Plans for Beloved Park Slope Key Food to Be Revealed at a Public Meeting on Tuesday
Shoppers of cheap, convenient groceries at Key Food in Park Slope: Your future grocery shopping trips—how far you’ll have to travel to make them, and how much your groceries will cost when you do—are about to come into sharper focus.
Avery Hall Investments—which we learned late last year plans a mixed-used commercial and residential development on the site of the decades-old suburban-style grocery store and adjoining parking lot—will reveal details of its plans at a public meeting on Tuesday, February 9th, according to DNAinfo and City Concilman Brad Lander.
The meeting will be hosted by Fifth Avenue Committee and Councilman Lander at 6:30pm at P.S. 133 at 610 Baltic St., according to DNAinfo.
Up until now, Avery Hall Investments has shared only that it will consider keeping a grocery store in the ground-floor space, though they have made no promises. For its part, the community has banded together to impress upon the developers how much their convenient, if not minor-eye-sore grocery store means to them—how imperative it is that they keep an affordable market in Key Food’s stead, as more and more cheap and large markets disappear in the city. Save Fifth Avenue Key Food was begun by Park Slope resident Anita Bushell, who partnered with Park Slope Neighbors in December to ask residents to add their signatures to a petition to save the Key Food.
According to DNAinfo, the property on which Key Food and its abutting parking lot resides is governed by “a decades-old urban renewal plan,” and any changes to the property have to get approval from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the City Planning Department. Those organizations, in turn, would solicit feedback about those changes from Community Board 6, according to DNAinfo and Fifth Avenue Committee.
Interestingly, DNAinfo reports, in 1972, the land Key Food currently stands on had been a “rubble-strewn empty lot that stretched from Fifth Avenue to Fourth Avenue, between Baltic and Douglass Streets.” Prior to that, 400 housing units had stood in its place, but they were bulldozed for an “urban renewal” project. At first, a school was planned for the lot, but that project fell through when the city fell upon fiscal difficulties.
Eventually, an idea for a grocery store plus housing was born; but only the grocery store was built in the 80s, at a time when the “suburban-style” market was popular. Key Food and its parking lot in no way added to the beauty of Park Slope, but they made life for its neighbors a lot cheaper and more convenient.
Attend the meeting on Tuesday (or check back here), to learn if a similar convenience will remain after Avery Hall Investments shares its plans for Park Slope’s most-frequented shopping market.
You can also check Fifth Avenue Committee for meeting updates; currently, the gathering is scheduled for 6:30pm on Tuesday, February 9, at 610 Baltic Street (P.S. 133).