BAYCHESTER — Bronx residents will be able to shop in style once construction finishes on a new 780,000-square-foot enclosed mall that will include a three-story Macy’s and as many as 80 other stores.
Construction of the mall is underway on a vacant parcel of land at the southern corner of the Bay Plaza Shopping Center, a decades-old retail complex adjacent to Co-op City, which the developer, Prestige Properties, says is already the largest shopping center in the city.
"With this new $300 million project, Prestige Properties is casting a major vote of confidence in the future of The Bronx," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a groundbreaking event Monday.
The new space, called the Mall at Bay Plaza, will connect to an existing J.C. Penney store and will include a 1,800-car parking garage. When the new mall is complete, the total shopping center will encompass about 2 million square feet.
Macy’s has one other Bronx location, a Parkchester store that opened in 1941. It opened its last New York store at Queens Center in 1995.
In a press release, the developer said the Bronx’s population density — 1.4 million residents within a 10-mile radius — and the future mall’s location at the intersection of Hutchinson River Parkway and Interstate 95 has "already drawn intense interest from dozens of other national and regional retailers."
The mall is expected to create more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,700 permanent positions. Space will cost up to $200 per square foot in the mall, which is expected to be finished by the spring of 2014.
Related Companies opened a 913,000-square-foot retail mall near Yankee Stadium in 2009, and plans for some retail space have been floated for the redevelopment of the historic Kingsbridge Armory in the northern Bronx.
