New York City Council’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises held a public hearing Wednesday on an application to rezone 815 Hutchinson River Parkway in the Bronx, a property better known locally as the Throggs Neck Shopping Center, from an M1-2 light industrial district to a C8-3 commercial district. On paper, that sounds like the kind of industrial-to-commercial conversion happening across the city as manufacturing land gets repurposed. On the ground, it’s something narrower and more specific: an already-operating, decades-old shopping center trying to fix a zoning mismatch that’s kept a vacant storefront empty.
The site, a 343,891-square-foot lot at the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Brush Avenue in the Ferry Point section of the Bronx, has functioned as a retail shopping center for years, with tenants including Home Depot, Marshalls, CVS, Old Navy, AutoZone, and several bank branches. Despite that, the underlying zoning has remained M1-2, a designation meant for light manufacturing and warehousing, not big-box retail. That mismatch has mostly gone unnoticed because most of the center’s existing tenants fit comfortably within what M1 zoning allows. The problem surfaced when Party City closed one of its larger spaces on the site, leaving a vacancy that the property owner wants to fill with a full-scale supermarket.
That’s where the zoning math gets specific. New York City’s M1 manufacturing districts cap most individual retail and personal-service establishments at roughly 10,000 square feet, a limit built into the zoning code to keep light-industrial districts from quietly turning into shopping centers. A modern supermarket typically needs 20,000 to 30,000 square feet to operate, well above that cap, so the vacant Party City space simply can’t legally be leased to a grocery tenant of that size under the property’s current M1-2 zoning, no matter how much demand exists for one…