph Ave. in the Georgetown section of Bergen Beach, the upscale metro-area supermarket chain announced recently.

A grocery-store opening — so what? No big deal, you might say. But you’d be wrong.

This is the first store Fairway Group Holdings Corp. has built since its emergence from Chapter 11 this past summer.

It had made the bankruptcy filing earlier in the year because it was burdened by big interest payments on debt it had amassed for regional expansion.

As a consequence of the Chapter 11 proceedings, one of Fairway’s 15 stores was closed. That shop was in Lake Grove, Long Island.

As for the Georgetown store, it will be Brooklyn’s second Fairway.

The other one, at 480-500 Van Brunt St. in Red Hook, was closed after Superstorm Sandy because of damage from floodwaters. It reopened on March 1, 2013.

The new Fairway is located in Georgetowne Shopping Center, in space previously occupied by a Waldbaum’s supermarket.

A Fairway spokeswoman told the Brooklyn Eagle via email that the prices of the merchandise in the soon-to-open Georgetown store will be “on par” with those at the company’s Red Hook store.

By the way, numerous media outlets spell the shopping center’s name without an “e” at the end. But “Georgetowne” is the way the owners spell it, court documents and property deeds indicate.

The lease Fairway signed in May 2015 for the Ralph Avenue location had a 20-year, nine-month term with options for two consecutive 10-year lease extensions, city Finance Department records indicate.

The 140,000-square-foot shopping center belongs to brother and sister Howard Mintz and Susan Mintz-Bello.

The siblings bought shopping center co-owner Rochelle Pazer’s 52.0317 percent stake in the property for $32,711,808 in July 2015 following a legal dispute, Finance Department records show.