Retail Roundup: Northwell Health to open in old retail building in Seaford

A Seaford building is getting out of the retail business after more than 60 years.

The largest building at Calvert Manor, a shopping center built in the mid-1950s, is being remodeled for a new tenant, Northwell Health. Also, the three small shops on the property, in the 1200 block of Hicksville Road, are being relocated to a small, new building on the 4.2-acre site to make room for Northwell.

"This is the redevelopment of an outdated retail center into a thriving mixed-use center. By having the medical offices combined on the same site as the other retail uses, the people from the offices can help support the retail on the site … and it benefits the offices to be located near the retail services that are there,” said Brian Ferruggiari, spokesman for AVR Realty Co., the Yonkers-based owner of the property.  

Northwell Health will be taking the entire 33,466-square-foot building where Behr’s Baby & Kids Furniture had been the biggest tenant, occupying about 18,000 square feet before the store closed in June 2016, he said.

The Northwell facility will offer imaging, orthopedic and physical rehabilitation services, Ferruggiari said.

A New Hyde Park-based nonprofit, Northwell Health is the largest health care provider in New York State.

“Northwell Health is committed to expanding, specialized services and compassionate care to Nassau County residents and is always evaluating how best to deliver care to the community. This includes the plan to build a new 33,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art health care facility at 1200-1250 Hicksville Rd.,” Northwell said.

The health care provider declined to provide more information, including its planned move-in date and employee numbers for the site.

Northwell already has a presence in Seaford with its Northwell Health Physician Partners Cardiology and Internal Medicine at Seaford, which is at 850 Hicksville Rd. and about a 3-minute drive from Calvert Manor.

AVR is almost done with the exterior renovation of Northwell’s Calvert Manor building, while the health care provider will do the interior work, he said.

Behr’s Baby & Kids Furniture closed in 2016, and a few of the smaller shops in the shopping center, including a dry cleaner, pizzeria and a children's learning center, left shortly afterward as their leases expired or owners retired, Ferruggiari said.

Three remaining businesses – Calvert Manor Bagels, Beautique Salon and TJ’s Cards & Lotto – are relocating to a new, approximately 5,000-square-foot building on the property. TJ’s already is open in the new building and the other two businesses will reopen in their new slots this month, Ferruggiari said.

AVR paid $5.5 million for the redevelopment of Calvert Manor, which included landscaping, some improvements on Hicksville Road, such as adding sidewalks and a pedestrian crossing, and creating more parking spaces by demolishing two free-standing buildings that held chicken and yogurt eateries years ago, he said.

Expect more essential businesses and service providers, such as medical offices, supermarkets and discount stores that sell groceries and household goods, to fill shopping center and mall vacancies.

Online competition was giving brick-and-mortar retail a run for its money for years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in the first quarter of 2020.  Mall and shopping center landlords thought they were addressing online competition by filling vacancies with non-store tenants, such as gyms, restaurants and entertainment venues, that weren’t susceptible to such competition.

But the pandemic compounded problems for brick-and-mortar retailers and caused financial losses for gyms, restaurants without drive-thru lanes and other nonessential businesses that were forced to close for months to help slow the spread of the virus.

There will be a record 20,000 to 25,000 permanent store closures in the United States in 2020, topping last year’s record of about 9,820 closings, according to estimates from Coresight Research, a Manhattan-based retail analysis provider.

Retail Roundup is a column about major retail news on Long Island — store openings, closings, expansions, acquisitions, etc. — that is published online and in the Monday paper. To read more of these columns, click here. If you have news to share, please send an email to Newsday reporter Tory N. Parrish at tory.parrish@newsday.com.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.