By Chris Fuchs
The owners of a mall on 39th Avenue in downtown Flushing want it to open before the Christmas shopping season, hoping to attract a diverse cross-section of customers from guests at nearby hotels to residents of the five boroughs and beyond.
Work on the mall, which is owned and being developed by F&T Group, a Flushing developer, began about seven or eight months ago at a total cost of $50 million, said Martin Soran, vice president of operations for Fultonex, an arm of F&T Group.
The group is also expected to demolish the former headquarters of Queens County Savings Bank on Main Street in January to make way for developing a retail center, he said. The principals of the F&T Group own the property.
The 150,000-square-foot mall on 39th Avenue between Prince Street and College Point Boulevard will have more than 200 tenants. It will house a marketplace with vendors selling everything from jewelry to electronics, a two-story mall with such stores as Calvin Klein and Steve Madden shoes, and an Internet cafe, Soran said. There will also be a farmer’s market, open all seasons except for winter, in a space that is now occupied by a parking lot, he said.
The two-level mall, which will have a DJ perched on a landing on the second floor, is expected to open either in late September or early October and the marketplace in November. In all, F&T Group’s goal is to begin doing business before Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the Christmas shopping season, Soran said.
The completion of the mall comes at a time when a number of projects, including two hotels, a retail center next to the Sheraton Hotel on 39th Avenue and an Old Navy, are sprouting up in the downtown district. A Best Western hotel, next door to the mall, is expected to be open for business by the end of August, and construction on another hotel on 37th Avenue is still underway.
Apart from the mall, F&T Group is considering how to develop the property where Queens County Savings Bank had its headquarters before it merged with Haven Bancorp and moved out to Westbury, L.I., Soran said, The principals have considered building everything from a movie theater to a hotel, but have not decided on a specific project yet, he said.
The funds to build the mall came from selling the Fulton Plaza l hotel on Fulton Street near the World Trade Center in Manhattan to Pace University last July, Soran said. The investors in F&T group owned the hotel.
Sorin said he hopes that all this development, combined with the visitors who already stay at hotels near LaGuardia Airport and future initiatives with bus-tour companies, will attract customers from across the city, drawing in people who otherwise would not come to Flushing.
“They want to bring people from Jackson Heights, they want to bring people from Bayside, they want to bring people from Whitestone,” Sorin said.
F&T Group, Sorin emphasized, does not want to market the mall just to Asians. To that end, the group was expected to meet with members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People this week to try to get black business owners to lease space in the mall, he said. The principals, he said, are eager to court members of the Hispanic business community as well.
The mall recently hosted a singing contest attended by Chinese-Americans in late July on the ground floor. Sorin said, the principals would like to attract organizers of other cultural events as well.
If the mall succeeds, it will eventually be torn down to make room for a larger facility, he said. The leases being signed are for only five years, offering tenants the option of retail space should the original mall be razed.
Rent inside the mall averages around $2,700 a month, whereas the rent in the marketplace, which Sorin said gives tenants greater flexibility should they need room to grow, ranges from $880 to $3,500 a month.
Across the street from the mall, F&T Group once had a travel center, a building that has since been knocked down. The group is developing that property into a parking lot, retail space and a plaza for entertainment purposes, Sorin said, In the long run, they would also like to close down 37th Avenue and 39th Avenues and turn it into a pedestrian walkway.
Reach reporter Chris Fuchs by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
