And then there were four.
Amazon’s aggressive move into regional industrial spaces in and around New York City has not spared The Bronx.
A fourth location in the borough has been announced for the tech giant and its second in Hunts Point.
Located at 511 Barry Street, just across from Jethro Cash and Carry, and according to New York Business Journal, is scheduled to begin operating by the end of the year.
The warehouse is currently refrigerated but Amazon does not need the equipment and will therefore take them out of the 139,700 square foot facility. The size of this warehouse bumps up the total to well over three quarters of a million square feet that the company now leases within The Bronx.
Back in 2019, the company leased its first Bronx warehouse at 1300 Viele Avenue which is 117,000 square feet in size. Last year, the company snatched up two significant industrial properties via leases: The former ABC Carpet warehouse along the Bronx River at Bruckner Boulevard and measuring 200,000 square feet in size, and the old Model’s Sporting Goods property in Morris Park at 1500 Basset Avenue totaling 366,000 square feet in size.
These facilities are all part of Amazon’s plans to speed up deliveries by having strategically placed “last mile” facilities to make fulfillment of orders as expedient as possible.
For several years, warehouse spaces in The Bronx have seen an uptick in sales and leasing as developers and investors see a future in such last mile facilities.
The former Whitestone Cinemas, which was sold for $41 million in 2015 and demolished in 2018, will soon be home to one of the largest multi-level last mile facilities in the country and a first-of-its-kind in New York City. The futuristic facility will span 700,000 square feet and is advertised as the perfect place to reach over 9.4 million people in a 15 mile radius and was scheduled to open last year but will most likely open sometime this year.
Meanwhile, over in Oak Point, plans were announced last year to construct a massive 1.24 square foot million monster warehouse spread across 4 levels which would be the largest of its kind in New York City.
It will be one of the largest such facilities in the region and the only one connected directly by rail.
While many will see that this may mean more jobs for locals, others are more concerned with the environment and the additional pollution that more and more truck traffic will bring into a borough and an area that is already saturated with such industries
The Bronx already has one of the highest rates of asthma not just in the city and state but in the nation.
These companies should be mandated to operate only electric vehicles in neighborhoods that are already suffering from such negative health outcomes.
You must be logged in to post a comment.