Anchor Tenant Abandons Beleaguered Staten Island Mall

Everything must go at the Empire Outlets’ Nordstrom Rack, including the store itself, in another blow to the Staten Island retail property.

The Nordstrom offshoot is departing from the shopping mall on Richmond Terrace, the Staten Island Advance reported. The store will close its doors on Dec. 4 ahead of a lease expiration the following month.

Nordstrom Rack has been one of the anchor tenants of the mall, which has been through its share of problems since opening less than a decade ago. The company confirmed it will continue to operate elsewhere in New York City, just not at Empire Outlets.

In other words: It’s not us, it’s you.

Nordstrom Rack signed on as the anchor tenant of the 1.1-million-square-foot, $360 million mall back in 2014, years before it opened. In fact, the company was on board as a future tenant roughly as long as its actual occupancy at 15 Richmond Terrace.

A year ago, senior lender Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group bought the mall at a foreclosure auction for the nominal price of $10 million, the climax of a two-year saga at Empire Outlets. The sale pushed Donald Capoccia and Joseph Ferrara’s BFC Partners out of ownership.

Grinberg Management also bid during the auction following the February 2022 foreclosure initiation against BFC. Goldman was always positioned to come out on top, however, considering the mall owed Goldman $174 million at the time, while also owing Sterling National Bank $38 million.

Work on New York City’s first outlet mall broke ground in 2015. After several construction delays postponed a planned 2016 opening, Empire Outlets finally launched in 2019, just in time for the pandemic to decimate its prospects. Eleven tenants quickly bailed, leaving 50,000 square feet vacant.

It didn’t help that plans for a major tourist attraction next door, a project called the New York Wheel, fell apart.

BFC began missing debt payments to the New York City Economic Development Corporation in mid-2020. Two years later, BFC agreed to put the property into foreclosure.

— Holden Walter-Warner