Clinton Street stores to reopen on Columbia

NYCHA will soon demolish a row of shuttered storefronts on the west side of Clinton Street between Hamilton Avenue and Mill Street. Three evicted businesses – Frankie’s First Stop Deli, the Red Hook Pharmacy, and Smart Tax – will relocate to a newly rehabilitated structure, also owned by NYCHA, at the corner of Columbia Street and West 9th Street.

The commercial building on Clinton Street will make way for a new power plant that will provide heat and electricity to the entire Red Hook Houses development. The construction will take place as part of the $550 million Sandy Recovery and Resiliency project funded by FEMA, projected to finish in 2022. Conceptual renderings for the future East Plant show possible ground-floor retail below a vast system of boilers and generators.

The official move-out deadline is December 12, but store owners, who have known about the plan for months or longer, appear to have cleared out already. Dave Stahl, NYCHA’s construction site director in Red Hook, stated that a “full asbestos inspection” will promptly follow, and his team will then knock the building down over the course of two or three weeks, starting in January.

Awaiting repairs, the commercial structure on Columbia Street sat vacant for about a decade before their recent completion, during which time the shops on Clinton Street served as the only open stores within the Red Hook Houses campus. The pharmacy’s reopening date is unknown, but Smart Tax expects to return with a fully functioning office before Christmas. The deli may take longer, as it will need to secure new permits for its cooking equipment, according to NYCHA.

For now, the area surrounding the Red Hook Houses has become something of a retail desert, thanks in large part to private redevelopment plans on Lorraine Street that led to the closing of a laundromat, a 99-cent store, and the neighborhood’s only bank over the summer.